The Almighty Doer of Stuff

Salmon, when you say "Some folks can't post here" I assume you're referring to TM and TGM. Other members of the community are more than happy to channel them for legitimate business and the administration seems okay with that, so I don't see that as too much of a problem. SW is probably better than SV if we keep it message-board based. Anyway, I've modified my Blades Forge-based idea yet again in light of recent discussion, so here it is: --- There would be three specific Quality rating categories on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being absolutely bereft of any sort of redeeming quality whatsoever and 10 being absolutely perfect, all listed as numbers only except 1 and 10. For each of these ratings there would also be "Not Applicable" and "Abstain/No Opinion" options. There would also be a similarly-scaled Overall Quality rating, except it would be to one decimal place, like CSR. There would also be three Genre scales. These would have five (or whatever odd number) descriptive ratings with an clearly defined center, that serve to indicate what sort of scenario it is. All ratings would be optional except (possibly) Overall Quality, which might be required for all rating submissions. A user may modify his past ratings at will. The above describe Rating system will be placed at the top of a scenario's Discussion Thread for reviews and other discussion, sort of like a poll on a typical message board (only better). Results would have to be visible by default, unlike message board polls, because first you look at the rating to decide what to play, then you play it, and only then do you actually rate it. Next to the results will be a button for "Ratings By User" that will display the ratings by user and allow you to uncheck or recheck boxes next to each user, in order to exclude or include a specific user's ratings in the calculated, searchable averages. Below the Ratings would be a Discussion Thread for textual reviews and discussions. Spoiler tags MUST be enforced, but spoilers are allowed. You can discuss the player-end aspects of the scenario, the designer-end aspects, or both; it doesn't matter. The actual rating aspect of the system is strictly player-oriented, however. This is both so that players won't have to deal with scenarios being rated highly for things that don't affect play, and to prevent people who don't know what they're talking about from bringing down advanced scenarios. (Actually, perhaps there could be an additional scale that's only available if you've released a scenario. That can be discussed later, though.) Lastly, as is already present on the Blades Forge, you can Tag the scenario with keywords that indicate noteworthy aspects of the scenario. --- The [b[Overall Quality Rating[/b] is independent, but has an optional "Calculate Average" button. Each of the three specific categories would also have an explanation: 1. Writing This category encompasses storyline, plot, themes, dialogue, descriptions, cliché or lack thereof, etc. The literary aspects of the scenario. 2. Gameplay This category encompasses combat, puzzles, balance (how well the combat, treasure, EXP, etc. interact), engine modifications (such as the water system in "Destiny of the Spheres" or the rune system in "Nebulous Times Hence"), flow (or something, not sure what to call it. For instance, do you constantly have to blindly guess what you have to do or say to progress the scenario, or are the outdoors so unnecessarily large that it takes three weeks real time to get from one town to the next?), etc. What the player actually does while playing the scenario. 3. Aesthetics, Functionality, Etc. This category includes graphics, spelling and grammar, town design, cutscenes, technical noding/scripting, bugginess, whether the scenario contains far too much gratuitous foul language/lewdness/etc. (if that's important to the person rating the scenario), artistic merit, etc. The presentation of the scenario, things whose primary purpose is to enhance (or detract from) immersion in the scenario. I know some people want a separate scale for graphics so we can exalt Ephesos's pretty trees, but ultimately I feel that people who are playing these games generally aren't doing it for the graphics, so I don't feel it's that important. If you want, you can always Tag the scenario with keywords like "beautiful" or "visually stunning" or whatever. --- After those categories, the Genre Scales: 1. Serious<->Humorous +N/A (in case someone releases a scenario with nothing but combat and no text, which for all we know may happen, we'll need an N/A checkbox) 2. Hack-and-Slash Combat and No Puzzles<->Strategic Combat and/or Puzzle-Heavy +No Combat or Puzzles (I think strategic combat and puzzles should be together because really, strategic combat is a sort of puzzle. This scale will move right if there are puzzles, even if there is hack'n'slash or no combat, for instance, or if there's tactical combat but not puzzles, or both.) 3. Linear<->Open-Ended (Can anyone think of a scenario where this might need an N/A? Not necessarily a BoX "scenario" but scenario in the literal sense.) --- I don't think we need a rating scale for short/long/epic, because the length of the scenario isn't subject to opinion. We could just include a Number of Towns and Size of Outdoors field in the database, I think. Same goes for recommended party level/prefab/singleton. We should be careful not to just use the level listed in the scenario, though, if the readme says otherwise. I don't know if this matters much in BoA, but in BoE, some scenarios were listed as Very High level just to prevent monster HP doubling. Lastly, for utility scenarios, the "genre" really isn't open to interpretation either. The fact that it is a utility scenario and perhaps a more specific categorical tag should be included in the database when the scenario is posted. --- Of note is that the Overall Quality rating is the same scale as CSR's system, which makes it easy for CSR ratings to be imported into the Blades Forge (or whereever) system. The ratings would go into Overall Quality, and the reviews would go into the discussion thread. As with the original Blades Forge policy regarding old scenarios whose authors are no longer around, old CSR reviews will be placed under the control of the user who posted them when they register at the Blades Forge. This will of course be done manually, although the original porting from CSR to Blades Forge could probably be automated. --- Any comments are welcome.

The Blades Forge seems like a pretty neutral location to me, really. Does anyone have some strong dislike for Arancaytar or Ermarian.net? Plus, unlike a message board-based system like the current CSR, a Blades Forge-based system has more flexibility and searchability. I was talking to Bain-Ihrno last night, and we thought of some ideas. Perhaps, in addition to the "poll thread"-style rating/review/discussion system, we could have a button next to the results that says "Ratings By User" that would display each individual rating and the person who rated it that way. Perhaps you could even choose to eliminate the ratings of certain people who you tend to disagree with, or search only for ratings by people you tend to agree with. This is better than the thumbs up/down system that was proposed once, because it's more personalized to the user and doesn't make other reviewers who might get too many thumbs down unjustly feel like they're being bullied. As for Nioca's rubric, I find myself disagreeing with many aspects of it. This is one of the problems with the huge rubric that Drakey mentioned: not everyone agrees with what makes an aspect of a scenario good and what doesn't. In addition, that's a LOT of reading to expect everyone who tries to use the system to read before they can rate scenarios. While I don't think we should make the system overly simple to the point where it's not functional or practical, I strongly believe we should make it as easy as possible to use the system. Complex rubrics, while useful in theory, will tend to just discourage people from using the system. Furthermore, I could see the problem arising of people starting a fuss about specific people applying the rubric unfairly. With no rubric, it's all personal opinion and everyone knows that. Besides, rubricless rating systems still work well in other applications. For instance, on Amazon.com, you rate a product from 1 to 5 stars. No rubric is provided, but the reviews still serve a useful purpose. You select a number of stars, and read the reviews that gave that number of stars, and you figure out which reviews tend to scrutinize the item most fairly and logically. You may find that all the 1-star reviews are by people who didn't read the instructions, and thus you can ignore them. Alternately, you may find that the 5 star reviews are from people who don't know how to tell whether the product in question serves its purpose well compared to similar products, and you can ignore them. I think the system Bain and I came up with for ignoring users you frequently disagree with or searching only for ratings by people you tend to agree with fits its purpose well in that regard. Even people who don't review or discuss don't pose a problem, because you can base whether you agree with that person on whether you agree with reviewers who rated the scenario similarly.

"The Everything Guide to Pirates". My girlfriend got it for me for Christmas. I've barely started the first chapter, but I already love it so far, having read the introduction and the contents and the other stuff at the beginning of the book. It's written engagingly, even the Acknowledgments page which I usually skip. My girlfriend is the best girlfriend ever! She knows me so well. I don't know how I got lucky enough to end up with her, but I sure am glad.

Perhaps we should keep the reviews and the ratings separate but next to each other then? Have it so you don't have to enter a score to create a review, and vice versa. Sort of like poll threads on message boards work, but designed better. You enter a thread for a given scenario, and at the top of the page is the categorical rating system. You can submit your rating without discussing/reviewing the scenario in words, or you you can discuss without rating. Spoilers are allowed but spoiler tags are strictly enforced. EDIT: Also, you can see the results without voting, by default. This is important because chances are you're going to be picking a scenario based on the ratings first, and then, only after you have played it, will you place your own rating.

Have you tried entering A Small/Mild Rebellion or The Za-Khazi Run? I believe the text hasn't been changed yet, but it should still function as a registered product. If you create a party and try to enter either "A Small Rebellion" or "The Za-Khazi Run", you should be able to start the scenario. If you can, then it's working. If you can't, come back and tell us what happened. Also, strangely, the program documentation is not included with the Mac version. You can try downloading the Windows version as well, take out the help file, and see if you can open it. Oddly, the Windows version contains the Macintosh documentation, so I assume it will work. It should give you plenty of information on how to get started and learn to use the program. If you have further questions or if something's not clear, we're always here to help.

I think, for searchability purposes, it would be best to have a standard scale of 0-10 or some other numbers or symbols or whatever. I agree with Drakey, though, that we should probably leave it vague as to what the numbers mean, except obviously the direction of the scale. For instance, if 10 is supposed to be a perfect scenario (however the reviewer defines "perfect"), and the reviewer loves the scenario but rates it 0, that does nobody any good. Perhaps we could apply more well-defined scales to certain scales more than others, though. The quality scales (plot, gameplay, or whatever we have) should probably be vague, but genre scales (linear vs. open-ended, humorous vs. serious, etc.) should probably have a well-defined center, still leaving how far to either end the scenario is up to the reviewer. I posted my review system idea on Calamity Refuge. If anyone wants me to post it here, I will (or someone else can copy and paste the whole post if they want), but I have to go catch a bus now.

Salmon: Are you saying that if we ban people whose reviews aren't up to our exacting standards from reviewing scenarios, then people whose reviews we like will somehow decide to review more? I'm afraid I don't follow the logic in that. I imagine all that would happen is we'd have fewer reviews, and perhaps a rise in average quality, but no rise in max quality. I don't see why we can't have reviews open to everyone, and then have a separate place for in-depth discussion of the scenario. I imagine the people who don't know what they're talking about wouldn't stick around the in-depth discussions for too long, and if they do, there's no reason why you can't hit the "IGNORE" button if you don't like what they're saying. As for reading the scenario documentation, I think that before we can enforce reviewers reading the documentation, we need to get on the cases of designers to keep their Read Mes small, and only containing the really important information. Version histories, hints, credits, etc. can all go in separate files. Even background info, like that in the readme for "Caverns of Stylbore Mountains", does not need to go in the Read Me. All that's necessary is a note that you should read Background.txt (or something like that) if you want to know what's going on. The Read Me should, however, contain the intended purpose of the scenario, so people know they're not getting a plot-heavy adventure from, say, "Blades of Rogue", or "Sound Showcase". This does not mean, however, that they can't decide that the scenario isn't any good even though it fits its purpose exactly. Just because BoR succeeded in pushing the limits of Blades doesn't mean it was fun to play. Alternately, just because it didn't meet its stated purpose doesn't mean it isn't fun or otherwise useful for some other reason.

The reason I put it in General was because I wanted it to be about BoE as well as BoA, but I guess it doesn't matter much. At any rate, Spidweb is the best place for the discussion, definitely.

Plus if we use CRF's chat, we can't have more than 8 people before the server crashes. >_<

I was hoping to have all discussion on CRF. I was just posting a heads-up on SV and SW, but apparently Drakey and Dinti don't want it that way. *shakes finger* Let's redirect all discussion to the CRF, please.

Originally Posted By: Master Ackrovan A couple of things. For one, its the reviews themselves. Most of them tend to be unhelpful to the designer or even the player (who is arguably the lesser important of the two and should therefore receive less attention). Commonly, a large amount of reviewers (including me, in all honesty)tend to be short, meaningless posts with a score. Reviewers would point out how amazingly technically advanced scenario's are (Blades of Rogue particularly) and hand it a score fractions over a 2. Most of the recent reviews have been more thoughtful, true, but its unlikely this trend will continue (I admit this is more of a personal opinion then fact). A fresh atmosphere is a good way to encourage people to "begin anew". I'd say the player is more important than the designer as far as reviews go, although there needs to be a good way for designers to get feedback as well. I'd also say scenarios that are technically advanced but not really fun to play should be getting low scores, although with BoR, from what I understand, it was getting very high scores for being complicated technically, despite not being particularly interesting from a player's perspective. I definitely agree with the comment about the fresh atmosphere, though, and the second paragraph is accurate. We're building off threads on Shadow Vale about the shortcomings of the CSR, by the way. Here they are: http://forum.nethergate.net/index.php?showtopic=1477 http://forum.nethergate.net/index.php?showtopic=1504 EDIT: As for why we need numbers, nobody wants to read through 400 threads to find the scenarios they might like. We need some way of searching more efficiently.

http://forums.calref.co.cc/index.php?board=39.0 Many people have cited issues they have with the current Comprehensive Scenario Rankings system we have over at Shadow Vale. Some have argued for creating an entirely new system for rating and reviewing scenarios. Others say we should simply improve the current CSR to correct its failings. What do you think we should do? Have your say. Voting has begun on the direction we should take the new (or simply modified) system, here. The poll will be restarted as new ideas are proposed, until the suggestions stop and we have a clear winner.

Or you could kill Sulfras, take the stuff, leave town, and use the unaltered editor to unkill Sulfras, I believe.

They're intelligent humanoids, so presumably it depends on their social structure. If they're a raiding party, you'd call them that rather than a tribe. Perhaps the raiding party would be party of a larger tribe or other sort of society. I'd imagine they're not tribe-forming, however, and they seem to gather mainly for the sake of partying. Note the disco suits.

I think I've just been mentioning catching up on Exile, BoE and BoA, frequently.

I've only been trying to catch up with Exile. Avernum has the same story and Geneforge doesn't really interest me. Why do you say that?

Maybe. I haven't counted. I haven't boycotted it, anyway.

I'm sure Jewels at http://www.truesite4blades.com/ would love to have your walkthroughs. As for the tutorials and other stuff, where it should go probably depends on what they are, but at any rate we'd be glad to have them. I've never actually played your scenarios, although they're definitely on my list to play after I've finished the Exile trilogy. Anyway, welcome back!

I don't know if you've been paying attention, but a lot of people actually have been boycotting Shadow Vale lately. I will be playing BoA once I've caught up with the Exile trilogy.

She'll try to kill you as soon as you take it from its case, which is right behind her. If you want that mace, you'll have to either kill her or run really fast. As for Heartfinder, I recommend organizing your inventory so it comes after the other weapon. When you use weapon poison or cast the Envenom spell, the poison is applied to the first weapon in your list. So if it's second, you can cast Envenom and poison your opponents twice.

Probably because Warrior's Grove is a medium-sized town, and in order for the program to import the town from Bladbase.exs, the first town needs to be medium as well. I'm assuming it wouldn't be too tough for the editor to be made to check if the Warrior's Grove button is selected and only then require that the first town be medium, though. (Speaking from no coding experience and not having seen the code, anyway.)

Sorry to see you go, but good luck with school! Thanks for all the work you did, it was a great service to the community. I'll download it straightaway.

Setting every instance of the same item type to stop concealing the ability seems to make the most sense to me. Maybe the same node could also set "Always Identified" and "Cursed" as well. I don't know if it would be worth it to set "Magical", though that's up for debate. As for items being someone else's property or contained, I could see potential uses for changing those properties for individual items. Perhaps a Town Node that asks for a town number, a location (x,y), whether to set/unset Property and Contained (maybe Identified too?), and the item type number to set it for (perhaps with -1 indicating all items on that space). I don't know how many of those ideas are feasible, but it's always possible to pick and choose parts of the idea.

Also, technically, those BoA graphics are not available under GPL 2.0. That hasn't stopped certain scenario designers (particularly TM and Vince Fizz) from using copyrighted images in their scenarios, but still, it should be considered.

Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel Originally Posted By: Chokboyz The last one i'm considering to implement is the "Make town hostile -> Set Town attitude" one (as in this post http://pied-piper.ermarian.net/topic/7/001822). Should i bother ? I think Stareye actually changed the Make Town Hostile node to a Set Creature Attitude node, which I think should instead be a separate node. Then perhaps we could change Make Town Hostile to Set Town Status (valid statuses being friendly, hostile, and dead). Perhaps an option to set the town's creatures to their preset attitudes (the ones set when you Edit Monster after placing a monster in a town) would be useful too. As for monster stats, there's already a program called the Super Editor that increased all the monster and item stat caps, and it was used to create the Undoomvahgaz Armor god-party utility scenario. I'm currently using it to create my own god-party utility scenario, because Undoomvahgaz is not easy to come by, and as far as I know it doesn't maximize stats and give all spells and alchemy. Here's the page where you can download the Super Editor, at TrueSite: http://www.truesite4blades.com/Home/listofalldownloads.html I don't think it was ever used for anything other than Undoomvahgaz Armor due to the fact that modifying the program was forbidden at the time, but increasing the caps could have good uses.