I would like each hub medal to come with an associated score, and for the cumulative score to be displayed somewhere. The idea is by no means new, but I believe that the problem in the past has been how to keep bogus entries from being created just to inflate scores.
My idea is that hub owners could have the option to associate a score with each medal, any score they want, but each hub individually could only award a set number of points. So if a player was awarded 5 medals, each worth 20 points for a total of 100 points, but the hub was only allowed to award a maximum of 50 points to each player, then that player's score would only go up by 50 points.
In order to prevent hub entries from being created just to award points, each hub would start with zero points total and have to be approved for more. This approval process would be automated such that any of the following would trigger approval:
*The game is featured in a banner (or maybe just offical) guild.
*The game is a BYOND favorite (Gold star in searches. Is this the same as the above?)
*The game is very popular, regularly receiving 50+ players.
*(All approved games get the same budget of points)
The idea behind this setup is to have a system which doesn't require policing, which significantly increases the prestige of being featured in a guild, and which rewards players for trying games outside their usual genre.
The scores themselves would be displayed on a member's page in the same box as their medals. There should be a set of options on their blog layout page by that box: Show Medals Only, Show Score Only, Show Both Medals and Score. The score could be displayed with forum posts (in a span with "class" set to "score" so that forum owners could disable them), and there should also be a client proc for retrieving a player's score from the hub (perhaps this could just be a client variable: client.score).
ID:103897
 Oct 29 2010, 6:11 am (Edited on Oct 30 2010, 6:07 am)
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Oct 29 2010, 6:45 am
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DivineTraveller
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I remember this has been suggested before, but I can't remember exactly where. I agree, as long as limits are placed (I noticed you came up with a reasonable solution for that, too).
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It depends on what the purpose would be, but it seems like hub entries would need to have flexible point budgets (not just a max of 50 for all hub entries). Any idea how you'd figure out this limit?
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Forum_account wrote:
It depends on what the purpose would be, but it seems like hub entries would need to have flexible point budgets (not just a max of 50 for all hub entries). Any idea how you'd figure out this limit? I've been thinking a lot about that, and I'm not convinced that having different budgets for different games is a good thing (then again I'm not convinced otherwise). Regressia may be a game of much larger scope than Plunder Gnome, but who's to say that winning Regressia (and probably getting all the medals in the process) is worth more than doing all the superlative things in Plunder Gnome that are rewarded with a medal? The only way I could think of doing this requires human involvement, either guild leaders or hub moderators. Perhaps automatic approval only confers the minimum number of point, but hub owners could request an upgrade? | |
My reason for saying that games need a larger budget depends on what these scores would be used for (and what you'd expect them to mean).
If Regressia is budgeted 50 points like all other games, I can play for a while, earn the medals, and get 50 points. Then you update Regressia and double the amount of content in the game. Does my score drop by 25 points because I now have only half of Regressia's medals? I think that putting guilds in charge of the budgets is reasonable. It keeps the scores consistent throughout the guild, which means that your total action game score somehow represents your skill/experience with BYOND's action games. The total scores (for all game types) will always be kind of meaningless. | |
If I'm not mistaken, an xbox game gets a total of 1,000 points to distribute, and no single medal can exceed 100 points. No need to break an established formula.
I also think the point allocation should be handled entirely by the developer. Though whether the points actually count or not should be based on some automatic criteria, like I listed in the other topic, or Iain listed here. | |
Forum_account wrote:
If Regressia is budgeted 50 points like all other games, I can play for a while, earn the medals, and get 50 points. Then you update Regressia and double the amount of content in the game. Does my score drop by 25 points because I now have only half of Regressia's medals? What happens is that I (as the owner of the Regressia hub entry) set a value on each medal. So you earn the medal "Sword Master" for 20 points, the "Dragon Slayer" for 10 points, and "The End" for 30 points, for a total of 60 points. Because Regressia is only budgeted 50 points, you get only 50 credited to your score. Later, if Regressia gets its budget increased to 100, your score would increase to 60. In other words, any game can set a medal equal to 9001, even if it doesn't have a budget. Adding more medals doesn't change the score a user has, unless the hub owner actually goes back and changes a medal's value. | |
Falacy wrote:
If I'm not mistaken, an xbox game gets a total of 1,000 points to distribute, and no single medal can exceed 100 points. No need to break an established formula. The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion's achievement for beating the main quest is worth 110 points :O! Also I'm all for medal scores, as long as there are limits and some decency to them, such as... "You log into XYZ! Medal unlocked: Logged In (+50 MEDAL SCORE)" Logging into a game is not an achievement. >:( | |
LordAndrew wrote:
Falacy wrote: By the logic here, I would imagine that games like that would get a significantly smaller budget. | |
DivineTraveller wrote:
By the logic here, I would imagine that games like that would get a significantly smaller budget. Not if the budgets are automatically managed by meeting certain criteria. | |
Falacy wrote:
DivineTraveller wrote: Managing things automatically based on certain criteria seems like it has potential for abuse already.. Can you list some criterion you would use? | |
He listed several things in the original post...
*The game is featured in a banner (or maybe just offical) guild. *The game is a BYOND favorite (Gold star in searches. Is this the same as the above?) *The game is very popular, regularly receiving 50+ players. Figuring each of those is worth 50 points or something... I don't generally like the idea of increasing budgeted points anyway. I think if your game is listed in one of the official guilds then it should just get 1,000 points to allocate. And I stick with the plan of having a max of 100 points per medal, even though that doesn't seem to the case with achievements. | |
1,000 is quite a bit if you only have a handful of medals (compared to a 360 game which on average has ~50 achievements divided amongst the 1,000 points).
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And 50 is way too small for any game with a lot of medals. 1,000 is a viable options that allows games to expand their medal base, while requiring at least 10 medals to make full use of all the points. It also provides a standardized amount of points between all games.
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Falacy wrote:
Figuring each of those is worth 50 points or something... My proposal was for those criteria to trigger that game being accepted into the points system and getting budgeted the standard amount (whatever that is). I don't propose that each one of those criteria hand out points cumulatively. So a game that only fits one of them would get 1000 points, and a game that fits all three would still only get 1000 points. I didn't even mention the idea of different games getting different points, in the original post, as I don't like the idea. And, yes, 50 points is too small. Small round numbers make great examples, which is why I used it. 1000 does seem awful large, though. Were I setting up the system, I might go with 500. | |
IainPeregrine wrote:
I didn't even mention the idea of different games getting different points, in the original post, as I don't like the idea. "each hub would start with zero points total and have to be approved for more. This approval process would be automated such that any of the following would trigger approval:"? | |
Falacy wrote:
"each hub would start with zero points total and have to be approved for more. This approval process would be automated such that any of the following would trigger approval:"? Yes. Some games have 0 points (they're not approved), other games have 1000 points (they are approved). All games that are approved have the same number of points. | |
50 points isn't nearly enough to spread around, 1000 points is way too much. How about 400 points per game and leave it up to the developer to choose how many points each medal is worth? I'd also prefer all point totals be divisible by 5, just because that looks nicer.
As for the approval criteria, I think Ian got most of it right besides the 50+ players thing. That just causes problems for new releases/single-player games. The game should only have to be in an official guild and have a gold star. Since updates to BYOND games aren't quite as big as expansion packs or happen too rapidly, adding additional points shouldn't be automated. Any budgeting of additional points should require the intervention of an actual person, a guild moderator. They'll have to make the call on how many points to add, but usually it should probably be around 50-100 points. | |
SuperAntx wrote:
As for the approval criteria, I think Ian got most of it right besides the 50+ players thing. That just causes problems for new releases/single-player games. The game should only have to be in an official guild and have a gold star. The idea was that any game that met even one of those criteria would be approved, not that a game would have to meet all of them. | |