this forum is currently the only sc map database on the entire web. at same time, SC2 has elicited great amount of interest in starcraft again & I'm sure that staredit.net will also claim responsibility for SC2 maps in the near future. However, staredit.net desperately needs to change how its database operates if it wants to ride on this resurgence of interest in starcraft.

let me tell you, database isn't used frequently. there are a ton of new maps but most of them dont get downloaded at all or at most get 2 clicks. the reason is that nobody trusts these maps & most fear that they are waste of time.

the rating system is not so useful. it doesn't show in search, so it's hassle to click each maps to see the rating, only to find out that it's received very few ratings & little downloads (sometimes none...how could ppl know how good the maps were?) many of the "reviews" are probably written by the authors of the maps themselves, using sock puppet accounts, in order to promote those maps. and, there's no link between the reviews & the maps, so sometimes you don't even know there was a review & it's impractical system because if there will be more reviews, it will be very hard to search for them. also, every review is different. this inconsistency confuses ppl & it's very hard to see what to expect of a good & comprehensive review.

staredit.net must transform itself from not mere group of map makers trying to showcase their creations but a more useful database & coalition of reliable map reviewers.

we must model our review system on that of notebookreview.com. Only if we branch out the review factors can we review maps more accurately & without less sentimental biases. the review rating & anonymous rating should be kept separate but they should be displayed right below map title on search & browse pages.

we must introduce reviewing as a forum activity, where you get points for writing reviews that get approved by admins. people must be able to comment on the reviews to complain biases & mischaracterizations, & also rate on reviewers themselves so time will build or break their reputation & their user rating will be assurance to others who want to try new maps.

the reality is, really, people are tired of old maps & they want new ones but they are hesitant because they fear that they will waste a lot of time in doing so. if staredit.net offers people ways to constantly feed themselves with new & fun maps, it will become big & significant.

as for reviewing categories, i suggest division of points like this:

fairness 10 pts (glitch, cheats, balance, etc)
visual design 10 pts (terrain, color, unit names, etc)
play interface 15pts (special fx, player-game interaction, flow, etc)
gameplay 10pts (lv of competition, pace of game, concept/idea)

again this is similar to notebookreview.com's reviews.... http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3869http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3869

review should indicate how many times the reviewer has tried the map.
2-5, 6-10, 11-15, 16+. that way ppl can know reliability of that review & also reviewers themselves will be more honest regarding this... than if they were to tell the exact number of times they have tried the map (always # will be inflated), they can just give a range of # of tries.

God... if you're making a "Review of SeN" post at least user proper grammar and decent punctuation.

Anyway, as to the topic, Maps don't get downloaded cause they aren't trusted. Yes, you're most likely right. But you come here and propose a reviewing system for maps that don't get downloaded so, who will make the reviews then? Will there be like a thousand of slaves working day and night to review new maps? Otherwise it won't happen cause if people don't go through the hassle of downloading the map they won't even dare to try reviewing it. That besides that if the map DOES get LUCKILY reviewed it probably will be by the author or his best friend that are both unknown to SeN and untrusted.

A reviewing system was to be incorporated on the DLDB anyway and was bound to take part in the economic system as well.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Nov 1 2008, 6:17 pm by Corbo. Reason: Oh the irony. shouldn't post at midnight

lol

Anyways, it's true that I don't think too many people would bother with writing reviews for some random maps, but I'm also sure that regardless of me uploading lotsa korean maps I guess no one gave a fawk and it was just a waste of time to try to add a lot of these maps I got from Naver, to have the latest version of these maps. Considering most of them got like 1-2 downloads except Alphabet D and Pandemonium, although Pandemonium is so rigged that it hurts. I get many maps from the Database just in case someone hosts it, because then I won't have to dl.

Neways I don't think the reviewing thingy is a useless idea, it's better than the nothing we have now. Maybe it would work out, or not. You can't know.

Blood will be spilled if anything is implemented correctly in the DLDB before the search.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Nov 1 2008, 7:00 am by Mini Moose 2707.

Because you can search only for tags?

Shouldn't there be more categories? What category would "Picture Mapper" fall under? its not under mapping utilities. Its easier to browse then to search for tags (sometimes)

the current rating is not sufficient. b/c ppl don't need to explain their ratings, too often their rating becomes exaggerated or sentimental or at-the-moment whimsical & the entire system is very susceptible to sock puppetry. only when people are held accountable for their expressed opinions & are required to explain & know that they will be questioned or noted about their reviews, will they be honest & more objective.

it's no good to argue that because nobody downloads the maps, nobody will review them. with comprehensive reviews getting incorporated into the database's navigation, more people will come to staredit.net & there will be more downloads & more activities & more reviews.

Why do people write reviews for notebookreview.com? Why do people bother to engage in lengthy discussions in our forums?

There may be many reasons, but for some it's like an RPG. Ever heard of Wikipedia being a MMORPG? For some people, doing something significant & getting points & higher ratings/rankings are fun.

I'm talking about transforming the entire SEN community where reviewing becomes a norm.

----
also, let me add 2 things to my first post regarding this...

1) reviews should have pics so that they're not dull.

2) we need to have a collection of featured maps, similarly to featured articles on wikipedia & featured wallpapers on animepaper.net. this makes a really great incentive for people to make & post great maps on this site. but we should wait until we have a library of reviews/ratings of considerable size.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Nov 1 2008, 6:01 pm by cosmicagent.

And after the search, a number of other things..

I forget if it was old sen or maplantis, but Millenium made a bunch of map reviews.

Anyways, this comsicangent kid is phail.

It was old SeN.
I remember that too. DTBK and Bolt and some more people also did map reviews. It was pretty fun.

I didn't do very many reviews, I just spent a couple months going solo at approving every file submitted to SEN (that was a shitload of work).

I can see a few issues with this idea:

1) Only maps that people have heard of, or at least by people that they are heard of, will get reviews. As a further consequence of such, if users search by rating, only those maps that originally got enough attention to earn downloads will come up, and other maps, which might be just as good or better, will be overlooked.

2) It's hard to review a new map on your own because, unless it's already becoming popular (in which case the whole process is largely unnecessary), there'll be nobody to play it with, and you'll be on your own in terms of figuring out how to play. Being a newbie on your own is fine when you're dealing with maps that are either very simple or contain a very limited number of truly new ideas, but if we are to consider maps that really exploit the full capabilities of the Starcraft engine as a platform for the creation of independent games, then we have to consider that any work of that type, in Starcraft or otherwise, will have a learning curve. The one thing I do like about the system that you've outlined is the classification of the review by number of times played; a lot of perfectly fine maps get a lot of hate from people who play them once and get all bitter when they're brutally defeated by vastly more experienced opponents.

3) A pre-set division of points might be fine for a contest, which has a stipulatively defined notion of winning, but the virtues of maps are much more variable. Some maps do not suffer at all in terms of their enjoyability for having old-fashioned interfaces and minimal consideration of visual design (old maps in particular would be vastly biased against by your proposed categorization); other maps might have the most professional visual design, a wonderful interface, and brilliant triggering, but still be awful to play. At the same time, it's fully possible for a balanced, nicely-paced map to be ruined by a horrendously awkward input system, or to have two maps that are generally similar except that one is vastly better-looking than the other. Having finite categories might, in fact, be detrimental to the quality of maps produced, because map-makers will be reluctant to sacrifice categories that are completely irrelevant to the particular map that they are producing. For instance, a map might play best if set on plain, geometrically-constructed isometrical or square terrain, a setup without any visual design appeal; yet a fixed-category scoring system will grade the map for the æsthetics of the terrain whether or not the gameplay is such that the players will be paying any attention to that terrain at all. Even if the gameplay wouldn't be affected either way, taking time to add things that do nothing for the actual fun of your map simply decreases the likelihood that it will be completed. Not to mention that æsthetics are subjective, and while colored unit names, extended terrain, and so on might be the "SEN Way" of expecting things to be, the "SEN Way" is no more than a product of community members mindlessly parroting one another for the sake of popularity, and thus is no more valid than those which specify prefer a dark, early-Starcraft æsthetic or the neat squared-off look, as either of those can have their own appeal to an unbiased observer. It's the same problem as we often get in the map-making assistance forum: there's a certain way of doing things, the hyper-triggered, dropship or building-controlled, death-count-timered style of map construction that is always automatically suggested without looking to see whether that way is actually appropriate to the map at hand. As a result, people often avoid doing things in a "newbish" way even when that way would make for a better or more likely to be completed game than the "pro" way (which is usually the best way, but to argue on those grounds would be to miss the point here) without any downside in the particular situation.

If we are to have a rating system to accompany an expanding review system, it needs to be non-dogmatic; it needs the flexibility to recognize that the important categories for rating a map are determined by the map itself, not by some abstract or community standard. And even then, you'll have problems with maps that do not draw reviewing attention being ignored, and of maps that happen to get unlucky in terms of their first reviewer having very different tastes being shunned; the entire affair is bound to have its own problems. Thus, it might be better to just leave people with an overall encouragement to be more adventuresome in terms of the maps that they're willing to try out.

Is everyone blind or do they not think that the Search button might be a nice place to look?

Yes, but the main search must be corrected to search more than just tags.
Especially after we're told not to use 95% of the things we would search for the map under as tags.

Then we could have different review standards for different types of maps.

If reviewing becomes a norm in this community (& it's much easier to review maps already having been made than to make new maps yourself...), so will testing be. We could have map creators themselves "sponsor" reviews of their own maps by having some other member of SEN come to battlenet & play & test (we could even create a map testing squad)--> this allows the creator to give all the insights into the map while making reviews easier to do. Also, although you're right about how the degree of visual detail can be limited according to map type & that focusing on it risks getting the map incomplete, even those exceptions can have decorations with tiled sets & we need to reward people who do the best job to make the game complete as it possibly can be. It's not a matter of the SEN way or not & I don't think ppl randomly spew out the SEN way stuffs as you described.

We need to divide the browse page into 3 panels. Featured maps. Featured reviews (regardless of the map quality). and the most recent maps. The portal page for browsing should list 1 new featured map & 1 featured review per day (taking turns) & have up to 8 recent maps, regardless of their order. Users should be able to list the maps according to popular vote, review rating, & also have a page dedicated just to the featured maps.

I just now saw the "recent review" column in the database!

And I see that all the map pages have "review" tab on them. Is this something recent or did I miss this completely in the past?

Whether it's new or not, thank you for agreeing with me (who's the web designer here?)!

Several things:

~ Here, if I click on the link to the map page, I'm introduced to the home page of staredit.net. This isn't so for other map pages so I think that this is a glitch.

~ Here, the reviews are actually comments... If review features are standardized with rating, review categories, etc., this shouldn't happen anymore.

~ Anyhow, the forum should get rid of the crappy reviews in the past & quickly form a standard guideline for reviewing maps.

You missed it the first time. It has almost always been there.
Just not incorporated in the DLDB portal but the tab has always existed.

Also, as to the things you pointed out. Yes, I do believe reviews have to be somewhat controlled. Maybe it should be a job for us, not really make the reviews but accept them so they at least make sense and act like a review instead of random comments like in the file you pointed out.
As to the missing link. I'd say it does it for all maps/files/mods. Note that the DLDB is still under develpoment somewhat. But thanks for pointing it out. IP should be taking note of it now.

I'm killing the current review script and hopefully implementing something along the lines of what you are thinking.
Wait and see.

Well I think this would be a good direction for SEN to head. I'm tired of downloading random maps in hopes of them being worth the first play. I particularly agree with a controlled review system. Really, you just need to make a section for each part like you already do for the map showcase template, except make it part of the form itself. Some of those sections could be brought directly over.

I'm also willing to be one of the first reviewers if this ever happens, though I can't promise I'll be extremely productive. I'm harsh but thorough and honest. Also, if you guys would like some ideas for a form layout, parts to grade, etc, I'm willing to give some thought to make a theoretical good one as an example. We could make a thread just on that.

Guys, there was already a topic on having reviewers. And I'll be more than glad to be a reviewer for this

Example: http://www.staredit.net/?p=reviews&area=view&id=16

I also feel the same as cosmicagent, in that if we implement a review community, we will definately be ahead of every other mapping forums when SC2 comes out. Although it doesn't need a full blown reviewing community at this very moment, we should experiment with it now.
I also like the review rating, because it does matter. If I were to read a random review, and it sucked, then I wouldn't want to read any other reviews anymore, and we'll be back to where we've started.
In essence to the above system, we should allow everyone to review, and have the highest rated review sitting on the top, so people will probably only read that, and can read more if they want to. Reviewers can even develope their own language too (because I feel perfect grammar is unnecessary at certain times )

But we probably need to wait patiently before the review session is scripted. I'll definately support this with my own reviews.

As for the point divisions
1) gameplay
2) presentation (professionalism)
3) design (basically player interface... like what types of modes there are, how are the spells, and spell effects.. what things are made to enhance gameplay etc)
4) Story for rpgs..
5) others..? we should have a poll for this, actually.