Forget Nevrax, lets come up with a good ratings system for scenarios.

[raynes]

Since the people at Nevrax seem to be completely incapable of designing a decent ratings system for scenarios, I think we as players need to take the Ring slogan "power to the players" and put it to use.

I think it’s total BS that the only scenarios that get a rating are the ones that are filled with combat, forget the awards (though that is a big problem), this is about ratings. So instead of complaining and waiting for them to do something (which who knows when it will happen), I think we the players should come up with our own system of rating scenarios. That is the point of this thread. So lets work together and come up with something.

To set things in motion here are my thoughts.

I think a ratings system with similar aspects to the US movie rating system might work here. Basically there is a group of people that you can submit your movie to, that give it a rating. I think something like that could work for Ryzom.

So we get a group of volunteer players and maybe Nevrax can throw in a few CSR’s. Each with a different play style and beliefs as to what makes game play fun. When a player wants a rating for their scenario they submit it to the group. Each member of the group then rates it in different categories on a scale of 1-5:

Storytelling: How was the story?
Combat: How was combat?
Puzzles: How were the puzzles, if any?
Ease of Use: Was it clear and easy to follow?
Entertaining: How fun was it?

The scores are then averaged out to give an overall score. Now it wouldn’t be fair to a person who put no puzzles (or other category) in their scenario to drop their overall score for a massive amount, yet it wouldn’t be fair to give the same score to someone who put puzzles in. So to solve this, the average would be equal to the total of scores/number of categories used. Then a point is given for each category is used. That is divided by the total of categories and added to the other total.

Here are some examples:

Scenario A
Storytelling: 4
Combat: 2
Puzzles: 4
Ease of Use: 5
Entertaining: 5
Total: 20
Average: 20/5 = 4
Bonus: 5/5 =1
Total Score for Scenario A: 5


Scenario B
Storytelling: 1
Combat: 5
Puzzles: N/A
Ease of Use: 5
Entertaining: 5
Total: 16
Average: 16/4 = 4
Bonus: 4/5 =.80
Total Score for Scenario B: 4.80

The raters would have the choice of explaining why they rated the way they did or not.
Each scenario would then be put on a website that would have a function to allow you to search through the submitted scenarios based on any item the player wanted. So they could find the best over all, the best combat, the best story telling and so on. They could also see the over all score a rater has received for all the creations they have made.

So who would the raters be? In my opinion it would have to be players who have been long time players, who know how the game works, who know at least one aspect of the game very well. Three examples would be Me, Grimjim, and Vguerin (and I’m not saying that we should be or their aren’t other people), just giving an example. I like PvP and combat but also like storyline. Grimjim doesn’t like combat but like storyline. Vguerin likes it all. We are long time players and even though we disagree on things, I think we could give honest opinions without resorting to giving a bad rating cause we have someone personal against players. Again, I am not putting myself as an automatic rater, I am simply using myself as an example.

So those are my thoughts. This is really an open discussion. There is no one correct way. I’m simply hoping we as players can come up with something to give real ratings to all scenario makers, not just those who put lots of mobs and combat in.

So what are your thoughts?

[riveit]

Sounds like a good idea to me.

Although you would need a broad group of volunteers from different factions and playstyles, I think.

[rushin]

few thoughts:

I think having a select group of players/csr/whoever deciding the ratings is an extremely bad idea. can you imagine the calls of favoritism, bribing, flaming that would go on?

things need to be rated by the ppl who play them, all the ppl who play them, its the only fair way to do it imo

there are going to be scenario's that are fun but dont easily fit into a category that you can rate so i think its important to have a few, very generic categories, the fewer the better

entertainment (ie fun), ease of use (which would cover bugs, etc), overall. are more needed really? You'd hope the good ones would bubble to the top of any lists. there will be the usual childishness that you get with any ranking system (take a look at mmorpg.com for plenty of examples) ppl ranking their friends at max and ppl they dont like at min. you can apply flashy statistical analysis to remove this but it really only works with good sample sizes so might need to be done by hand for a while.

As i stated over on the website comments i think the system they have come up with is worse than useless so any attempts at improving it are welcome.

[raynes]

Originally Posted by rushin

few thoughts:

I think having a select group of players/csr/whoever deciding the ratings is an extremely bad idea. can you imagine the calls of favoritism, bribing, flaming that would go on?

things need to be rated by the ppl who play them, all the ppl who play them, its the only fair way to do it imo

there are going to be scenario's that are fun but dont easily fit into a category that you can rate so i think its important to have a few, very generic categories, the fewer the better

entertainment (ie fun), ease of use (which would cover bugs, etc), overall. are more needed really? You'd hope the good ones would bubble to the top of any lists. there will be the usual childishness that you get with any ranking system (take a look at mmorpg.com for plenty of examples) ppl ranking their friends at max and ppl they dont like at min. you can apply flashy statistical analysis to remove this but it really only works with good sample sizes so might need to be done by hand for a while.

As i stated over on the website comments i think the system they have come up with is worse than useless so any attempts at improving it are welcome.

My thinking was that the scenario gets sent to the group who rates them so they can play them. I also thought of a small group of players simply because there is no real way to get everyone to rate a scenario. Furthermore I really beleive there are some players who wouldn't rate based on bribes, flaming, favortism or other childish garbage. I think there are a core group of players who want to simply see good scenarios and wouldn't just inflate something cause it's their friends or were offered daper in game.

My thinking in having catagores like storyline and puzzles was for searching ability. Lets say I wanted to find a scenario with some really good puzzles. With the three catagories of entertainment, ease of use, and overall, I can't do that. However if you have a puzzles catagory then people could search for scenarios that feature that type of game play. It works the other way too. Lets say I was just in the mood to kill things. Then wouldn't be easier to do a search on all the scenarios that have a great combat rating, and not care about storyline?

Pretty much what I am trying to come up with is an easy way for people to search for a scenario that has what they want in it, as well as get some sort of idea what it's all about and how it rates.

After all lets be honest here, if you were asked to rate a scenario Rushin, would you do so in a biased manor? Or would you judge it on it's own merits? I'm guessing the later.

And I'm glad you brought up mmorpg. The players scores are a perfect example of why you don't let everyone vote. Certain games have a habbit of having campaigns where they tell players to go boost the scores of a mmo just to get it to the top of the list. The same exact thing would happen with scenarios in this game. You would have guilds running campaigns to have their members scenarios bumped up to the top. The only scores one can trust on mmorpg are the editors scores, as they are for the most part free from bias. Having a set group of players to rate them would have the same effect.

There needs to be some form of controlled rating. If there isn't, then the ratings tend to mean nothing due to immaturity.

[grimjim]

Why not, for the time being, simply list our scenarios in the scheduling section along with a poll for people to rate them 1-10.

Imperfect, but something for now.

[Marjo]

Originally Posted by rushin

things need to be rated by the ppl who play them, all the ppl who play them, its the only fair way to do it imo

there are going to be scenario's that are fun but dont easily fit into a category that you can rate so i think its important to have a few, very generic categories, the fewer the better

We will probably add a players rating system in the same time as the one presented in the document. This system was originally planned but not ready so we first thought about releasing one after another. And so we won't.

What you said Rushin is close to how the players rating will look like. Give me some time to write a small document that will explain it more deeply.