Today I learned people want to be rewarded for volunteering their opinion. How about no. I also do not think said opinion should be optional. I already mentioned that there are absolutely people who have no idea what they're talking about, but the onus is on the author to sift through useless feedback. Requiring them to write something diminishes drive by abuse of the system.
If I'm understanding you correctly, you would like a third option to differentiate between "approved" and "needs work"? While that might be really easy, I'm afraid that we're getting too close to the star review system. It's less binary.
I think he meant 1 option, highly recommend or nothing. That way maps will trend, and gain popularity and what not. The Facebook approach. We can already "like" maps, but its meaningless, so maybe just focus on making that relevant?
No, to the first part and, to be clear, reading comprehension was indeed part of the curriculum at every educational institution that I attended. That's why I understood his sentence to mean, "what, if anything, do I get in return for the time I put into writing a review?" Some people attempted to answer that question. You just called it a stupid question. You call anything you don't understand stupid, and a lot of people here will agree with you rather than risk being called stupid also. Not to mention that you don't seem to understand a lot unless you're the person that said it. Do you even have it in you to make a point without resorting to personal insults? What kind of discussion forum doesn't allow any kind of discussion? Who wants to write a review if guys like you are going to review the reviews? If your opinion is the only valid opinion, what's the point of any discussion here? Just to see how many people agree with you? Here's why I don't write reviews: no one here should give a rat's ass what I think about their map. If you want my opinion about your map you can contact me on Xbox live and we'll get together and look at it and I'll tell you what I think, which is probably no one else's business. I'm not about being publicly critical of someone else's work. If I am looking at your work I'm not going to say, "You didn't do this" or "You shoulda done that" or the all-important "I woulda done it this way". In order to foster learning I would instead ask questions like, "Why did you do that?" or "Why don't you like what you did here?" or "Did you know that if you go into this menu, then this menu, then this menu you can change that to whatever you want?" or the really all-important question, "How did you do that?" If I ever post a map here it wouldn't be because I want you or anyone here to like it. It would most likely be because I want someone here to help me figure something out (really thought that was the purpose of this site). I think reviews only help the reviewer socially. On the internet, if you put something out there and actually ask for an opinion it's probably going to be mostly negative no matter how good it really is. "Needs Improvement." What map doesn't?
A singular approach like this kind of does the work of a binary system, but in a cleaner way: If you appreciate the map, then you recommend it. If you don't appreciate it or approve of it, you simply don't recommend it, which is just like "downvoting" but it doesn't inspire hateful relations between users or the feeling of being attacked. The best maps would get voted more and rise up above the rest. I don't think it is necessary to keep a visible tracker on who explicitly recommends a map, but maybe an option to display that information on the recommender's profile so people that follow that person could see the maps they think are good. The more recommendations a map gets could turn the its rating into "Very Recommended" or Highly Recommended", or the number of recommendations could be displayed next to the map, that is kind of a small choice to be made based on aesthetic or whatever.
I said this already, but I think it warrants saying again--although prefer a binary system--just "highly recommend" seems fine as long as those that recommend also write their thoughts. This discourages spamming upvotes. If you want to highly recommend something you should have enough knowledge about a map to articulate why.
The whole point of posting your map on ForgeHub is to share it and have it reviewed by your peers. If you aren't interested in hearing what people think, or if you don't value that sort of feedback or attention, then you shouldn't be sharing it. If you put something out there, you are asking for opinions whether you want them or not. It's the same for every art website - that's how creating anything works. It bears repeating that you are going to get all kinds of feedback. Some of it will be constructive, some of it will be useless praise or useless nitpicks, and most of it will be the person's interpretation or expectation of your design as they view it through their own preferences. Your job as a creator is to examine that and compare it to what you want out of your design, not to do what they want. But Feedback on technique is separate and very important. If you have sloppy forging, broken spawns or poor lighting, people have every right to tell you. That happens to be everyone's business because the map is otherwise not going to be playable. Your point about "fostering learning" is fine if you go into the map with someone during the design stage. It is there that you can have a dialog with them about the issues they have with the design process and offer solutions. But if we're to operate under the assumption that a map posted to the map page is "complete" or otherwise ready to be shared, then what else are people to say then aside from "I would have gone about this differently because you're going to have this issue"? Besides, public feedback allows other people to learn. If you post your map and your weapon set doesn't compliment the geometry, publicly explaining why lets people read it and go "huh, I never thought about it that way." Avoiding this kind of discussion will just lead to fewer quality maps being posted because everyone wants to walk on eggshells. My problem with the review system stems from how inefficient and exploitable it is, not from what people actually use it for.
Been wanting to do something like this for a while. A system that separates the qualities of a map into separate categories forces people to isolate their thoughts on that particular portion of the work. This will allow us to place emphasis behind our thoughts and perhaps initiate a discussion into more constructive methods. Aesthetics (visual artistic direction, cleanliness) Originality (interesting design, fresh ideas) Gameplay (fun factor, player flow, battle interactions) Technical (performance, spawning, player containment) As for the 'Approved' / 'Needs Work' buttons, I think we'll just use the 'like' system we currently have in place. I do have a plan to make 'collections' where users can build lists of their fav maps, so that will provide some useful data in the future.
This is a Good Plan. I do think a site feature that promotes maps with few reviews/ratings would be good to go alongside it, though, to help get people using the system.
I like this. Maybe add a separate rating categories for remakes as they are fairly prevalent in the community. Or perhaps not a separate method for remakes, but a more encompassing category label for originality.
That solves literally none of the problems anyone has brought up. It's just a slighty more specific version of what we have now.
I like separating the stars into 4 categories provided that they are not tallied or reflected on the map's actual score, and merely represent the critic's opinion. That needs to be combined with a Recommend/Needs Work option. So when you look at a map page, you would see "75% Recommend this map", which means the other 25% thought it needed more work. By doing both of those, a typed review could remain optional. I would be more inclined to rate a map based on those 4 categories, elaborate on my thoughts, and then decide whether to recommend it or not, as opposed to the current system. This system could retain weighted reviews too, implying that more seasoned Forgers have more weight to their recommendations. And last but not least, let people edit their reviews, and receive notifications on any map they've reviewed if it's been updated.
Also I think the categories should be less ambiguous: Art (aesthetics, lighting) Design (layout, theme) Gameplay (encounters, balance) Technical (performance, containment) Rating based on originality is unnecessary
I really hope that the ideas generally agreed upon by the community recieve dutiful consideration and possible implementation to address this problem. If this thread was just a way to "discuss" the implementation of the system you clearly have spent some time designing then label it as such - no need to be opaque with topics such as these, as that only hurts the community we hope to foster. A lot of good can be drawn from a minimalistic and accessible approach that combines required and desired features. Let's not convolude the system to where it breeds the same issues as the current.
Got another idea today. Users want to perform a quick analysis of a map without being encumbered by the social implications / judgements associated with leaving a written review. People seem to use the 'like' button a lot to express their interest in a map however that action isn't 'expressive' enough, its not communicating anything other than 'cool, nice map dude'. If we introduced a 'tagging' system located in the sidebar, it would be easy to perform while providing more depth and expression than a standard 'like'.