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v20170003 Update

Hi all,

I really didn’t intend to make another update this soon, but I wanted to get a hotfix in for the trophy/order situation, and it turns out that I’d already developed some pretty cool other functionality in the 36 hours before I realized it was broken, so that comes along with it. Here we go:

1. Trophies are being given out nightly again (hopefully) and the same can be said for Order prefixes/suffixes (hopefully). Seth/Havacoman should get their CC trophies tonight (hopefully).

2. Sanctions have been changed to Commendations.

3. Commendation tags on forum posts and storygames are a bit less intrusive.

4. Future storygames that get featured are now worth 200, not 100 points.

5. People with fewer than 0 points will be automatically reset to 0 points nightly. This is necessary to prevent the About Us section from reporting an inaccurate point value.

6. The biggest change is with Game Ratings. You’ll notice that games are rated to two decimal places now. This may take an hour or two to update, at first they might all be rated at 8.00, 7.00, etc. Once a back-end script has run, all games will be updated to more precise ratings!

7. If you hover over the game rating on a game properties page (not from a category listing page), a tooltip will appear telling you the game’s ADJUSTED rating. An adjusted rating is a rating that takes the number of votes into account. If a game’s adjusted rating is 0, that means that it doesn’t have enough ratings to have an adjusted rating. In order to earn an adjusted rating, a storygame must have 100 ratings. Note: All games will have an adjusted rating of 0 until a script runs tomorrow night. Adjusted ratings will be recalculated nightly. Until adjusted ratings have been calculated, the top games page may be a mess.

8. The Top Games page will be ranked by adjusted rating, not actual rating. The formula for adjusted rating is the same formula that IMDB uses to calculate their top 250. Please note that because the top games section is ranked by adjusted rating, not actual rating, a story won’t necessarily be ranked higher than another story, even if it has a higher apparent rating. Hover over the rating on the game properties page to see its adjusted rating. Again, this is how all major ranking sites work (such as IMDB and rateyourmusic).

9. Every game with an adjusted rating will also display a ranking on the game properties page for overall and for the year it was published. In this way, you can see how a game stacks up against the site’s best even if it doesn’t make the top games page. For now, all games will say too few ratings to be ranked, but that should fix itself overnight (hopefully).

10. Because of the switch to two decimal places, the order that the top games appear in will no longer rotate randomly but it won't be accurate until Adjusted Ratings are calculated.

11. The big reason for the top games change is to encourage authors to leave early end game links when a game ends naturally. You want to get more ratings now!

12. A small bug with CrescentStar’s featured comment on a relatively new game has been fixed.

I’d like to take this moment to ask people to really be clear in the Bugs & Problems section. Please give me as much information as possible, so that I have a chance to fix your problem. I’m sure I will have created some bugs in the course of building these changes!

Cheers,
3J

Whoa incidentally, until scripts run tonight, the Top Games list is a list of the earliest published games. Super cool!

Alexp may run some of the "overnight" scripts in a minute or two.

Overnight scripts? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Basically, the thing that hands out trophies, etc. It's a good thing if we want to see that stuff happen now!

Hooray! We finally get to see the long awaited trophies.

Woah, yet another update :)

More new stuff, cool!

Wow. An extremely quick hotfix. At least this site isn't as buggy anymore ;)

Oh yay! I really like the new decimal places on ratings. Thanks for another great update! Also, does this mean that you can no longer go into debt when placing bets on contests?

Ooh. I hadn't thought of that.

@EndMaster @Bucky really sorry for the headache here.

Not a big deal. We'll just have to decide whether to make a very small bet amount, like a token 5 point wager for 1 bonus point upon completion, or say you have to be at least non-lazy enough to have 25 points to enter.

Or third option, just say if you can't hit 25, you can enter for what you have, but have to win to get any points back. Having 25 points isn't really that hard since you start with 15...

EndMaster can't damn people anymore. Poor him.

Trust me, i'm sure he'll find a way. 

Aware of the bug in the storygames right now. Hopefully fixed momentarily.

Wait, why am I a notorious marauder now? I feel super cool. Hey guys, I'm notorious! 

Must be because of your Commendations.

So far I’ve seen:

Ordained Sage
Notorious Marauder
Pre-Eminent Architect
Sovereign Warden

There's also Lauded Sage. What could these prefixes or whatever mean?

I think it's just becuase they have commendations.

You sure?

E: E= Edit locked

A number of bugs cropping up with the scripts Alex is running right now. Not sure why but this is good practice for when I inevitably crash my employer's multi-billion dollar website. Hold tight! :)

*Barricades the doors*

Please don't crash this site on the process of trying to fix the bugs.

Thought this site was a hobby site Alexp made. It's a million dollars now though because of the numerous stories xD

Definitely not a million... probably. But we do have some amazing writing here.

11. The big reason for the top games change is to encourage authors to leave early end game links. You want to get more ratings now!
I'm sorry, but I can't help but question that logic. Stories with a end game link on the first page are usually not very high in quality. Putting the end game link there is like saying, "Hey, I know my game sucks! Here, you can leave it right now without needing to read it!"
I'm not saying it's allways like that, a lot of good games also have early end game links. But if a player ends the story early, that will also show in their rating. Isn't it better to get 30 endings of a 8 because people actually bothered to play the story and not 70 endings of 1? (overexaturating numbers here, I know)

Wait, are you trying to say that authors putting end game links early make games bad, or just that you've noticed that the two coincide? Right now authors are putting end game links super late in the game in order to artificially inflate their rankings. The average user who manages to get that far in the game is going to rate it higher. We want end game links where stories naturally end, period.

I know Bucky tends to hate stories that don’t have proper endings (and use the "restart link" cheat) and force you to play through the whole thing. He’ll actually rate those low on general principle.

I don’t tend to like them either, and would rather see an ending link on the first page rather than a story using the “restart” link cheat all the way through.

Almost all stories that have an End Game link after one click get a 1/8 on principle.

Almost all stories that force the reader to Restart if they don't follow the author's ideal path also get a 1/8 on principle.

A path shouldn't end before it reaches a legitimate and satisfying conclusion where the reader gets to actually make meaningful choices. I've always felt that a minimum of three choices and five pages worth of reading is a good standard to try and hold before closing your shortest story paths. This is an adequate amount of time to give the reader a good experience and may be enough to intrigue them to read more on their own will. Anyway, if you can't manage something comparable to that, you should probably just cut the path.

Likewise, if you force a reader to Restart, you're taking away from the impact of your "Ending" and kind of spitting in the face of the CYOA concept. It's a cheater tactic and lessens the entire story. All endings should be complete and meaningful in some way, even if the ending has a less than an optimal outcome.

Yeah, you nailed it! With popularity adjusted ratings, authors will be motivated to put End Game links at the natural end of a path. Adding premature end game links is likely to lower the average rating and using reset links instead of End Game links is likely to lower the number of ratings you get. In either case, it will hurt your site ranking.

Okay, most/all updated-caused bugs should be resolved now. Game rankings and the top games list should resolve tomorrow night. Man, that was stressful. @alexp really bailed me out!

I like the addition of decimal ratings. This will benefit for upcoming plans.

New ratings look is pretty neat.

There was a bug on one of my comments? :/

Interesting, some of the stories actually went down in ratings based on the new system. Now we have a lot more stories between the 2 and 3 range.

All the 1s & 2s got purged during the old system, so I guess nothing has changed too much. Just have to keep an eye on anything that's a mid 2 or less now. (Or even a high 2)

By the looks of it, the new system made changes both ways. Before if the storygame was a 2.51 it would round up to a 3. And if it was a 3.49, it rounded down to a 3 also. To the average person it appeared they had the same reception, but in reality their ratings might be quite different. With that said, I think it was a good change to the rating system because it entirely removes that discrepancy.

Just a random thought: to save you time, and since 3J is actively updating the site, it might be worth adding an auto-unpublish feature of lowly scored games that happens with the nightly update that impacts orders, trophies and such. After maybe 7 or 10 days, if a game is under 2.50 then it'll get unpublished automatically. That should give enough time for its rating to stabilize and let people get some comments on what the author should improve on. Maybe even add an automated message sent to that user, saying it was unpublished for being rated too lowly, but also adding a list of tips based on common mistakes to advise them on how to work towards at least a 3 or 4 rating. 

Entirely deleting a game, if someone keeps republishing it with no changes, would still be a manual admin action. Much more optionally: there could also be a hidden variable/flag that could be activated on the backend, that would allow a storygame under 2.5 to not automatically get unpublished by this system. I'm not sure why there would need to be an exception, but having that option in place would counteract any odd what-if situations where it could be a problem. Anyway, not sure how much work this would be to add, but long-term the feature might be helpful in site management if there's periods when not a lot of admins are active (like it was for a while last year).

Auto-unpublish? But the DMA-ers would lose a (soon-to-be-outdated) method of gaining points! But it does seem like a good idea and with commendations and featured comments, gaining points would be easier now. I'd put this in the FWW.

I'm not really in favour, as there are other requirements, besides a low rating, that mean a game can be unpublished, like a poor plot or poor grammar. These would be overlooked with an auto-unpublish script.

EndMaster has already been unpublishing all games rated below a certain threshold before the change, and this suggestion would simply do what he's already doing. There is only one currently published game below 2.50 rating right now (as of typing this) and it's near the top of the Newly Created Storygames list rated at 2.49.

If something rated higher needed to be unpublished, that'd still be taken care of manually by an admin as usual, since anything past that can't be automated. Even if there was no active admins for a period, then at minimum the lowest rated games would still be removed automatically. And when there are active admins, then it cuts back on their workload by taking care of what would be unpublished anyway.