Rating system overhaul

[Arthmoor]

Jury is still out. But leaning toward liking this system slightly more than before.

 

I just want to prod again that we could use a couple of more fitting categories for things:

 

"Cities & Villages" and "Landscaping"

 

Because putting a village under "Dungeons and Locations" seems wrong especially if it's not meant to compete against dungeon mods, and a mod that alters existing landscape doesn't fit the definition of "New Lands". I think of "New Lands" as something that adds actual new worldspaces and/or province overhauls to the game.

[FalloutRaven]

Yes, the new rating system is way better.

Nuff said from me.

[TehFreeman]

It all seems to be much better although 3 hours is a bit much, it takes 30 minutes to check out most mods.

 

A lot of people won't bother rating any more which kinda sucks.

 

I guess it just means I will have to bookmark everything I want to rate later

 

Oh, could you also please move the "Webmaster's mini blog" somewhere else. It's annoying seeing the same post from December every time I open the site. That or update the darn thing!

Edited July 8, 2009 by TehFreeman

[NMC]

I can't help but feel a little concerned that this new system is a little too black and white, and will make it difficult to judge whether to download a mod, without reading every comment to decide its worth.

 

A parallel I would make is in game reviews- if its 90%+ over 5 reviews, I will probably get it, but if games were reviewed using this system I would need to wait for a few months to find out how 'popular' it is first. The easy answer is to just try them ALL out, but logically thats never gonna happen.

 

Personally I'd like to see a few more shades of grey between the black and white, to assist judging what to download. I would have liked to have seen a percentage system used instead of 1-10 ratings, as sometimes 9 seems not enough and 10 seems too much, whereas say a 93% percent feels right- mods could have been delineated from each other more accurately, and the fractional scoring differences in the top 50 would have been reduced this way. But no system is perfect, and these are only concerns- I will be very interested to see how things pan out longer term.

Edited July 8, 2009 by NMC

[holliberri]

Thank you, Dark0ne. From reading the post, I'm not sure how it will work out, but I salute and applaud your effort. It at least sounds like there's a possibility (and perhaps even a very good possibility) that it will work as expected to resolve the worst difficulties of the old ratings system.

 

I will give this new Endorsements system a try with hope in my heart... which is already an improvement, since I couldn't bring myself to participate in the previous system for love (of my favorite mods and modders nor money (not that there was money involved, we should be so lucky :) ).

 

So if nothing else, congratulations on and thanks for providing a system that encourages me to try and do my part to help this wonderful site become even better.

 

I hope this doesn't sound like damning with faint praise, because it's not. It's huge that you've successfully shifted my position even so far, and I really, really appreciate your continuing to strive for the best that this site can achieve. That means a great deal as well.

[lordbelfast]

I approve of this new rating system, great idea, but waiting 3 hours to vote is kind of ridiculous.

[theLeeHarvey]

I'm probably the only person who's going to say this, but I'm not really liking the changes a whole lot.

 

As it was stated before, It was damn near impossible to get people to rate files in the first place, now that they have to wait 3 hours after downloading I can see them not ever rating at all out of sheer forgetfulness. How many people honestly take the time to look at their DL history and go back to rate the files they have used? I know I do, but I'm sure people like me are in the minority.

 

Also, as a mod player, I relied on the 1-to-10 system to help me decide which mods were worth downloading and which weren't. I wouldn't bother with mods that had less than an 5 because those mods were usually the ones that were incomplete or had serious problems. Now I can't tell. Also, I've noticed that if you decide not to endorse a file it still gives the file a rating of 10 when you look at it's brief description block. This is going to cause a bit of confusion I think.

 

I do like the new lists though, I think having them divided up into separate groups such as non-adult, adult, monthly and all time is a very good and useful idea. I also like that it will lessen the workload of our obviously overworked Moderators. I have a healthy respect and admiration of them and their efforts and it can only benefit the community as a whole when they don't have to get stressed out taking care of the d-bags on a regular basis.

 

I hate to be negative and I don't mean to be a %&$! about it at all, but I think the system was better the way it was before. Things seemed more clear.

 

For me the ideal would be the 1-to-10 ratings with the new lists and features added to the download history.

However, what I prefer personally doesn't matter much next to the needs of the community as a whole and I can accept the changes whether I like them or not.

 

Thanks for hearing my piece.

LeeHarvey

[gurkmeja]

I just have to say I love the new rating system, and not only becasue it puts me back on the top-list... :whistling:

 

...but finally everones vote count equally, instead of the old system where one guy giving an 8 in reality got the weight of 6 or 8 votes, because that's how many 10's you need to counteract that imbicile, that probaly thougt he was giving you a good rating anyway.

 

Also to be able to separate categories is fantastic!

[theLeeHarvey]

See though 8 was a good rating. 1 was bad, 5 ok and 10 excellent. Each rating in the previous system was clearly defined when you went to leave your feedback with a rating. The problem was that people thought that if they didn't get a 10, they were being told that their work was sub-par and that wasn't the case. It was simply a problem of people having too thin a skin and not being able to take criticism, or misunderstanding the rating system.

 

Now people wont be able to tell the quality of a mod by it's number of endorsements, only it's popularity. Then again, if it's not a quality mod, it probably wont be popular. At least that's the theory, but what about unpopular mods of excellent quality that appeal to a certain niche of players? They are likely to be lost among the thousands of other mods hosted here. The Jury is still out I guess, only time will tell, but I still say the old 1-to-10 was more efficient for letting you know what was good and what would mess your game up.

[dimon99]

I absolutely love new system - "hot list" (top 25 in last 2 weeks) is VERY nice and useful! Ability to multithread discussion in future would be super useful too.

Only thing I'm not sure about - 3 hour waiting time before rate...but that can be adjusted,if needed, time will tell.

 

Overall- exellent system, you guys rock!