Locking polite threads

[Caithe]

I think positive endorsement should be removed as well. It bring nothing constructive. I'd much rather see negative rating with a simple "It doesn't work" comment than a positive one with "Awesome" comment. At least the negative one can warn me that it may not work if i don't take extra care.

Of course sometime people will down rate for nothing, but either you accept that or you don't accept any form of rating at all.

[rickerhk]

I'm just thankful the damn things are gone. I can handle somebody criticizing my mod in the mod thread - if it's just a troll, I'll report it. In any event, the comment will get buried as time goes by. Not so with a negative endorsement that somebody gave me just because I would not change my mod to suit their tastes. Every time I would go to my page, that red mark would bug me, because it was made out of spite.

[Gopher]

@LadyMilla I used to feel the exact same but after reading many such threads and talking to quite a lot of modders I am somewhere in the middle right now. I see peoples point when they say if a mod has 300 endorsements but 50 negative endorsements, I look at it a lot more carefully before downloading that I would a mod with 50 endorsements but no negative endorsements. The one with 300 plus votes is obviously liked by more people, but equally as obviously something about this mod is an issue. Whereas 50 plus votes with no negative votes suggests a mod that has only a small group of fans, but has no issues. So I sort of see the point. But like you, I loathed the negative endorsements and do not want them back in their old form.

 

 

And the admins have stated clearly it will not be re-instated, so the discussion really should be : How do we get the benefits of the old rating system, without the downsides?

 

Myself I am beginning to think what they should show on the mods pages are the number of endorsements given in the last two months. Generally that is a good indicator of how good a mod is right now. I mean plenty of mods got 600+ votes in the first few weeks of the games life, but dont get used anymore as they are obsolete. But the current display of 800thumbs up leads people to feel it is a popular mod when in fact it is essentially something that crashes your game now. I think 2 months is a good period as it gets past the silly period when a mod is first released and picks up the 'new mod' boost, and the mod is now well tested and played.

 

I think something like this might also highlight mods that have issues such as conflicts, crashes etc. Basically my theory is that after a while when a mod is having obvious problems, people stop endorsing. So even if the mod gets 1000 votes in the intitial perod, it will start to bleed supporters until eventually it gets almost no endorsements. I mean if you saw a mod with 1000+ endorsements, but only 9 endorsements in the last 2 months, you would get suspicious right?

[llamaRCA]

@LadyMilla I used to feel the exact same but after reading many such threads and talking to quite a lot of modders I am somewhere in the middle right now. I see peoples point when they say if a mod has 300 endorsements but 50 negative endorsements, I look at it a lot more carefully before downloading that I would a mod with 50 endorsements but no negative endorsements. The one with 300 plus votes is obviously liked by more people, but equally as obviously something about this mod is an issue. Whereas 50 plus votes with no negative votes suggests a mod that has only a small group of fans, but has no issues. So I sort of see the point. But like you, I loathed the negative endorsements and do not want them back in their old form.

 

 

And the admins have stated clearly it will not be re-instated, so the discussion really should be : How do we get the benefits of the old rating system, without the downsides?

 

Myself I am beginning to think what they should show on the mods pages are the number of endorsements given in the last two months. Generally that is a good indicator of how good a mod is right now. I mean plenty of mods got 600+ votes in the first few weeks of the games life, but dont get used anymore as they are obsolete. But the current display of 800thumbs up leads people to feel it is a popular mod when in fact it is essentially something that crashes your game now. I think 2 months is a good period as it gets past the silly period when a mod is first released and picks up the 'new mod' boost, and the mod is now well tested and played.

 

I think something like this might also highlight mods that have issues such as conflicts, crashes etc. Basically my theory is that after a while when a mod is having obvious problems, people stop endorsing. So even if the mod gets 1000 votes in the intitial perod, it will start to bleed supporters until eventually it gets almost no endorsements. I mean if you saw a mod with 1000+ endorsements, but only 9 endorsements in the last 2 months, you would get suspicious right?

 

Gopher, the red thumbs didn't tell anyone that information in the normal course of their use ( a handful of red thumbs to many more endorsements). Maybe in the most extreme cases was it useful, and in those cases you would know the same thing by going into the thread because a mod with that many problems has a lot of comments about that problem. I, for one, do not think it is too much to expect that a player with concerns about his or her game integrity would take the time to read the first two or three pages of comments to see if a mod is worth downloading. I do it as a player so am not expecting anyone to do something I don't do myself.

 

And regarding endorsements over time. If it was a current mod, then yes, that might be an issue, but one, that again, would probably be discovered easily in the comments as players are very vocal when things go bad.

[Gopher]

I, for one, do not think it is too much to expect that a player with concerns about his or her game integrity would take the time to read the first two or three pages of comments to see if a mod is worth downloading.

 

In my experience you are an optimist if you expect people to read beyond the second line of the mod description let alone comments or anything as obvious as the README file :)

 

Sorry I could not resist that. But you are right of course that reading the comments section is a thousand times better way to get a feel for a mod than some endorsements.

[buddah]

Then why do you keep posting walls of text in your posts. Your logic is flawed.

[Vagrant0]

What it boils down to is this... What possible good could negative endorsements serve? As I see it, there two things... Being a way to flag broken or buggy mods, and the aforementioned way to vent negative feelings about the mod.

 

The second part I think we can all agree that we are honestly better off without. But what about the first part?

 

Well, the capacity that negative endorsements had to do the second has always been small, and more recently has been replaced with more accessible ways to report broken or bad mods. Combined with discussion threads being separated from endorsement threads, it is rather easy to report bugs about a mod in the discussion thread or report a purposely broken mod to site staff. Which is essentially the thing... Either a mod is something which is purposely bugged and designed to be harmful, or it is something which has a few bugs which might need to be worked out over time. In the later case, do you really want to leave a permanent strike against that mod just because the author didn't anticipate how their mod works against all the others out there? While yes, endorsements could have been changed, usually they wouldn't. Usually someone would leave a negative endorsement and just never come back no matter what updates were made to the mod, meaning that even if the issue was fixed at some point, there was still a showing non-endorsement. Even as a notification of potential mod issues, non-endorsements didn't work because it often referred to older versions of the mod, or just someone who did not read instructions.

 

And some of this is coming from personal experience. In the past some of my mods have been non-endorsed, and of the 5 I tried clearing up, 3 of them were from bad installs, 1 was a bug I knew about, mentioned in the description, and I eventually fixed, and 1 was a stubborn individual who was doing it out of spite. The only one I managed to ever get changed was one of the bad installs, who thanked me afterward for explaining how to get the mod working. The other 2 bad installs didn't care any more, the one for a bug never responded back, and the stubborn individual only argued with me... And from what I've seen, this was rather typical, if not more heavily weighted towards users who are offended by your mod.

 

As being something there to let others know about issues with a mod, they simply did not work, even in those extreme cases. And more importantly, in those extreme cases, the mod should either be reported so that it can be taken down, or have a clear and concise feedback about what is wrong with the mod posted in the mod discussion.

[llamaRCA]

In my experience you are an optimist if you expect people to read beyond the second line of the mod description let alone comments or anything as obvious as the README file :)

 

rofl. You got me there. I don't read them. And then when mods don't work for me I'm all like, wtf! And then I go play Hello Kitty Island Adventure :tongue:

[sendo75]

Endorsement ratings is mostly a popularity measure, with certain categories of mods yielding a larger appreciation from users and controversial mods yielding much disapproval. Variables like personal preferences and bias opinions also makes this rating inaccurate. Ultimately it comes down to studying the mod through description/readme/screenshots/comments or just testing it out.

 

The merits pointed out so far are just theoretically idealistic, much different in practical reality. Only a small percentage (~10%) of users actually provide feedback and there are not many professional reviews with unbias constructive feedback, so no point in debating for such a need when the actual usage is minimal and the abuse is optimal. And more crucially, it deters modders from sharing their work which doesn't benefit users. Citing inconvenience is really not good enough a reason to offset the abuse.

 

As for not locking polite threads, I agree further debate in hopes of generating a good discussion on related matters is not a bad thing. I can see halting a potential flame war, but if it is not the case, allowing users to discuss can promote a sense of involvement, encourage participation in forums. A lively civilized forum benefits the community.

[DrakeTheDragon]

After reading 3 topics of this kind now I have a simple question.

 

Is it possible to disable endorsements on my uploads but leave the comments sections intact?

 

The first never served a purpose to me, but without the latter it'll be hard to keep answering help requests the way I'm doing now.

Help can't even be requested without the comments sections, apart from PMs but the inbox is too small for this amount.

If it won't work to keep the latter but get rid of the first, I can live with it, just ignore endorsements and keep asking my downloaders not to use them.

 

Endorsements or a place in a meaningless superfluous arbitrary ranking are not what I'm here for. Nor is it advertising my mods or getting people to download them.

I came here on request, because people wanted to get a hold of my creations. Once people stop asking for them, I'll stop being here.

 

Sorry for bursting your bubble.

 

I'm not going to take part in a hilarious discussion about the urge to critizise other people's work or the people themselves. Sorry.

Edited August 28, 2011 by DrakeTheDragon