blacc
Member
1 half star
Add-on Ratings changes
- Thread starter RoyKirbs
- Start date
Doxy the fox
working on my own character currently...
My guy that's lower
Saturn Ross
The Local Bird-Brain
I really miss the proper ratings, but on the one hand I do agree that I saw a lot of low effort jokes get 5 stars very fast with even more joke ratings. It made finding genuinely good mods without some kind of bias pretty difficult at times and that led me to downloading a lot more than I anticipated both to try them and give ratings accordingly. I'm not alone, there were a lot of well put reviews despite this.
On the other hand... while Cools are neat and I try to distribute them well, I feel it'll still have the effect of putting poorly made jokes up front as opposed to truly well made addons. I would much rather revert back to proper ratings than vague engagements, because lord knows the algorithm everywhere else only requires engagement and not good content. This feels like a change out of not wanting to put in effort.
Also noticed: on reviews that were given before this change, all the stars on them disappeared completely! Despite this, it's still listed that you can leave star ratings on reviews. So... what gives? Where are my star ratings I gave myself??
If we really needed a change to allow for addons to be better sorted, I would much rather had a change to the Ignore system, as currently it just hides works on a page and doesn't bother shifting over whatever is on the next page to the current one to accommodate. It makes browsing real annoying with how a page can be quite long only for the next to be far shorter in comparison, would rather them all be the same length. But I digress...
TL;DR I want stars back proper.
On the other hand... while Cools are neat and I try to distribute them well, I feel it'll still have the effect of putting poorly made jokes up front as opposed to truly well made addons. I would much rather revert back to proper ratings than vague engagements, because lord knows the algorithm everywhere else only requires engagement and not good content. This feels like a change out of not wanting to put in effort.
Also noticed: on reviews that were given before this change, all the stars on them disappeared completely! Despite this, it's still listed that you can leave star ratings on reviews. So... what gives? Where are my star ratings I gave myself??
If we really needed a change to allow for addons to be better sorted, I would much rather had a change to the Ignore system, as currently it just hides works on a page and doesn't bother shifting over whatever is on the next page to the current one to accommodate. It makes browsing real annoying with how a page can be quite long only for the next to be far shorter in comparison, would rather them all be the same length. But I digress...
TL;DR I want stars back proper.
Why was this change needed? Is it that difficult to take serious criticism now? I like the idea of 100 word minimum for reviews, it solves a lot of issues, but it shouldn’t be bundled with the change of straight up nullifying the point reviews. You’ve just made another discussion section for no apparent reason. Criticism is necessary to develop. If I didn’t get pretty poor reviews on some of my earlier levels I would have never changed. This is pretty much just forcing happiness and encouragement, which is sometimes not the best. Essentially what I’m saying is sometimes being mean and negative is necessary for growth.
blacc
Member
Yeah, there is no problem with a 5 to 1 star rating. The problem is that the review sections need to be monitored more closely. There is barely any monitorization of the review section from what I can see. The 100 word minimum doesn't fix the damage that has already been done. You either need to delete mod reviews that are under 100 words, or get rid of change all together. Because I know this community well enough that people will get confused why they have to type at least 100 words for a review but users before the update don't.
It's like taking away reviews on steam, or in a more extreme case: removing features that were essential to what it was trying to be. (something about the letter x) There is no incentive to use it if another section can do the same thing, possibly even better than the other.
We need a proper review system, and removing stars do not make it proper. In fact, it just negates the purpose of the section entirely. Because all it does is make the discussion tab the same thing. It's as bloated as the discussion tab, it's got the same kind of upvote system as discussion, literally the only things that separated it before this change was quoting someone else's post for discussion.
You are essentially at this point telling people to make more slop content, this message board is becoming algorithmic, STJR is trying to be corporate.
With all the changes involving "safety for others" to full on silencing and shunning those who call out what's been happening to the game we love.
To STJR: You should not worry this much about safety for others mods. This is not an art community, it's a modding community. You are caring too much about what others feel about your game and it's community to where you are doing everything else with your free time instead of making the game your community cares about.
Yes, you have lives, yes you have worries, but this is taking too much time for a minor update to drop. Please focus on your game more instead of focusing on the state of the community.
PencilVoid
Circuit Enthusiast
To elaborate on my thoughts, I dislike the removal of review weighting for multiple reasons but the most immediately annoying to me is that there is now no way to sort submissions by quality. You can sort by downloads, but this measures popularity, not quality. This is why I want a downvote to compliment the existing upvote; if we had both you could simply sort by upvote to downvote ratio.
To be frank I think the purpose of this change is to make negative feedback less visible, which sucks. Negative feedback and criticism are useful to any artist. The mimum character requirement on reviews is great, but the other changes defeat its purpose as a review system (others have already touched on this, so I won't repeat what they've said). If negative feedback is getting toxic that is a unique problem and the solution to it isn't to make negative feedback less visible entirely.
Bring back stars, and change their labels such that 3 stars is neutral, 1 star is negative, and 5 stars is positive. Either this or add a downvote button, and let us sort submissions by upvote ratio. If either of these happen I will be happy.
To be frank I think the purpose of this change is to make negative feedback less visible, which sucks. Negative feedback and criticism are useful to any artist. The mimum character requirement on reviews is great, but the other changes defeat its purpose as a review system (others have already touched on this, so I won't repeat what they've said). If negative feedback is getting toxic that is a unique problem and the solution to it isn't to make negative feedback less visible entirely.
Bring back stars, and change their labels such that 3 stars is neutral, 1 star is negative, and 5 stars is positive. Either this or add a downvote button, and let us sort submissions by upvote ratio. If either of these happen I will be happy.
The 100 character minimum is a good change as it will remove the annoying "this is peak" reviews and such and will require a more detailed reasoning on why you like the mod, as well as why you dislike it. However, the removal of stars is a BAD choice. Removing the stars is bad because it doesn't let the modder know that they should improve in some way. And it will help people outside of the community see which mods are the most popular, and maybe they will like to get into the community and see what other cool things are made.
Plus, maybe you want too see some not too good mods and play them just because you enjoy those kinds of mods in an ironic sense, then you can go specifically see those mods instead.
As mentioned by others this change was clearly made to "not hurt other artists feelings." and while I can understand where this is coming from, no one is going to get better unless they have a reason to improve.
And if they get their feelings hurt, then erm ok, it's the internet, thats kinda just how it is. You kinda just get used to it after a while. There's always gonna be stuff like this. A positive echo chamber is just as bad as a negative echo chamber, and a positive echo chamber is basically what this change is allowing the message board to be if you sort of "lighten" the negative feedback given by others, who mostly give negative reviews in a way to help the creator improve.
and if you don't like just constructive, non-mean negative feedback, you can always just ignore it, y'know. not to be mean about it but some people in this community should probably consider learning how to do that.
TLDR: 100 character limit was good, star removal was bad because it doesn't give motivation for the creator to improve, and if you really don't like negative feedback that isn't mean at all then you should just learn to ignore it
erm, with that being said, this is my TED talk about why this change to the review system was very mid
Plus, maybe you want too see some not too good mods and play them just because you enjoy those kinds of mods in an ironic sense, then you can go specifically see those mods instead.
As mentioned by others this change was clearly made to "not hurt other artists feelings." and while I can understand where this is coming from, no one is going to get better unless they have a reason to improve.
And if they get their feelings hurt, then erm ok, it's the internet, thats kinda just how it is. You kinda just get used to it after a while. There's always gonna be stuff like this. A positive echo chamber is just as bad as a negative echo chamber, and a positive echo chamber is basically what this change is allowing the message board to be if you sort of "lighten" the negative feedback given by others, who mostly give negative reviews in a way to help the creator improve.
and if you don't like just constructive, non-mean negative feedback, you can always just ignore it, y'know. not to be mean about it but some people in this community should probably consider learning how to do that.
TLDR: 100 character limit was good, star removal was bad because it doesn't give motivation for the creator to improve, and if you really don't like negative feedback that isn't mean at all then you should just learn to ignore it
erm, with that being said, this is my TED talk about why this change to the review system was very mid
1. This is an art community, it has been for years.
2. STJR does not manage the MB nor its rules, the Board Staff handles all that. Really not sure why so many people thing STJR spend any time moderating the MB.
3. It is the job of Board Staff to focus on the state of the community, if we feel like a feature is overall detrimental to those who contribute then we will take action. We do not care if addons are "quality products", we want to ensure that artists who contribute to the MB can do so with as least hesitation and ick as possible.
A low number score can seriously de-motivate people. Individual reviews that offer actual insight and aren't averaged with a single number is far more helpful to the artist and improving the addon to be as best as it can be.
Wumbo
edited
Someone who's easily demotivated by negative reviews is likely going to have a similar reaction regardless of whether or not that review has a star rating attached to it. And raising the minimum character length for reviews would've been a good enough change by itself to ensure that each star rating is warranted.
If it was specifically the averaged star rating that was getting people down, then now it's going to be a relative lack of COOL's compared to others.
Correct, reviews that offer insight to the modder are great and much more helpful than what we normally get! But removing stars hurts filtering mods for people who want to play them. The only real problem the star system had was that it pushed just ordinary people, who aren't mainstays in the community, away from playing these 1 to 2 star mods just because they want the best of the best. Thats not a problem with the system, thats just the preference of just normal people. I think everyone wants to play the best mods, and the star system helped show people what mods are the best!
also what this guy said is true, i can still write a negative review and the person who made the mod can still have their feelings hurt, even without the stars. if you really want to remove any form of modders having their feelings hurt you should really just ban all forms of negative feedback altogether, wether in reviews, or discussion tabs
i do NOT think that is a good solution, i think its a very dumb solution, of course.
Maril
Fluffy Kitsune Connoisseur
Except for cases where the mod is "anti-review bombed" as I'll put it. There's a bunch of people who'll just 5 star an add-on, much like those that give little criticism and give it 1-2 stars.
I will say the removal of the star rating is very very similar to the removal of the dislike count on YouTube though, people never learn do they? Removing something leaves people more confused than it does to keep it.
It depends on how the review is structured and the word choice, you can make constructive reviews that address weak points of an addon without being negative. I'd argue that purely negative reviews aren't something we really value.
"Filtering mods' can happen by playing the mod yourself, and deciding if it's something you enjoy or not. Reviews are still staying as well, you just won't see the arbitrary 1 to 5 rating anymore. If you need to assign some numerical value to your individual review, you can still do so. In fact, you get to choose the range of your number you use. 1 through 5, 1 through 10, 1 through 50, this concept can still be conveyed through your text.
This isn't about hurt feelings, this is about reducing damage to motivation. Obviously shitty and mean reviews will be reported and removed as always, so the "hurt feelings" thing is taken care of. The net gain of motivation through thoughtful words will just no longer be hindered by the average star count anymore.
Yeah this was another problem we had, thanks for pointing it out! Unhelpful reviews aren't always negative, they can be very simple messages like "Good addon!"
When it comes to people outside of creators, we would like to have their viewpoint expanded upon when it comes to reviews. Hopefully this will help separate the review section from the discussion page.
And hey, why not just try this new system out? If it's genuinely the worst thing ever and no one likes it, then you can petition to have it removed. It's not the end of the world.
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Also one thing I want to clear up, it's a 100 character minimum. Not limit.
You need to make a longer review now, and 100 characters is not that long. I'd argue it should be 200 characters :P
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yeah i agree with that, which is why the 100 character minimum was a good change, but generally the addons that were getting "anti-review bombed" were generally are very good, like x sonic, or chaotix
no i meant like someone new, who has never played srb2 with mods before is just looking for the best mods in general, not playing one specific one. if that can no longer be filtered then they have to manually look for good mods.
and before you say "well they can use the featured section to find the best mods!" well yes, that is very true, but having people only rely on the featured section will actually hurt the general modding community. now if you want a quick and easy way to find the best mods out there,
you can just look at the featured mods section, which is mostly comprised of mods made by the staff, or friends of the staff (this is not necessarily a bad thing, nor are there only staff mods on the featured section) which is harmful to the general modding community as a whole because now you don't know which are the best mods just by looking at the addons section, so you look at the featured section just to guarantee you get the best mods out there, which really don't have mods made by the general community.
PencilVoid
Circuit Enthusiast
I shouldn't need to waste my time by playing bad mods to find out whether they're bad. The old system did a fine job of preventing this because I could just look at the star rating. Now I'd have to sift through reviews, a lot of which are most likely spam or don't actually review the submission, or waste minutes of my life downloading and playing a mod to see if it's shit.
Someone who is fragile enough to have their feelings hurt by a low average star count is almost definitely fragile enough to have their feelings hurt by a review that isn't pure praise, even if the criticism is worded as constructively as possible.
Why is this idea of "best mods" so important? That's incredibly subjective, and stars are not a reliable method to weight the quality of a mod. Download counts, reviews, and reputation handle that just fine. Even if someone is so new that they don't know what's good or not, they'll have most likely watched a youtube video of someone playing with mods and start with those. And then over time they'll start to grow their addon file with time, and acclimate to the community like how we all did.
We still have reviews, and high ratings don't always mean "good addon".
Sure, that may be true to some people. But there will also be those who aren't that fragile, those who would fold at a low rating but can handle a proper review.
The few artists who benefit from this are worth it.
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One more thing I want to say, this is my subjective opinion regarding judging addons purely on star count.
I've browsed many, many addons being both a Judge and a Server host. Most addons on this site do not have reviews, yet I found value in them and would choose to use them. Are those addons bad because the stars are empty? No. I think it's stupid that a an addon not reviewed at all has less stars than the 1-star reviewed addon.
There's also been addons with 5 star reviews that I genuinely did not enjoy, and found little value in using. Most of these mods have been either meme mods and rather simple maps. Sure, there's value in those addons. However it did not help me in particular with deciding on whether an addon is good for me or not. I always end up reading the reviews, discussion page, and playtest the addon myself.
The idea that stars are so essential to knowing what's "good" is incredibly over-exaggerated in my personal opinion, and very little is being lost.
I like these changes, and I genuinely think it will help the creators. I've been judging addons for a long time, and I know what usually turns people off from contributing their work and art to this site. You're free to disagree of course, but so am I.
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you are correct! stars are not that reliable! i could rate a very good mod 1 star and it wouldn't change the quality of the mod! but the stars generally helped show you what is of high quality and what isn't. generally if the community gave it an overall 5 star rating, it means its very good, and if thats what ur looking for, then perfect!
i'm going to be completely honest, and i may sound even a little mean *very scary* *insert vine boom sound effect here* but if you really can't handle a proper review that gives a low rating then you really should not be posting things publicly if you aren't ready for that kind of reception. that goes literally everywhere, including here.
trying to just "lighten" negative, constructive feedback just discourages the modder to make even better mods! can it discourage the modder from doing this again? yes, it can. but that kinda means that they aren't ready for the internet, and thats not necessarily a bad thing either.
plus, most negative feedback that does give 1 star is generally very constructive and not mean at all. if you are sad about that kind of review, once again, you really shouldn't be posting things publicly.
What is a proper review to you? That seems super subjective, plus we have the right to adjust rules on our site as we please. If we think certain reviews are harmful, we have the right to remove it.
We don't have to conform to the internet as a whole, we will make changes and decide what's acceptable on our servers. Feel free to make your own forum if you disagree!
Wumbo
edited
If it wasn't clear, by "negative" I meant critical/unflattering reviews and not outright hostility.
True, and as long as there's some measure of engagement, people will always find ways to demotivate themselves. And while there are ways to remediate this, replacing a purely fractional metric with a number that can balloon to infinity is not it.
Consider the following scenarios:
Pretty self-explanatory, don't you think?