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REVIEW SCORING: STANDARDIZATION, PROFESSIONALISM, ETC.
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Sailerius
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Closeauthor=Fallen-GrieverIt's easy to say "games should be taken seriously if they have rips." It's not so easy to convince the rest of the world. If you want your game to be taken seriously, then it's a lot more feasible to just not use rips than to rant about how unfair it is on RMN.
It's not the commercialisation part I am focusing on, Ciel. I agree that games need to have "legal" resources if they're going to go commercial. I'm talking about the "taken seriously" bit that he also mentioned throughout that piece. If a game is good then it deserves to be taken seriously and to be respected, regardless of rips.
"god how are you this stupid how is this possible it is like you are completely incapable of reading a body of text and discerning its meaning"
EDIT: But yeah, we're getting way off-topic.
author=Fallen-Griever
It's not the commercialisation part I am focusing on, Ciel. I agree that games need to have "legal" resources if they're going to go commercial. I'm talking about the "taken seriously" bit that he also mentioned throughout that piece. If a game is good then it deserves to be taken seriously and to be respected, regardless of rips.
"god how are you this stupid how is this possible it is like you are completely incapable of reading a body of text and discerning its meaning"
Basically what Ciel is trying to say is that the point you are focusing on is relatively irrelevant in relation to the rest of what he was trying to say. A lot of games that use rips are taken pretty seriously and are acclaimed by the general masses outside of this community. Exit Fate and Hero's Realm are fantastic examples. Unfortunately nobody was really talking about that subject at all and it was more just casually mentioned.
If you want to keep talking about it or feel it is worth discussing, perhaps you should make a new topic.
Actually I really want to avoid talking about that topic for the thousandth time. Let's focus our attention on something that already isn't beaten into the ground and something that could change and help the rest of the community in a more direct and faster way (this).
author=Fallen-Griever
I'm talking about the "taken seriously" bit that he also mentioned throughout that piece.
there was no direct correlation in what he actually wrote between being taken seriously and use of rips. he was saying that in order to be taken seriously you have to ditch the hobby mentality and start promoting your game correctly. do you understand the nuance?
Those professional reviews go a long way with businesses and distributors, and that is why they are successful while your games...unfortunately...are not so much. If your only audience is the "RM maker audience" then don't expect to be taken seriously outside of that audience. It's a cold way of thinking yes, but it's the absolute truth, and it does a disservice to those on your site who are thinking or who want to get in on the indie gaming scene as actual game developers.
They were promoted to the public correctly, and now they're all generating a buzz because of the way they were promoted. If you all truly want to be taken seriously as a community, to get your games out there, free or otherwise, then the day you stop seeing yourselves as "this is only a hobby" is the day you'll be taken seriously as game developers.
he 100% talking about method of promotion. an example of what he was talking about - getting your game 'out there' 'free or otherwise' - is barkley, which had loads of rips but was marketed in such a way that a lot of people were aware of it and ethusiastic about it. the post was about putting your game out there, taking it to that level where a greater audience of human beings are willing to recognize it, play it, review it. he wanted people who make games like alter aila and leo & leah to present their games to the public in that manner rather than letting them just circulate within the rpg maker scene.
maybe your philosophy is that games should be taken seriously regardless of their graphical content. that's great. but in the actual words that he wrote there was no correlation between being taken seriously or being a good game and using original graphics. he even advocated the use of RTP, which is most certainly not original graphics, but since it is free of legal restrictions it is great to use if you intend on marketing your game to a commercial audience. he made the unfortunate mistake of bringing up the topic of rips in reference to the legal implications of selling a game, which was only tangentially related to his main point, but you immediately latched on to the words 'taken seriously' and 'rips' and formulated a vigorous riposte to an assertion he didn't make.
author=Ciel
you immediately latched on to the words 'taken seriously' and 'rips' and formulated a vigorous riposte to an assertion he didn't make.
Continuing on that non-sequitur, though I love original graphics I am fully in support of people using rips as a means to an end.
for instance, i wish i could rip this entire thread in two right now
deboo
85
i think he just means they can only legally go commercial if they don't contain rips, it's kind of...necessary.
author=Fallen-Griever
Like I said, I know that if you want to go commercial then you can't have rips. But going commercial and getting your game out to a wider audience needn't be the same thing, so I didn't think he was talking purely about commercialisation (and if he was then Ciel's example of Barkley pretty much shows that he's wrong about having to achieve commercial standards to get more people playing your game).
Fuck, Barkley sucks...
Yes, but it is well (i.e. aggressively, fearlessly, and accurately) marketed, which is Ciel's entire fucking point as well as the point DemonofElru was making in the first place. Come on, F-G. Demon guy was saying that we need to make an ATTITUDINAL shift from being self-identified amateurs. The thing about losing rips was just one supporting example of how that might be done. It's not really the key point of his post.
from Feldschlacht IV
*gun to mouth*
So, thinking about the idea of reviews giving a thumbs up/down instead of a star score, it kinda reminded me of the Pass or Fail videos Creation was doing. It makes things easier to understand, surely, but it also makes them a little black and white. Star scores are nice because you have more of a range than like it/hate it, and I'm not sure doing away with them would be wise.
Originally, I thought the thumbs up/down suggestion was just for the game itself, not necessarily attached to a review. A simple function users can drop their simple vote in. Since such a thing relies on larger numbers of users for accuracy, I think it would be better if it were not attached only to reviews. The two systems should work together well.
I'm also still in favor of assigning value words to number scores to make choosing them less ambiguous. We'd have to choose the words carefully, of course.
Let's talk about this stuff more guys please oh god please.
author=halibabica
So, thinking about the idea of reviews giving a thumbs up/down instead of a star score, it kinda reminded me of the Pass or Fail videos Creation was doing.
those were perfect. he talked about the finer points of the game and at the end just said 'this is worthwhile' or 'this needs work'. a.k.a. play this/don't play this. this format is beautiful.
Value words are even more ambiguous than numbers.
Stars are only done well with 2-3 staff reviewers doing all review for a site; this is not a site where that would work.
Not doing thumbs up/down because the community is too small is burying yourself into a niche so that the site does not expand, because you are looking at the site at this moment in time (really bad idea).
I don't like rips personally but I'm not going to stop you from using them.
You guys should shut up, like the site tank itself into the ground/make some miraculous recovery and develop some cool games to show off.
Stars are only done well with 2-3 staff reviewers doing all review for a site; this is not a site where that would work.
Not doing thumbs up/down because the community is too small is burying yourself into a niche so that the site does not expand, because you are looking at the site at this moment in time (really bad idea).
I don't like rips personally but I'm not going to stop you from using them.
You guys should shut up, like the site tank itself into the ground/make some miraculous recovery and develop some cool games to show off.
author=kentona
Well, I tried to tackle this before...
http://rpgmaker.net/articles/246/
http://rpgmaker.net/forums/topics/6897/
...it didn't really go anywhere.
Casual visitors who stroll through the site are likely to base their judgment of whether or not to play a game based entirely on the review score.
Also, this is a false assumption. The presentation of the game page is actually the defining factor.
Hell I didn't base what I'd play on the score, firstly. I based it on reviews, comments, the amount of screen shots and the quality thereof, before looking at the score as a factor.
The Score could help or make it bad, but I'm sure most people read the page(s) of the game(s) for comments, the stories, updates and so on, before looking at the score, as the score is more bias than anything else in terms of how good the game will be. That is pretty much common sense when playing games as a game is only as good as someone's opinion of it is. Opinions differ, and thus won't make the game good solely on the score.
I can explore the option of creating weighted/rated posts for gameprofiles. That is have the option to give a thumbs up/thumbs down along with a post for a game. Then we can tabulate the results and displaying them somewhere on the header. Of course, it would be limited to one rated post per gameprofile per member. These rated posts would not go through the submission queue but now that we have the Report Post function, I think that we can do a pretty good job of governing ourselves and mods can remove flagrantly bad/misleading/false/abused rated posts. I can also (probably) have a page that just displays rated posts for a game, or maybe have a feed for the frontpage (or whatever).
So this gives us a quick method for game recommendations without the overhead of writing a comprehensive reviews, in a simplified manner (thumbs up/down) but leaves the review system intact (my reasoning for leaving that intact is because 1) I like it, 2) it works well 95% of the time, 3) so much of the site is built around the assumption that games have a rating)
Thoughts?
(EDIT: oh yeah, and 4) migrating the hundreds of reviews from the 5 star system to a thumbs up/down system is problematic)
So this gives us a quick method for game recommendations without the overhead of writing a comprehensive reviews, in a simplified manner (thumbs up/down) but leaves the review system intact (my reasoning for leaving that intact is because 1) I like it, 2) it works well 95% of the time, 3) so much of the site is built around the assumption that games have a rating)
Thoughts?
(EDIT: oh yeah, and 4) migrating the hundreds of reviews from the 5 star system to a thumbs up/down system is problematic)
