Negative reinforcement: Instead of rewarding for reviews, punish those who don't. A board is open for review after 5 games played and must be reviewed after 10 plays. Until it is rated, the board is unavailable to that person.

Since opinions can change with many plays, I'd like a second opinion rating that forces a re-review after 25 games,  then show the two reviews together.

So something like:

__________________________

After 7 games, newb1234 said

I don't get it.

After 25 games newb1234 said

I get it. ROFLhouse.

_________________________

Keeps players accountable for their opinions.

I doubt many attitudes will change since those that aren't hooked hardly replay. I just know that I've rereviewed many maps on TOS.

Next, a set of stars for difficulty would let new players know what they're getting into, and the pair of ratings could give the ADD'ed/international community a review without the annoyance of reading/english.

Can't stand smileys, but a sequence of faces ranging from one with a dunce cap to an Einstein-looking one could help out the international players when reviewing. Same goes for the overall review (red frowny to green happy).

There's has to be a little bit of happy in here. So... after 25 games, unlock the board for as many open tables as that person wants to join/start. This can open things up for the standard member.

I just realized why there are so many 2 player world map tables created... not because they're fun, but because there's an end already in sight.

Last thing: expected number of turns would be easy to calculate and a useful stat to have beside a board- take the average of

(# of turns)/(# of players)

over all boards.

Sounds "busy".

Spite can be a powerful thing. I don't think I want people reviewing my maps because they are forced to.

NO!

Okay but I like the difficulty rating idea.

EDIT: To be a tad more helpful. It is certainly the case that we should be brainstorming on this topic. I've written maybe 1 review here. Reviews are not as integrated into the site as they should be.

asm wrote:

Okay but I like the difficulty rating idea.

I agree, I'd like to see something to help new players stay away from difficult (and/or even non-Risk boards) and stay closer to the basic gameplays at first.  I think the "Advanced Features" section of the board list is a start.

Cramchakle wrote: I don't think I want people reviewing my maps because they are forced to.

Most folks vote by participation. I doubt there is a 100% negative review on TOS by anyone who played more than 10 games- one has to be pretty sadistic to play 10 games of a board they dislike (tourneys excluded).

At 10 games, it only takes 5 seconds star rating should suffice, and if someone wants to take 40 seconds to write a little bit about the board, the better. 

We mentioned this before, but the reviews could be sorted by the number of games played at time of review. The reviews from players with the most exposure would float to the top and there's your good reviews, displayed proudly on the first page.

It's another suggestion meant to get new players acclimated. I'm just sensitive to this fact, that for every new design feature, the gap widens between the experienced core and the new players we are trying to retain.

I'm also just sensitive.

XOXO

Forced reviews bad.

How about a small nag, an icon that appears in the section with the two 'My Active Threads' and 'Recent Threads' icon when you reach X maps played without reviewing them.

As many mapmakers will tell you it's not the quantity of the reviews, it's the quality. Some people have no interest in the meta aspects of the site: forums, mapmaking, reviews, etc. They just want to play the damn games. Forcing them to participate will produce either useless or purposely negative reviews.

Putting a nag icon along with the forum icons will ensure that someone who clicks on it is at least interested enough that they know what the forum icons are, and by association are at least moderately interested in communication and thereby more likely to want to communicate their opinions about a map.

I think that could work, I would certainly advocate adding some more subtle reminders as well. Add a 'review this map' link to the "you've won!" or "you've been eliminated" emails, add a 'review this map' link to the "you've won!" popup in the Flash, add something on the homepage... I'll say that this was one thing that TOS did fairly well was encourage participation in the review process. I understand if you don't want to seem to mirror too many of the practices from there, but the free entry into the Primo drawing for every review you wrote worked really, really well over there.

asm wrote:  but the free entry into the Primo drawing for every review you wrote worked really, really well over there.

I definitely wouldn't use two "really"'s, dunno if I'd even use one or 'well".  It did somewhat "work" as people would leave reviews, but a lot of time they were junk reviews.  I would almost venture to say that a lot of the good reviews were not even based upon "forced" reviews of wanting to be in the drawing but to just give feedback.

Okay but it was all integrated and there was a motivation. The home page showed un-reviewed maps with a semi-sortable list. The home page also showed recent winners (for a while it did anyway). Yes, that douche Reich showed a lot of ways the system could be broken or gamed, but that doesn't mean there wasn't a kernel of 'really really good' in there. I don't mean the review system overall - it certainly had its flaws, some serious - but the integration of board reviews throughout the site and the motivation to at least write them (and writing 'junk' or short reviews would be a step up for WG from what I've seen) was very effective.

I definitely agree rating participation needs to be improved, in the next Player update I'll add some sort of prompt in as suggested.

Rating will become more important when the boards page gets split into sections (it's already getting too large). One option will be to sort by rating of course.