Jacob
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I'm writing a set of reviews of holds on the holds board - according to a template.

The aim here, in addition to giving me a place to discuss holds I like/dislike, is to help people pick out holds to play.
Some people will hate tar puzzles, or snake manipulation, or efficiency etc, some will love them.

For that reason, I'm giving scores on the amount of efficiency-dependent rooms, lynchpin rooms, hack-and-slash, tar puzzles and snake manipulation there is in each hold. Although I'll try to specifically count the proportion of rooms that involve this, it's not any kind of formal, accurate measurement.

Seperate to this are the scores for storyline, creativity, difficulty and an overall score. These are all subjective measures.

I'm restricting myself only to holds I've completed so far. I may also do this for my own holds - not necessarily to blow my own trumpet, but again, so that people can see what they're letting themselves in for.

Here's a list of what I've written so far:

Floor 33
Mark's Penultimate Dungeon
Suit Pursuit

More soon.

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[Last edited by Jacob at 05-03-2009 03:29 AM]

Tahnan
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Jacob wrote:
For that reason, I'm giving scores on the amount of efficiency-dependent rooms, lynchpin rooms, hack-and-slash, tar puzzles and snake manipulation there is in each hold.

You may want to edit those posts to point to this one (with a link called something like "explanation of scores"). That is, just based on "Lynchpins, Hack and Slash, Efficiency, Snake charming, Tar-osity", it's not clear to me whether those numbers represent the number of rooms containing those things, or your rating for the hold on those dimensions. (Does "3/10" mean "from a hack and slash point of view, I think this is only worth 3 out of 10"?)

Especially when mixed in with things that are necessarily subjective, like "Creativity" and "Story", it becomes really unclear. For that matter, does "Story: 1/10" mean "a tenth of the hold has a story to it"? "The story in this hold is terrible"? "There is no story in this hold"?

I think more hold rating is certainly a good thing! I just want it to be clear what the posts mean, lest someone come along and go, "Wow, Jacob really hated what this guy did with snakes!" or what have you.

Jacob
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Thanks for the comments. Have made a few adjustments and clarifications.

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agaricus5
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Also, if you haven't already read this thread, you might find it useful.

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Jacob
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Thanks. As you can see though, I've actually contributed to that thread! It was one of the reasons I've done this.

Actually, if I'm going to do this, I may as well do this properly and make this as useful as possible.

Are there any other ratings or information I could add, to make the reviews more interesting/comprehensive/useful?

Other ideas I've had:

- Number of players conquered/Number of players played this hold ratio (using caravelnet)
- Holds that are similar in style to this one (if you liked this, you'll like...)

Anyone got any suggestions?


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Syntax
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The ratio is dynamic so might not be good for a review - rather a site feature. I also think the similar style idea needs to be automated somehow (hold keywords etc).

Reviews should avoid association with anything which might currently be true but could change.

agaricus5
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Jacob wrote:
Are there any other ratings or information I could add, to make the reviews more interesting/comprehensive/useful?

Hmm. Well, I would stick tarstuff clearing in "hack and slash" and snake manipulation in "general manipulation", but they are different enough from other monster types that I can see why you'd have them as separate ratings.

I like your groupings: for clarity, would these be roughly the definitions you'd be using?

Efficiency-dependent = Rooms putting constraints on how slowly you can complete them.

Lynchpin rooms = Rooms with few but memorable and short solutions.

Hack-and-slash = Rooms with large numbers of monsters where a significant part of the solution is killing them.

Tar puzzles = Rooms that feature tarstuff as a significant component.

Snake manipulation = Rooms that feature snakes as a significant component

I like these ideas; here are a few suggestions for further categories:

Manipulation = Moving monsters around is a significant part of the solution.

Handicap = The room constrains you to move in a particular way (e.g. hot tiles, no rotation, dangerous walls). I would argue that "room efficiency" falls into this category, since rooms with timers, for example, force you to move efficiently.

Room length = Rough measure of how long it might take you to find a room's solution. Short rooms have short, intuitive solutions that can be found reasonably quickly. Long rooms have solutions that have many moves (e.g. >500) or are short but take a long time to figure out.

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