Community Content Reviews Suck

[Lecic]

There are some major problems with the CC reviews section that I would like to see addressed.

1. Content owners can whine and get almost any negative review removed for being "unconstructive."

This is a major problem with CC reviews. Why are content owners allowed to get nearly any negative review that does not include a paragraph long eloquently written thesis on why the review is not a 5 star rating removed? This hug box mentality on content reviews makes it hard for subpar designs to get a low rating they deserve.

2. There is no way to respond to other's reviews or to author's comments on your reviews.

Why is there no way to respond to an angry author's comment on your negative review, or to say thanks to an author who has complimented you on a positive review? Why can't I put a comment on a review made by someone who missed something important with the ship? These should really be something you can do. Reviews should work like profile page comment chains or something of the like.

3. You can't update your review if the author has commented on it.

This is just stupid. Why can't I update my review after the author has commented on it? What if the author has pointed out something important I've missed, or I want to clarify something that the author asked about, or my opinion has changed, or perhaps I just accidentally gave the wrong star rating? Fix this.

 

[kulbolen]

kummmbayaaaaaa, my lorrrdddddd

 

[Deserea]

well you learn something new, didnt know that reviewers couldnt respond to authors comments, guess ill have to PM chicken instead D:

 

[kikaha]

One thing also, why can't we review the ship AFTER we tried it and not only right after we downloaded it ? I mean, lets try the ship before reviewing it....

 

[Daeridanii]

1. Content owners can whine and get almost any negative review removed for being "unconstructive."

This is definitely a possibility with the current system, but it also allows content owners to remove reviews that are genuinely unconstructive or otherwise irrelevant; or reviews that are obviously there just to lower the star rating of the content piece.
If I were to receive a negative review on one of my builds, I would not expect a "paragraph-long eloquently stated thesis," but I would expect to have feedback that pointed out specific problems with it.
Reviews like:

• "This ship is ugly, I don't like the colors."
• "I lost a battle while flying this, your systems are terrible."

Are not constructive or encouraging, and I definitely would consider reporting them.

2. There is no way to respond to other's reviews or to author's comments on your reviews.

I agree with this tentatively; While it would be useful on occasion, I don't want to see reviews turning into mini-threads. Reviews are for publicly providing and receiving feedback, not carrying out conversations. We have a actual conversation feature for that.

3. You can't update your review if the author has commented on it.

Agree entirely with this.

 

[Spoolooni]

I see this as a good thing, it'll only push people to show off their the review section and onto an alternate platform like Reddit or Youtube where the public eye stumbles into often.

 

[MacThule]

The Community Content section can always use improvement.

Engineering is a major part of this game and most players love this aspect. It would improve the game though for it to be as easy as possible to make well-informed decisions about CC for when a player wants to use a ship built by master engineer. I can't imagine there being anything wrong with each ship having its own extensive chains of review discussion.

 

[alterintel]

To Lecic 's point. As long as a negative review isn't disrespectful and give's a real reason for a low review I wont remove it. Just ask Chckn Wildstyle , He has mastered how to piss people off with his reviews while being "respectful" but most importantly his reviews are constructive and provide very good reasons for low marks.

I would like for people to be able to change their reviews, and edit the text. I've done quite of few ships where I've made changes based on user's comments. I would love the review system to be able to reflect that.

Aside from the review part it's self I'd would like to see computer generated stats based off of the .sment file. Then you could do a real search in the CC section for ships based off of their stats. But I lack the skills to program a script that can read a .sment file and I lack the time to learn how.

 

[MacThule]

Being able to sort, filter and search ships based on their .sment stats, ratios, computer blocks present, etc would be amazing!

 

[Brokengauge]

One thing also, why can't we review the ship AFTER we tried it and not only right after we downloaded it ? I mean, lets try the ship before reviewing it....

I've always been able to come back to anything I've downloaded and review it whenever. How are you forced to only review right after download?

 

[Deserea]

I've always been able to come back to anything I've downloaded and review it whenever. How are you forced to only review right after download?

he worded that wrong i think, i believe he meant "Why can we review the ship before we trying it, currently we can reveiw it right after downloading it."

At least thats how i read it i might be mistaken.

 

[Brokengauge]

he worded that wrong i think, i believe he meant "Why can we review the ship before we trying it, currently we can reveiw it right after downloading it."

At least thats how i read it i might be mistaken.

Obviously, we need clarification lol.


kikaha , say again, how copy?

 

[kikaha]

I've always been able to come back to anything I've downloaded and review it whenever. How are you forced to only review right after download?

No idea but i could never come back later and review it. So if i did not leave a review straight after downloading it well too bad and too late.

 

[Brokengauge]

No idea but i could never come back later and review it. So if i did not leave a review straight after downloading it well too bad and too late.

That's very odd. Maybe talk to crusade about it?

 

[Chckn Wildstyle]

I would like to make it clear on this that there needs to be a more defined ruleset for each section of the CC because everything is way to arbitrary when it comes to reviews.

The problem comes down to how people rate ships at the very core. When there is a very large section of the CC just labeled "Ships" then there is any number of ways for the ship to be rated. It may perform wonderfully and look ugly as sin or vice versa and anyone can rate it any way that they possibly want to.

Now I do think that having a "Ships" or "Stations" or "Turrets" catch all category is a good idea because not all ship builders want to pigeon hole their creation into either "RP/Looks" or "PVP". To that point though, I do not think that should be the default category to post your content and I will explain why.

1) Looks are subjective and giving something a 1 or 5 star rating with the description as "It look horrible and the colors are all off, I absolutely find nothing good looking about this ship." or "This ship looks AMAZING I don't think I have ever seen anything that looks better!" should be valid reviews as that may very well be the reason for why they hate or like it so much.

With a ship that is placed in the overall category of "RP/Looks" I do not see why people have to explain their feelings as to why a ship got the rating it did. They are just that, feelings.
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2) Combat rating are slightly subjective but at least have some hard stats to be looked at to tell whether or not something is good or bad. These should be the reviews that are required to give explanations for why they rated the ships the way they did, in detail I might add.

3) Now for the crux of the issue: If any creation is placed in the catch all category then either of the two rating systems above can be used to rate the creation without the use of the other.

My suggestion is that for the catch all categories the creations have multiple star ratings wherein the ship is rated independently on its different qualities.
OR
Simply state outright that you MUST to review it using both critiquing systems, (1) and (2) above, then make a composite score for the ship.
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The issue here is that there needs to be more defined terms on how you rate the creations, but that does not mean that the reviews should be treated the same.

If I go onto the RP/Looks section of the CC and see something hideous, how am I supposed to tell this guy that literally everything of his ship sucks and should probably be redone because it looks terrible to me? Those are my base human feelings, I can't really describe human nature to hate things that look ugly.

Alternatively, if I go on the PVP section I should be expected to give reasons why the ship is good or bad and not simply a "this absolutely terrible ship too much armor way too slow, and pretty bad too fly. (1 Star)" to bring up a recent and probably relevant quote. Creations should get a little bit more explanation than that when it comes to PVP. No reasoning as to why or how these things impact the ship, just general statements that do nothing for the author or the people looking to download the ship.

Personally, and this may just be me, if I see a review like this on a PVP ship I normally ignore it due to its utter inability to help me in figuring out if it is in fact good or not.
​

The entire CC needs a redo to be completely honest, there are too many loopholes to 1 star things just because you don't like the person who made the ship or be lazy in your reviewing. There should also be some knowledge dispensed to first time CC posters that reviews will be harsh sometimes because of the nature of critiquing.

My suggested rework of the categories would be:

• Ships
  • PVP/Functionality
  • Roleplay/Design
  • Shells
    • PVP/Functionality and Roleplay/Design Mix
• Stations
  
  • PVP/Functionality
  • Roleplay/Design
  • Shells
    • PVP/Functionality and Roleplay/Design Mix
  Turrets
  
  • PVP/Functionality
  • Roleplay/Design
  • Shells
    • PVP/Functionality and Roleplay/Design Mix

Where you would Need To Click the Mix option for an overall review.

Again personally, I don't think that turrets should have more than one section because they are inherently PVP/Functionality oriented, but I have had enough complaint from SkylordLuke when he only wanted his turrets to be reviewed off of looks to know that other people see turrets differently than me.

This would clear up some of the confusion over ship ratings as currently someone can just click the "Ship" or "Station" section and submit in the blanket category because they don't know the other categories exist.


TL;DR: CC needs a rework on its content sections. Looks are Subjective and should be treated as such (Meaning short non-explanatory reviews are okay). PVP and Functionality is not Subjective and should be treated as such (Meaning short uninformative reviews are not okay).

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PS: Can you please make it so that TAB actually does what TAB does in any other writing software? I hate pressing TAB and having my cursor disappear. It makes it really hard to create bullet point lists that don't suck. I have literally no idea what TAB does in the text line of the forums so I may be missing something important.

 

[Reilly Reese]

well you learn something new, didnt know that reviewers couldnt respond to authors comments, guess ill have to PM chicken instead D:

Don't even bother responding to him lmao

 

[Deserea]

Don't even bother responding to him lmao

Why, he gave a decent review with decent feedback on a ship that i happen to love quite a bit, and hes the *only* person whos even given any idea of its weaknesses/performance.

 

[Reilly Reese]

Why, he gave a decent review with decent feedback on a ship that i happen to love quite a bit, and hes the *only* person whos even given any idea of its weaknesses/performance.

Last time he was reviewing stuff he was doing so in the worst manner possible

"This ship is too grey for me"

"I was eating a bad sandwich while writing this."

"This ship doesn't have enough guns" < Name includes civilian

 

[Deserea]

Last time he was reviewing stuff he was doing so in the worst manner possible

"This ship is too grey for me"

"I was eating a bad sandwich while writing this."

"This ship doesn't have enough guns" < Name includes civilian

Well, he still might be doing that, but mine got a few paragraphs so!

 

[Chckn Wildstyle]

Well, he still might be doing that, but mine got a few paragraphs so!

I reviewed quite a few ships in little words because at that point there was not a defined way to make reviews. I did over 300 different reviews. I am the reason that the guidelines we have now exist.

I rated everything that I possibly could including ships that had no ratings yet, a lot in fact, and some of them were very average and I really didn't feel like picking apart everything for a 3/5 star ship considering I was warned by the moderators that I couldn't make negative reviews without giving something good to contrast it. They changed their stance on that, but at the point in time that I was reviewing, if I ever got too critical of something I would get moderator warnings.