Insist on the importance of reviewing. Remind people that a rating is weak support, a comment is good support, but a full on review is fantastic support. I remember earlier on TDC, we had a small group of members who unofficially created an image for themselves as reviewers. Muz was one of them. It was an honor to have one of them take time out of their day to pay close attention to your game and provide constructive feedback to you and everyone else on the site. Maybe we could expand on and make this feature more prominent on the site?
Yeah, and maybe we should also separate trophies from tags because quite frankly, all these tags seem to just completely dilute the value of these trophies. I don't even care to look at peoples tag anymore, so their trophies are virtually invisible to me.
We tossed around the idea of a reviewing team of sorts, didn't we? Or was that an admin discussion? Though it makes sense that if someone has something useful to say, they're likely to say it already, it couldn't hurt to stress that again. Reviewing trophies could help. What would be the requirement? Perhaps after 5 well-received reviews, and regular contributions afterward, you get a TDC review team tag.
If we get a lot of reviews, we'd soon by inundated by lengthy paragraphs that nobody would read. The emphasis is on making and improving games, after all, not writing about them. So I think useful comments should be the main focus. I'd be opposed to such an absurd idea as rating comments (thumbs up/down), but perhaps ratings without a corresponding comment to back them up could be thumbsed down until they're taken off. Lots of chance for abuse, though... Hm. What about that outlandish idea (that I'm not even sure I like) of removing download ratings and just keeping count of favorites?
We introduced the trophies with the intention of getting people to send them to each other and be more supportive. A good question to consider is whether or not these new ideas will have as little impact.
The old days at TDC specifically aren't much different from what they are now. There was however a pretty negative opinion of TDC from other Click community websites, mainly due to having lower restrictions on quality. It was more like an in joke amongst them than anything malicious.
I do recall a few silly comments made towards my TDC member status. But actually I guess some of my releases were pretty n00b back in the early days.
I think setting specific statistics on junk like this, though relieving on the admins, is going to be the death of a lot of these new implementations. What ever happened to good ol' admin approval? I remember these big reviewers who did it on their own, just did it for the fun of doing it, and eventually an admin saw them doing it and gave them a custom rating for it. They appreciated it, not expected it.
I did that interview for a clickzine revival, but it was abandoned before it was started because it was determined that it wouldn't last long. The clickzine doesn't like to exist, I guess.
@Hayo:
I think many of the "This is stupid. 0 stars" comments come from the new ratings being transparent. Back then, if you didn't like a game, you didn't have to say anything. Now you do. And instead of writing why it's stupid, you just give a "meh, overrated" comment. I'm not really happy with the new ratings system, it's more accurate, but it causes a lot more strife.
@Ricky: The old days were more vibrant. Today, you look at the forums and sometimes there might be only 4 posts a day. Back then, there'd be so many discussions that threads would be bumped off a subforum within 3 days. The new people aren't really communicating with the community, they're posting up downloads/projects or downloading them, then leave, without stopping by to chat, so we haven't really noticed them.
@SiLVERFIRE: A long time ago, there was this thing called a review zone. I think Rikus would pick out the best review of the month and toss it there. Not download, but review (the idea was a little odd even then). So there'd be lots of people who, like me, wrote up useful reviews trying to get them up there. Nobody actually looked at the thing, but it was a little encouragement, kinda like how the Top 10 Articles/Downloads is a tiny encouragement now.
Now, there's no review zone, fine. Writing reviews is still fun. They added comments to reviews. Not so bad. There were guys like Shroomlock who wrote lots of reviews. The problem is, the more reviews you write, the more likely you'd write a bad review. Shroomlock wrote one or two reviews that didn't agree with the majority, and people just flamed him for his opinion. I think there's a few other admins who went through that. That's discouraging enough, especially when writing reviews is hard work.
And then, someone modified the review page to be more "objective", that is, to write about sound, graphics, gameplay, etc in different boxes. Unfortunately, a good game is really more than the sum of its parts, it's how the different things go together. Like with Knytt Stories - klikers look at every piece separately, and see a very average game. Game players all over the world look at it as a whole, and even the professional reviewers who play Call of Duty give it a 8/10. Now, it's just much harder to write reviews because of all the boxes you have to fill.
Still, that didn't stop dedicated reviewers. What really got them to quit was when some people decided that instead of making a better game, they could get better ratings by personally attacking every reviewer who didn't give them over a 8/10. They even attacked the "recommended download" tags to make sure that if they weren't getting any tags, then nobody would.
There was a few suggestions of getting a few "official" reviewers. I think one guy became admin for writing good reviews, Wong maybe. The last suggestion to get a TDC official "review squad" fell through because someone hated it and put up a huge fuss about it. Also, the people chosen to be in the review squad told me that they were going to stop visiting TDC because of all the trolling.
I mean I like lengthy paragraphs about games. I don't even download most games these days because I don't trust the main description or the comments, some outside judgement is needed. And I think the reviews really encouraged people to make games. I know some people were excited when I gave them like a 6/10 but a lengthy explanation why. This site is about both getting feedback on your games as well as making new ones, and I think reviews are the best kind of feedback.
Yeah, I think sadly, it's the new features that are hurting TDC. The really good features are nice, of course, like the Arcade, Spotlight, and Projects, but the it-would-be-nice ones, like purchasable tags, self-made custom ratings, the VIP forum, that "minimum 4 words" requirement.. those hurt more than they help. We just have to step back and rethink our strategy, but we seem to do it a lot and it doesn't seem to get better.
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.
Exactly, it was the most exciting thing on this site to get a review. I mean seeing my stars go up, that was cool. Getting comments, that was neat. But a full on review was like "Wow... I need to read this." So yeah, getting reviews, especially the constructive ones, was my favorite part of submitting stuff.
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" So yeah, getting reviews, especially the constructive ones, was my favorite part of submitting stuff.
