1 réponse à ce sujet

[Adinos]

Jesse van Herk just wrote

For anyone with suggestions on how to improve the projects section here
or what is lacking, *please* post them in the "social.bioware.com site
help" forum, where the devs can possibly find them. We are committed to
making the projects section more useful, but that's tough when we don't
know what people are asking for. Thanks!

Now, I have made a number of suggestions before (see http://social.biowar.../8/index/119467 for example, but then I discovered that Jesse had placed me on his blocklist, so I stopped - Still, I really would like to see this site to become more useful, so here is my analysis of some problems, and specific suggestions on how to fix them.

Primary problem - it is too hard to find anything in the 'Projects'section.
Specifically, it is too hard to find projects containing anything that is worth downloading.  If you just look at the "most popular" project list, a significant percentage of them are "work-in-progress", some of which are overly ambitious with virtually no chance of success. 

Several new categories have been added - however, there are two major problems - if a project got incorrectly classified originally, or if a more appropriate category is added later, there is no way to re-classify the project.  Also, the list is a mess, with builder-to-builder and builder-to-player categories mixed up.   Also, the gategories are not well chosen -  the NWN modules category is just a pointless waste of space and several categories seem to be missing.

So, here are some specific suggestions on how to improve the project section

• Most important: Come up with some way to separate "work-in-progress" projects from projects that actually have something availavble for people to download.  My preference would be for a "Project status" field, where you could at least select categories like "Under Development" and "Released", and make "Released" the default.
• Under "View", add "Subscribed projects" - once I have found projects that are sufficiently interesting to want to follow them, I want to be able to find them again easily.  Not everyone knows of http://social.biowar...bscriptions.php
• Reorganize the project category list, remove the NWN category and clearly separate playable content  from builder content.  Also, it is a bit confusing to have "Dragon Age Addons" as well as "DA Gameplay mods", as to most people those categories overlap.
• Add a few more project categories - where do machinima files go?  What about ready-made areas?  Scripts?  Custom-made music?
• Allow module owners to change the category of their projects.

Second problem - the popularity rating system is basically broken.
Once you have given a project a "+", there is no way to remove that again, even if you discover later that the project didn't deserve it at all.  Also, you cannot in any way decrease the rating of something yyou actively dislike.
Now, other similar sites have various rating systems.   Some offer a "thumbs up/down" system, while others allow you to give stars or a numerical rating.

I personally like something like the NWVault rating system, where you give a 0-10 score, but the rating is hidden until a specific minimum number of people have rated the project.  The average number may be meaningless - in NWNvault, an absurdly high percentage of modules have a rating above 9.0, but still the relative ranking is pretty good - a module with a high sciore and a high download count is probably worth looking at..

For a rating system to be useful, there has to be a way to indicate that you don't like the project., or a way to indicate how much you lkike it.

Third problem - the download counting.
One useful way to measure the popularity is to count the number of downloads.  In fact, I would suggest you shoukld be able to order projects by download count.   However, there is a major, major issue here - You cannot update a file without losing the download count - it gets reset back to zero.  This would need to be fixed - the ideal solution would be to count the number of people downloading files from the project, but at the very least allow people to update files without losing the download count.  As it is, the download count is utterly pointless.

Modifié par Adinos, 25 novembre 2009 - 07:40 .

[Snoteye]

I love strict hierarchies but this is something they handle very poorly. Usually it results in either of

• not enough/too specific categories: some projects fit nowhere and get thrown into a generic "Other" category, either by user-established convention or by design;
• too many/too unspecific categories: similar projects are categorized differently because they fit under too many categories.

As an example, when adding an NWN portrait to the Vault, available categories include all player classses; all player races and drow (but not, say, duergar); "Generic;" "Monsters;" "NPC;" "Other;" and finally "Jpg" (which is downright absurd considering it's not even supported by the game).

I would suggest only a very general level of categorization and leave the specifics to tags. For instance, allow only a single category for game modules but let the author assign Gameplay, Item, and Character (and any other) tags as applicable.

Two things that would definitely have to be considered for such a solution are:

• if the tags are gathered in one global list, some tags will not make any sense whatsoever for certain projects. On the other hand, category exclusive lists seems like a lot of database bloat, and what do you do when the tag(s) you're looking for are not (yet) in the category your project is in?
• if only the author can assign tags, risk of vandalism is greatly reduced, not to say eliminated. Meanwhile, allowing all users to add/remove tags to/from projects greatly increases the likelihood of the average project being more appropriately categorized (tagged).

On a somewhat related note, the list of project categories, in order, at the time of writing is

• Dragon Age addons
• NWN Modules
• Builder - DA Mods
• Builder - DA Textures
• DA Playable Modules
• Builder - DA Utilities
• Builder - DA VO files
• DA Gameplay Mods
• DA Item/Armor/Weapon Mods
• DA Character Mods

Whether or not these names are final, and even though it may not be all that relevant at the moment, I think the list should be sorted either by category or game, in alphabetical order, and that games only be represented in their short form. E.g.

• ...
• Modules - DA()
• Modules - NWN
• ...
• Textures - DA()
• ...

or

• ...
• DA() - Modules
• DA() - Textures
• DA() - Utilities (what are those anyway?)
• DA() - VO Files
• ...
• NWN - Modules
• ...

I also do not agree that the NWN modules category should be removed (in fact, I think there should be more categories, but realistically this site will never be able to match the Vault anyway simply because the Vault is so large now).

At any rate, a list clarifying the intended use of categories (and/or tags, pending changes to the system), maybe on the toolset wiki, would be a very good addition.

Modifié par Snoteye, 25 novembre 2009 - 08:09 .