They'll sting you right in the coochie.
Moral of the story... Everybody loves boobs ^_^
So... I just realized something depressing. So proud that Innocence Lost is the #1 game for 2019... Until I checked the list.
Boobs!!! a Edutainment by Ogre11
#197 overall, #2 for 2019
... Yep. Already half way through 2019 and the second best game of the year is called "Boobs!!!"
"Innocence Lost" and "Boobs" are the only two 2019 stories that have been ranked.
The next closest new story has only has 22 ratings, and my own story is stuck at 20.
Oh! ... That's okay then.
I think "Boobs" was successful in proving its point in how stories get ranked (or not) on this site. My hat's off to it.
For those of us who worked our tails off to try and produce something of quality... that no one reads once it's published... it's a frustrating experience.
I really do need to read more. >.<
They are rather impressive. ^_^
As I pointed out before, though, besides "Boobs!" the only other 2019 story to get any kind of attention is Avery's "Innocence Lost," with 262 ratings to date. When you scroll down to the comments, it appears that it gets reviewed every couple days by people whose user names I don't recognize from the forums, as well as from people who don't even have accounts. This tells me that people with no strong connections to the CYS site are finding it and reading it almost daily. (I read "Innocence Lost" myself, enjoyed it, and left a review that was later featured.)
However, the next most-rated game for 2019 (after "Boobs!) is "Knight Order of the Golden Sun," with a score of 6.52 but only 22 player ratings. The last review was Ogre's from 5/2, and all of the reviews seem to be from regular forum-goers. I haven't read this story, but it looks like this might have been a well-received contest winner... that no one reads or talks about anymore.
I don't want to begrudge any story its success--and as I said before, I did read and enjoy Avery's work--but one major difference that I can see between "Innocence Lost" and "Knight Order" is that one is featured on the site's homepage, and the other can be found only by perusing through lists of hundreds and hundreds of noob stories.
Basically, what I'm saying is that the way the site is designed directs new readers to stories that are already successful, while other stories that might also be pretty darn good are probably only read by regular site participants. The difference in the readership rate between a story that is featured versus one that is non-featured seems pretty large, from what I can see.
So perhaps the follow-up experiment to "Boobs!" is not to have Ogre take it out behind the barn, but to actually feature it and see what happens...
While it is sad that other stories have not had much readership yet, Price of Freedom was a long awaited upgrade of an older story with an already present fanbase, and it had been long-anticipated both here and on CoG (there's a lot of drama with that that you may have noticed digging around the forums.) So even without the featuring, it would have blown all other 2019 stories out of the water unless, say, EndMaster publishes another this year. It would be nice if more people dug around to find good, unfeatured stories though.
Also, "Knight Order" placed third in that contest.
Yes, I am aware of the history of Avery's story. And like I said, I'm not begrudging its success.
So who won that contest? I was basing my assumption on the reader ratings.
Funny, I think I did know that at some point in the past. So when I was making my comments above about the top stories of 2019, I was basing it off this list. It's odd that "Sir Osis" isn't here, but "Escape from Prison" is.
Thanks, and I certainly appreciate your support.
But what I was getting at is something a bit more structural in nature. Again, I fully recognize I've only been active here for less than two months, so take all this for what it's worth. Maybe there has already been a lot of thought and discussion about what I'm about to suggest.
However, I've seen lots of mention of a slowly-growing number of bugs that can't/won't be fixed: the RTE, the rating system, the tan background that makes me nostalgic for one of those beige desktop computers from the nineties. As I understand the history of the site, there were several programmers who got together and wrote all the coding quite a while ago, and CYS has been slowly accumulating content ever since. And for whatever reason, some of the flaws/bugs/limitations aren't a priority to fix.
It would surprise me, though, if on a website full of people knowledgeable in HTML that there isn't some fresh blood out there who wouldn't be happy to have a crack at updating the site.
Or failing that, staging a GoFundMe campaign to raise enough cash to hire a site developer to help modernize the site.
Because with a few tweaks, what is currently CYS could be redesigned and given a more dynamic interface. Authors could have their own pages where all their stories are easy to find, and therefore have a tool to help build an audience. A few more genres/categories might be added to help sort out the stories. You'd still want to highlight the best of the best, so a featured game is still a featured game, but there might be some other mechanism to help promote other stories that perhaps haven't found their audience yet.
As for new story creation, it's possible that the site's standards are set too low; currently, if a story can't rate higher than 2 it gets unpublished, and stories rated less than a 3 automatically get filtered from view. That still leaves a lot of 3s and 4s to wade through; in my experience with reading stories on this site, the good stuff starts at 5 and above.
So on my hypothetical updated CYS, any member could create and publish a story, same as today. But for the first 30 days, only regular members would see it and have a chance to rate it. If at the end of 30 days the story is just a 1 or 2, it automatically gets unpublished. The 3s and 4s go into a "developmental" workflow where the author has a chance to respond to the criticisms/suggestions and try again. Only the 5s and above would get promoted to the public-facing website, meaning that the CYS community would be putting its best face forward, and the reading public would have more quality storygames to browse through.
All of this assumes, of course, that the current library of stories could be transferred to the new site without any bugs.
So that's where I was going with this.
But now I see I need to stop spending so much time on the forum and working harder at completing Orion #2...
A lot of the site is broken, yes. I do like the tan background and think the site has a better overall layout than a lot of the other CYOA-types have. We do already have author pages in which all stories by an author can be seen, as well as tjeir activity. So I'm not sure what you mean by that. A member index maybe? You can also set the filter to only give you the highest ratings or include lower ones too.
Usually stories that rate beneath standards are deleted far faster than witjin a month, on account of members flooding over to get the free point and laugh. Having consequences for getting a 3 or 4 would likely lead to rating inflation as peeps who once rated average stories a 4 now give them a 5 or 6. Additionally, non-member ratings already have far less weight tham member ratings, and the more points a member has, the higher the weight of his rating. I do think there can be a bit of a copy-cat effect even with the waiting for ten ratings to recieve a number. Sir Osis had much higher ratings after a heavy-hitting member caused the average to jump up over half a point.
By regular member, what do you mean? Would membership alone qualify someone? There are active and reasonably well-known peeps here with under a hundred points, and limiting their access to storygames would hurt contest stories.
As for the site coding, talk to Killa and Mizal...I think a lot of stuff is out of their hands. I can tell you now that results of a GoFundMe would be sad too unless someone with actual, real money made a big donation. There just aren't enough active members that pay attention, have faith left in GoFundMes, are adults, and aren't poor.
That "slow process" that you mentioned was what I was afraid of. But if "modern computers just don't know what the hell is going on with a website this old," then that gap is only going to increase as time goes on, so at some point I imagine this site will be forced to modernize or become obsolete.
Yes, everyone has a profile page, but what I'm thinking of is something a bit more customizable, like a personalized web page where an author can try and build interest in his/her work. Whereas a profile page is basically a big honkin' version of someone's avatar, with their experience points / commendations to the side, and a detailed listing of both published/unpublished stories as well as every single forum post, the author page would allow the person to highlight the published stories they want people to know about, create a news feed so readers can see what they're working on, and allow readers to sign up for alerts or whatever--in other words, a built-in social media page.
As you said, the majority of site users are readers who peruse the stories but express no interest in the forums. The idea is to make something that keeps those people engaged with the site longer. There doesn't seem to be much evidence that Joe Q Public is using that filtering method you described to get to the better stories.
Again, these are just my thoughts.
To all who responded: I'm not saying I don't enjoy the site or enjoy the (free) service that it offers.
I'm just saying that I have a day job where basically I assess within a couple minutes where something went wrong, and then take the appropriate steps to fix it.
So rather than accept something as it is and assume that something that has been essentially been the same for two decades will remain unchanged until the universe implodes at the end of time, I see the potential in how something that many people currently value can be improved in a way that will attract even more people into the community.
But the situation as Killa described it is what I suspected was true all along. So feel free to carry about your normal business. Nothing to see here folks, move along.
To be fair, your whole contest for the month is based around trying to get people to read more reviews... Which I should really get back to
...and it look like this week we have one runaway contestant! She has 21 points so far, and it's only Tuesday.
Well when he's got a pic of himself with those fat green things hanging out for all the internet to see, of course he's going to draw attention.
Now that you mention it... Could he profile be considered pornographic?
I doubt anyone is choking the chicken/splittin the kitten to Ogre's ugly green boobs.
Inb4 someone says "Challenge accepted."
