>>Pirates stops reading the forums and starts hunting for Prophet<<
Yeah, Emi posted a couple days ago saying the neg rep was now a percentage of the missions. This was intended to give more weight to the negative consequences of making dishonorable choices. Just needs a bit more fine tuning maybe.
Handing the rating using forum threads has too many drawbacks: Not all users read the forums.
There are already dozens and soon will be hundreds of missions. Which means staff
would have to read them all and then make value judgments about whether the
consensus was positive or negative, which would take a lot of time. With the star
rating system in game, it could all be handled in code automatically. After 30 days,
any mission that dropped below three stars would be marked inactive. The code
could even append a publicly readable log file that tracked dumped missions.
And it could lead to hurt feelings. A numerical value is just a fact. Nothing personal.
Comments like "This mission sucks." or "Whoever made this is retarded." is too personal. On the other hand, constructive criticism might help the author address the shortcomings and revamp the mission and resubmit it. So forum threads might be useful as helpful feedback, but not as the criteria for dropping.
Perhaps it might even be possible that when a mission was dropped, the author got an in game message.
Of course, a lot of the problems could be avoided in the first place if the mission test links were available to all users and authors could post the links and request reviews, criticisms and suggestions before submitting them. Perhaps a mission authors only forum thread where we could post the test links and review each others missions without the entire community seeing them, or the catty remarks about them. And maybe that is the place to use the rating system. A mission has to get ten, three star or higher ratings by the writers group before it even gets reviewed by staff. And a Send Author Message link at the end so the reviewers could let the author know why they gave the rating they did, pro or con, and offer suggestions for improvement.
Someone suggested earlier that the author's name be shown. That also might motivate people to put more effort into making something they can be proud of.
But the first line of defense is just the staff being more selective about what gets approved and what gets sent back to the shop for improvements. Maybe a new name tag to go with WIP and FIN - NMW (needs more work) so authors know it has been
reviewed and is not up to snuff. And I think that already accepted missions should be able to be resubmitted for review and in game up date, just by changing the ADDED to WIP. So we can be self improving when we see problems with our own added missions.
Sorry to rattle on, but the mission creator is now my favorite part of the game and has brought the fun back to exploring the galaxy in game. I just want it and the missions produced to be as good as they can be.
Addendum: [In reply to Silence's post, so Slither [sic] doesn't need to flame me for double posting
]
There already is a link that shows all the steps. Would be groovy (that dates me eh? lol) if they were inputs and there was an Update All button on that page.
