I've followed the discussion here for a while, and would like to add my thoughts to the pool too. I apologise if I'm simply repeating what someone has already said, although I hope I'm not.
Schik wrote:
-I don't like rating down a hold that someone obviousy put a lot of time and effort into, even if I think it's poor quality despite that. I feel that rating holds is not the same as rating, say, authors (of books), to continue with an idea from the other thread. Architects are not making money or anything out of providing us with their work, which makes a big difference. It's similar to the old free-open-source attitude of if you don't like it, don't use it, and keep your wise-cracks to yourself; constructive criticism welcome, but saying it's worth 2/10 isn't constructive criticism. I even refrain from rating down poor quality holds that were thrown together in half an hour, but that's changing fast.
You seem to think the ratings are aimed mostly towards the architects, while I think they're for prospective players. Sure, architects want to get high ratings, but the rating system wasn't invented to give architects a pat on the back - it was to give players a way to make a somewhat informed decision about what hold they should try next. Rating something (2/10 or anything else) isn't meant to be constructive criticism. If you want to do that, then make a post in the hold's thread, and give as detailed criticism as you want to. But please rate the hold 2/10, if that's what it's worth, so that others know the hold's not all that great. If the architect learns from your criticism and makes the hold better, you can always change your rating.
Unfortunately, Schik, I disagree with you about what you think the rating system is useful for. I think a hold's score is important for Architects too, not because of vanity (although it can be encouraging), but for the exact same reason that it is important to players - the rating tells you what people who have played it think about it in general, and whether or not it is considered a "
good"
or "
bad"
hold. This is because it highlights whether or not people think the Architect built a good hold in terms of whether it fulfils its purpose
as a hold, i.e. to be fun, playable, challenging, creative, unusual, or any other rating criterion that the hold was created to score highly in, depending on exactly which hold is being considered. Architects can then use this to consider if their style of hold is popular or not, for whatever reason, whether stylistic, structural or even because of bugs, and then use this information along with any comments to identify what could be improved next time.
The changing of opinions over a hold's lifetime, however, I agree, should be free to change if people think about holds differently; in the world of fashion, for example, what is popular today might not be so next month. Of course, holds aren't likely to undergo massive popularity changes in months, but like what michthro said, holds that were popular and fun to play a year ago may not be considered so now.
However, I believe the point being made, (implicitly), is that the rating criteria for holds is now far too complex to be representatively shown in just two, overall general ratings. A hold's true rating is as complicated as the total opinion of all the people who can, have, and will play it, and given that there are probably more than 500 DROD players around at present who have opinions about at least one hold, I doubt just two criteria are going to be enough to express the
average opinion about a hold even fairly accurately.
For example, someone may not like Bavato's Dungeon because it is full of large hordes, lots of orb puzzles, and a lack of lenience towards certain types of mistakes, and would rate it 3 for tedium and 2 for frustration (i.e. lots of effort is required for little reward).
However, such a person may also like the variety of different puzzles available, the number of different concepts one must use, the aesthetics of the hold, and the fact that under the tedium and frustration, there were many puzzles that were highly enjoyable. So, the person might consider it a 8 for creativity and variety, 9 for the puzzles (i.e. how good the puzzles were at being, well, "
good puzzles"
), and 8 for overall coherence (i.e. as a hold, how well it fitted together and how much effort appeared to be put in to make it look that way).
So the person faces a bit of a dilemma - does he vote 9 to reflect his overall positive experiences, or maybe 2 to reflect his dislike of the more tedious aspects of the hold? Probably the most obvious thing to do would be to take the average of the scores and give it a fun rating of 6.
However, that's not quite satisfactory in the sense that it doesn't quite represent how "
Fun"
this person thought the hold actually was. In fact, this person didn't really enjoy it very much, since although he (I shall assume a gender for pronoun purposes) really enjoyed the variety of puzzles present and how many different things there were to do, he really found that tedious hack and slash techniques and having to play 50 moves sequences over several times in maybe half the rooms made the whole effort to play it not incredibly worthwhile, and reduced the fun factor of the hold. So, averaging what he would consider fun, he would actually consider it a 4. The 6 rating would also not reflect exactly what he thought about the quality of the hold (an overall rating criterion Eytan mentioned earlier, I think). Basically, although he didn't quite enjoy it, he was nonetheless impressed by the well-thought out puzzle ideas and the overall layout and aesthetics of the hold, and knows that while he doesn't like manipulating large hordes, someone else might think very differently. So, he would consider it to be a work of art that is of high quality, and rate it a 9 for that, even though he didn't really enjoy playing it.
I suppose an analogy would be that of, say, a building like the
King's College Chapel, Cambridge. I personally don't find this kind of architecture interesting to look at or visit (I'm more into things like imaginary dungeons). However, I am impressed with the amount of quality work that's appears to have gone into building it (it is large and intricate, for example and doesn't look like it is made of over-sized Lego bricks
), and know that its quality is therefore to be respected. So I can't really say I don't like it because I don't like that kind of architecture, and similarily, I can't say I like it because I think it was well-built; they're two completely different things.
So, my suggestion is to have at least one more rating criterion for holds. Right now, we have a "
Fun"
rating, which reflects how enjoyable it is for a person to play the hold, but this doesn't say much about the hold's quality, which is, I think, often a separate thing for people, and so would require a separate rating. Obviously, I guess the terms "
fun"
, "
quality"
, and any other rating term that someone else might use would need to be defined loosely to avoid ambiguity, and again, it won't entirely solve the problem of showing representative hold opinions, but at least it would help to make it more accurate (if a little more bulky).
Edit: I think the general consensus is probably similar; more rating criteria are probably needed, as
Eytan also suggests.
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Resident Medic/Mycologist
[Last edited by agaricus5 at 09-28-2006 06:20 PM]
