Magpie wrote:

tom wrote: What about incentives to rate boards - I'm thinking maybe a couple of days free premium per rating written? Anyone got any better ideas

 

I see that this has been shot down, but I would encourage you to keep thinking of ways to incorporate free premium into something.  Don't give up!  I'm thinking about the general health of the community!...err... something like that   :p

Free month of premium for getting a map released to Live.

Free premium for as long as you're ranked in the top 10.

Free premium for significant marketing efforts outside Wargear?

Do like: Free premium for community involvement and site-wide accomplisments.

Do not like: Free premium as a prize for winning games and tournaments or other individual accomplishments.

Don't like. Favors certain prolific people over others, and (more importantly) would politicize the Review process.

Don't like. Favors established players and reinforces the perception among newcomers that it's hard to break in. Also what you said.

Do like. No harm in some subjectivity on this score. If somebody does something Tom thinks is awesome, they get a month! Cool.

for ratings i was thinking that maybe it would be a good idea if you had a rating for the aesthetics and a separate one of the playability, but when you submit the ratings both are automatically averaged to give you a total rating. (if that makes sense)

also I'm thinking that you should have to play 2 or 3 games before you rate a board, this will make people give a board a second chance in case the just didn't get it or didn't read the info, or  they can submit a rating like "stupid board i didn't get it... 1 star" with only 1 game played on it.

So when a new version of a board is released (ref: Toaster's WarGear Warfare recent thumbnail update), the ratings for the old version are lost? I definitely left it a 6-star review - one star more than Global Warfar =P - but now it has no reviews. Is this the way things should work, or is this a bug?

I'm on the side that likes the idea of a premium for the winner of a tournament.

Ah yes thanks Kjeld I'll fix that.

Not a big deal, but you can't leave a Rating for your own board I take it (which I'm fine with), but the reason says "You can review this board once you have completed a Public game".

The Rating counter in the bottom right of each person's rating says #1 of 1, instead of actually incrementing the numbers. Ie http://www.wargear.net/boards/view/Gear%20Wars:%20Episode%20I/Ratings

Is anybody using this much?

i haven't yet... but at the very least when you win a game, in the same window that tells you you won it should have a button that allows you to leave a review for the board. that way at least the winner of every game gets prompted to review the board.

it could read:
You have just won the game . There were X amount of players and it took you X number of days/minuets to Finnish. you were Above/below the average time for the same numbers of players on this board by X amount. would you like to review this game board YES / NO

I'd include a link to rate the board on the "you've been eliminated" emails, too.

Yep good ideas will add.

Cramchakle wrote: Is anybody using this much?

I have to confess that I've thus far been terrible about rating boards.  In addition to reminders, maybe there should be some sort of small incentive for people who review boards.  Here are a couple possibilities:

1. Give a day of premium membership to a player each time they review a board.  Alternatively, hold a periodic drawing for X days of premium membership.  A person gets one "ticket" for the drawing for each map they've reviewed.
2. If at some point the site has an achievement system, there could be achievements awarded for reviewing X boards.

Once each board gets a significant number of ratings (maybe 10+), the site could start to feature/rank boards based on their rating.  Directing new players to the site's most popular boards could help quite a bit with new player retention.

EDIT: I reread this thread, and perhaps an incentive to review wouldn't be good after all.  The problem is that right now, there are plenty of people who could give valid reviews and aren't for various reasons.

Questions:

Should the reviewer be anonymous?

Should it be possible to give a board a star ranking, but not leave a textual review?

I ask because I thought the answer was no to both of these, but that doesn't seem to the case here. At the top it says, "Rating: 8.00 out of 10 based on 1 ratings", but at the bottom it says "No ratings have been submitted for this board". That seems contradictory to me.

I agree, answer should be no. I think we've seen this a couple times with new versions of boards. Probably means tom has to fix something.

minuets to Finnish

I love how these two typos actually made other words