Players’ Reviews

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doofus-01
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Re: Players’ Reviews

Post by doofus-01 »

Wouldn't just "1.Pros 2.Cons 3.Bottom-line" be good enough?

I don't ever know what X/10 rating means, for reasons that have been flogged here already. But the upsides/downsides descriptions lets you know something about both the product and reviewer, so you'd have all the info you need to interpret a given review.
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Turuk
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Re: Players’ Reviews

Post by Turuk »

bumbadadabum wrote:Do note that not all of the people in the "Developers" group are active developers.

Also, on the subject of 'professionals': I don't think it's a very good idea. The main complaint for me is that there needs to be a selection. The problem with that is, in my opinion, that there is no clear definition of what a 'UMC expert' is. How would they be chosen? Who chooses them? Who will get the title? Also, problems might arise when you create an 'elite', mostly because person X might not agree with person Y being in there, as person X believes he has more authority on the matter. I think the current system is fine, and I feel it's the most 'fair' as well. Perhaps if there is a clear plan for this, I might change my opinion, but for now I think the current system will do.

I agree, I see the value in having quality people identified and designated, but it's very subjective and what level of player would the person have to be? Person X might be able to beat a campaign on challenging and think it's well done, but person Y struggles with it on easy and thinks it's done poorly, takes too long, etc. So person Y writes a poor review, turning players off to what, for the majority, would be a very fun campaign.
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Adamant14
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Re: Players’ Reviews

Post by Adamant14 »

For that reason it would be great to have more than one review per campaign. :)
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Dugi
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Re: Players’ Reviews

Post by Dugi »

I came to a sort of radical idea that might work:

Problems currently faced:
1. Many of the reviews aren't quite informative (for example arawn's or vultraz' overly positive reviews, in vultraz' case also spoiling the story instead of actually reviewing the quality)
2. Many of the reviews are strongly disagreeing (for example lipk's description for After the Storm disagreeing with the two above), and you can't tell which one represents the opinion of majority that is the more probable opinion of a generic player
3. Chaos in the numbers, because as previously noted, high scores are given too frequently.

Ideal case that should solve them - enough reviews, possibility to vote up one or two reviews you agree with and vote down the reviews you disagree with. I know I speak like Captain Obvious now.

Method of reaching this solution - getting the reviews into the game client. This should also increase the frequency of visits there. This would mean getting the developers to actually write the code, which looks quite impossible. So far, all of this was suggested. Things like hey man, I'll contribute $100 if you add this feature don't work usually. I think that I'll have to rely on my last option here - doing it myself.

During this summer, I've learned C++ and became a student of informatics (in addition to physics), that are the two requirements to participate in a Google Summer of Code project here. I don't know what are some other conditions around this, and what would be the reaction, or even if the unlikely but possible event of me being dropped out from informatics faculty (as physics is still my primary study) will happen.
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Re: Players’ Reviews

Post by lipk »

During this summer, I've learned C++ and became a student of informatics (in addition to physics), that are the two requirements to participate in a Google Summer of Code project here.
C++ doesn't hurt, sure, but being a computer science student isn't a requirement at all. If you can code, no one will care where you learned it :wink:
I think that I'll have to rely on my last option here - doing it myself.
That's the radical idea? "Make yourself" has always been pretty much the only way to go here :P Anyways, cool. I wouldn't have high hopes for getting a GSoC project for it, though. Firstly, every project requires a mentor (I can't think of anyone for this). Secondly, Wesnoth usually has a very high number of applicants for a very low number of available slots (it was something like 20 vs. 3 this year). So, with all due respect, I doubt that you would make it to the finals with your one-summer C++ experience.

All in all, not only you'll have to do it yourself, you'll also have to do it for free :wink:

(And convince a certain few people to accept the patch, but that's a different matter.)
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Re: Players’ Reviews

Post by Iris »

lipk wrote:Firstly, every project requires a mentor (I can't think of anyone for this). Secondly, Wesnoth usually has a very high number of applicants for a very low number of available slots (it was something like 20 vs. 3 this year).
Thirdly, the odds of student-proposed ideas being accepted are very low given our past experience with them, and GSoC activity for the last two years has been focused solely on developer-proposed projects.

Anyway, topic.
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Dugi
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Re: Players’ Reviews

Post by Dugi »

lipk wrote: C++ doesn't hurt, sure, but being a computer science student isn't a requirement at all. If you can code, no one will care where you learned it :wink:
I thought it was only for computer science students. Anyway, I didn't start studying it with the purpose of being able to get to GSoC.
lipk wrote: Secondly, Wesnoth usually has a very high number of applicants for a very low number of available slots (it was something like 20 vs. 3 this year). So, with all due respect, I doubt that you would make it to the finals with your one-summer C++ experience.
One summer of C++ experience, that's true, but I've been programming various sorts of things since 2006, just not in C++. C++ is just learning some syntax, which doesn't take a year of work, and passing to object-oriented programming, which is trivial, it's just C-like structs or other variable arrays becoming objects and having some specific functions attached to them.
How many of the GSoC applicants actually succeeded in their projects? Except for thunderstruck's refactoring project, I haven't heard of any successful change.
lipk wrote:All in all, not only you'll have to do it yourself, you'll also have to do it for free :wink:
Decreases the motivation sort of, but I still might do it. And before the summer.
lipk wrote:(And convince a certain few people to accept the patch, but that's a different matter.)
It would have to be prepared in advance, because otherwise my work would be wasted...
shadowm wrote:Thirdly, the odds of student-proposed ideas being accepted are very low given our past experience with them, and GSoC activity for the last two years has been focused solely on developer-proposed projects.
Never heard of any of the GSoC applicants having a specific idea about an improvement. Think of this thread, this project would solve quite a serious problem. And anyway, my primary motivation was to get this thing done, and the whole GSoC idea was just to connect the useful with getting actual money.
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Re: Players’ Reviews

Post by pyrophorus »

Dugi wrote: ... and passing to object-oriented programming, which is trivial, it's just C-like structs or other variable arrays becoming objects and having some specific functions attached to them.
Not trivial, not at all... sorry...

A lot of experienced programers have a hard time (or never succeed) to write really object oriented programs. It's not only a matter of programing language.

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taptap
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Re: Players’ Reviews

Post by taptap »

Just adding another mechanism (voting for reviews) for no good reason whatsoever would be bad in my opinion. I believe when hundreds or thousands of reviews are inundating the page, we may have to discuss about pruning reviews simply to keep the page readable and editable, whether we like it or not. Even then, I would not do that by popularity contest (which would drown out minority opinion, while I would rather highlight it), but currently we are far from such a situation. In fact, we have a ridiculous amount of discussion here about a very limited number of reviews on the page.

@pauline: I doubt many developers find the time to play a lot, let alone all of the UMC content. When I was active in a somewhat similar community, you even had to stop playing. when you started developing. While there is no such rule in Wesnoth, I wouldn't be surprised when some of the people who are very actively coding have almost stopped playing for quite some time.

P.S. If someone has spare time for coding at hand I would suggest making replays more robust in general and giving MP some love. (A beginners room, server support for tournaments ...)
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Re: Players’ Reviews

Post by Iris »

taptap wrote:P.S. If someone has spare time for coding at hand I would suggest making replays more robust in general and giving MP some love. (A beginners room, server support for tournaments ...)
There’s a bug tracker for this kind of thing (see ReportingBugs), although submissions are obviously required to be more specific than “please make replays more robust”. There is also an Ideas forum for building more complete proposals from vague ideas like “server support for tournaments”.

Still, this isn’t really the most appropriate place for these tangents.
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Re: Players’ Reviews

Post by pauline »

@ taptap: "… when hundreds or thousands of reviews are inundating the page …"
This is so sweet ! Well, the project is still young, with 28 inputs on 17 campaigns in 5 month,
it´ll take not even 2 years to have feedback on the almost 70 campaigns listed now. :wink:

@ taptap: "... a ridiculous amount of discussion here about a very limited number of reviews"
It´s an important subject !!! Yet, that´s exactly what I thought too when I got here the first time.
(Let alone the intimidating opinions on the quality of reviews … :wink: )

@ taptap: "We need more criticism in reviews."
So far, I learn from this thread: Quantity beats quality ! :D

@ taptap: "I doubt many developers find the time to play a lot, let alone all of the UMC content."
Point taken. All work and no play. Hopefully they won´t forget the fun provided by the subject of their coding.

@ Dugi "We need to get people to review, any ideas how to achieve that ?"
Not the authors will get a gold star next to their name but the players who posted a review !
100 stars will be rewarded with a personal gryphon ! :D

At the risk of getting banned from this thread by reason of all too unqualified comments,
try to see them as the opinion of a clueless player who is supposed to add a hoped-for review:

To decide what campaign to play next or to add my enthusiastic, strongly emotional, unprofessional feedback on a recently finished game
I used to go to the Forums > Content Feedback, where other players reviewed and rated user-made SP/MP campaigns.
A SP would check the "List of Single-player Campaigns for Feedback" with the impressive number of 25 campaigns,
2 of them are mainline, 5 are "Imperial Era" (whatever this means ... is it relevant to a SP ?), 18 campaigns to choose from. Great.
Question
Just in case other players would try this way too:
Is it possible to replace this absolutely outdated list from 2009 with the up-to-date UMC index for 1.10.x/1.11.x ?
Or the link to this wiki-page (as in the menu "Play") ?

Next the vanilla player notices the threads: 47 campaigns are listed here, there seems to be some development after all !
The lucky player will find something to download, or the campaign he/she would like to rate.
The unlucky player most probably gives up and chooses by the descriptions of the campaigns on "addons.wesnoth.org" or the in-game-menu "Add-ons".
At present, I counted 215 user made AddOns for single players ...
All this different numbers of UMCs are already confusing to me, thou I understand Adamant14´s carefull selection for the new review-site.

So, the board itself has only a forum "to benefit the authors". It´s "controlled by moderators",
"users are not able to create new threads in order to avoid excess noise".
This sounds very encouraging for players that have a review in mind, but it´s the rule here. OK.
Question
Could one conclude that a writer who ignores to offer a thread here is not even interested in feedback ?

I wonder how many players go to the menu option Play > User Made Content (UMC) Campaigns ...
Anyway, now they are guided to the correct place (with currently 69 campaigns listed).
Question
"The only place to host it is the wiki at the moment … ", so what would be the right moment ?
Why is it not possible to have a forum on the board that benefits "users helping users to find easier what they seek" ?
After my own inglorious first experience with wiki-editing I really think this could be a reason for the lack of reviews.
Developer Groggy_Dice who maintains the list of unported UMCs supports my point of view.
Spoiler:
Now, Groggy_Dice is a developer, a pro !
Imagine the hassle a vanilla player has to go through before going through the hassle of creating a not overly biased review ...
Well, I might be a solitary exception after all. :?
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taptap
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Re: Players’ Reviews

Post by taptap »

Just to answer a few points brought up by pauline:

Imperial Era (http://units.wesnoth.org/trunk/Imperial ... imper.html) means a complete set of different factions, units, sprites. I guess this matters even for single-player.

We (adamant and me) started these pages because we felt exactly the same confusion when navigating among the many user made content available and all the outdated, partial lists available. And it is in the wiki on purpose to make it a collective endeavour instead of a sticky post somewhere in the forum "owned" by its author, often read but never updated. I believe wiki is the right place for a collectively maintained list, not only at the moment but in principle. Rarely seen due to the little love the wiki sees. The lack of single login plays a role as well. I guess most people will agree a shared login for wiki and forum is a good idea, but you need to convince some people (who can do so) to spend time to actually do it.
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Re: Players’ Reviews

Post by Iris »

taptap wrote:The lack of single login plays a role as well. I guess most people will agree a shared login for wiki and forum is a good idea, but you need to convince some people (who can do so) to spend time to actually do it.
If it only were a matter of blindly dropping some code and forgetting about it forever.

I intend to look at it eventually, but there are a lot of things about MediaWiki I do not understand which actually matter for this particular task, which means I need to replicate the whole production environment first in a self-contained testbed to avoid data loss or security breaches. Plus I am not too keen on the officially-sanctioned phpBB bridge extension’s potential outdatedness relative to MW; to make things worse, it includes a rather discouraging notice in the install.txt file.
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Re: Players’ Reviews

Post by Telchin »

@pauline
Question
Could one conclude that a writer who ignores to offer a thread here is not even interested in feedback ?
I can't speak for other UMC authors, but I like feedback, yet I don't have a thread in the "Add-on Feedback". Instead I made a thread in the "Scenario and Campaign Development" (see link in my signature). From what I've gathered the intention of having two fora is that the former is for completed campaigns and only developers can post new threads (on the author's request), while the latter is for campaigns under development and anybody can create a new thread there. Thus I made a thread in the "Scenario and Campaign Development" forum, because my campaign wasn't complete at that point and I keep using it even after it's completed for both bug reports and improvement suggestions. I just was too lazy to ask for a second thread (similiar mental block that you mention about registrating for the wiki). I wouldn't be surprised if there were more UMC authors like me.
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Re: Players’ Reviews

Post by doofus-01 »

Telchin wrote:@pauline
Question
Could one conclude that a writer who ignores to offer a thread here is not even interested in feedback ?
I can't speak for other UMC authors, but I like feedback, yet I don't have a thread in the "Add-on Feedback". Instead I made a thread in the "Scenario and Campaign Development" ... I keep using it even after it's completed for both bug reports and improvement suggestions. ...
I had a thread in the feedback section, but it seemed redundant, and just scattered the information. People post feedback in the Scenario & Campaign Development threads and bug-reports in the Add-on Feedback threads, and vice versa. Also, if an add-on has been worked on for some years, it has evolved and old feed-back/reviews aren't so relevant, but they get collected and showcased in the feedback threads, whereas you can start a new S.&C. Dev. thread when appropriate.

So, I don't have a (open) thread there because I didn't think it was necessary or really helpful to anyone. Probably many other authors also feel one thread is enough. If a player has something to say, there is a place to say it.
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