[Suggestion] Custom Map rating/sorting

[Blue Dwarf]

To preface this, I will state that finding maps for CW1 is rather annoying. A kind user generously made a customized sorting site for CW2 maps, and for that I am grateful.
After doing some searching on the forums here, it seems that the idea of 'Sort by rating' will somehow collapse the entire world-building community. Perhaps it will, highly rated maps will bury new maps, and good but difficult maps will also fall into obscurity, as people will rate them lowly. Now I come from Hamumu.com originally, an indie site run by Mike Hommel (Jamul). Some years ago Jamul released a game based on player-created maps titled "Costume Party," in its prime it saw a multitude of user-created maps released daily.

I personally think Jamul's level rating and sorting system would be great for CW maps. He offers two ratings for every level: Awesomeness (stars), and Impossibility (skulls).
For ease of explanation, here's a screenshot:

Spoiler

[close]

The first two boxes allow you to narrow the search by map name and author. They can be left blank if you aren't looking for something specific.
The stars and skulls allow you to limit the search to only maps with the amount of stars or skulls you specify, for example a map with 3-5 stars and 1-2 difficulty if you want an easy but fun map.

The next two boxes can be toggled to the following options:
1. Include All Levels, Only Levels I Haven't Played, Only Levels I Have Played
2. Include All Levels, Only Levels I Haven't Won, Only Levels I Have Won

The 'Sort By' determine the order maps appear in the search list. It can be set to sort by Impossibility (difficulty), Awesomeness, Played (how many times you have played the map), Won (how many times you've won), Author (alphabetical on Author name), Name (Alphabetical on map name). The search can be reversed on each of those as well, that's what the double arrow button does.

The only tweak I'd make on that is altering 'Played' and 'Won' sort options to search for total times the map has been played and won by the entire community, not just yourself.



This system would pretty well allow players to find whatever map they wanted. New maps, old maps, hard maps, easy maps, most popular maps. Whatever they want. You could also add in Creeper World specific sorting options, such as tick boxes for each type of weapon so you could play maps that only have the weapons you marked available, or only non-CRPL maps, or size settings (small, medium, large, huge), whatever other options might be useful. Perhaps those options could be tucked away in an 'Advanced Search' tab so as to not overwhelm brand new players.

Anyway, this post mainly stemmed from frustrations with the CW1 map search function. I'd also just really like to see a powerful and specific search function to help players find exactly the types of maps they want in CW3.
Back to lurking I go!

[Cavemaniac]

I'm very please to see you make such a well reasoned/impassioned request/argument.

I agree totally and was about to ask for something similar.

There are over 6000 cw1 maps which makes finding a classic older map almost impossible.

I used to make extensive use of the 'random map of the day' suggestions - until they were pulled to improve the website response time.

With thousands of cw2 maps, the older awesome maps are consigned to oblivion - a three week old ok map has more downloads than a two year old map - have a look at Liberation Pinball for a prime example.

Anyway, I'd love to see random suggestions back again, and ideally some variation of your suggestion for a rating system implemented for cw3

Might have to wait til post release though - the community is hanging out for a taste of the nutty goodness of cw3 and they'll brook no delay!

[asmussen]

I think the 2 rating system is a pretty good one. DROD (Deadly Rooms of Death) uses a similar system, except the scores are called 'difficulty' and 'rating'. DROD has an enormous amount of high quality user made content, and the rating system makes it much easier to find interesting holds of the approximate difficulty that you want. DROD has had a very active user community for a very long time, and users can make entire holds, not just individual rooms. Some of the user created content rivals the official games in both scope and quality, and I think that the rating system really helps encourage the better content designers continue to make great content, by making sure that their holds get played.

[pawel345]

I think that a great addition would be a tag search for the maps, I think it was mentioned somewhere before, but the ability for the mapmaker to add tags like rush,puzzle,custom image background, world map based, fun shape, void islands..... and so on. Best if there was a list, and you are supposed to choose a tag from it, but you can add a new one. And search would give you a list of tags and maybe a number of maps in each category. Another feature that would be nice is best map of the week, month, year, but that can be community based, like a tournament to which one could nominate a map they liked or vote on one of already nominated maps, and the maps that won would be featured somewhere on a toplist or something :P  that would allow the most interesting maps to get more attention and would make finding fun maps to play easier.

[teknotiss]

blue dwarf has made an excellent point.
i was wondering about the rating system, but hadn't formulated any solid ideas, i just knew that the old systems wouldn't be enough.
a double rating would be excellent, and an advanced search would be very useful, so i hearby "third" this suggestion (if cave "seconded" it  ;))

[dhc]

I haven't spent as much time in the custom maps section for CW1 as I have for CW2 - so I went and took another look.

One thing I didn't realize was that there already is a rating for each map.  It isn't visible on the main page which means that you have to click on each individual map to see its rating.  It would be nice if the maps' ratings were brought to the main page - I look at the ratings on the CW2 maps frequently.

The hidden ratings on the CW1 maps are on a 0-5 scale and the skill ratings are also pretty much on the same scale (Trivial, Easy, Medium, Hard, Expert) so the data is already there for a dual-rating system on CW1 where (it appears that) the difficulty component is currently missing from CW2.

Anyway, moving forward to CW3 - I was wandering about the usage of the 'Best Time Filter'.  My preference would be to have an 'Average Time Filter' because the number and skills of the expert players around here make the best time filter kind of useless for the average/new players in the community.

And if you wanted add a little extra incentive for players to post the highest scores on maps you could put the user's name in parentheses next to the current high score on each map.

[J]

@dhc, you still missed something; CW2 actually also has a difficulty rating system. Hard maps tend to get a lot of downvotes because people can't finish it. The only problem is that bad ratings show up for both bad maps and good hard/near impossible maps. Comments will help you out, or download the map. Good ratings tell you that a map is both good and for trivial-easy-medium skill range.

[dhc]

...The only problem is that bad ratings show up for both bad maps and good hard/near impossible maps...

I agree with you - so, do you think that a rating system similar to the examples given earlier in this thread would help to avoid this problem with CW3's custom maps?

[J]

I like the idea discussed here and I think pretty much everyone here does, but I don't know if V will add it or not.

[Ronini]

What would you say if you were only able to rate a map when you have beaten it, thus filtering out all difficulty based down-votes? And the difficulty rating is made up objectively by presenting a player-based attempts/success ratio. Something like 50 players have attempted this map, 30 were able to beat it, which gives a success-rating of 60%. I'm sure there are several flaws in this approach, and it could do with some refining, but what do you think of it in general?

[J]

That would prevent long slogs from getting lots of down votes from people who stopped playing because it isn't fun.

[pawel345]

Well long slogs that make many people bored should be voted down, so therefore one should be able to vote regardless of completing the map. Showing the amount of attempts is rather impossible, as only the amount of downloads and posted scores can be counted. Also while on the details page for each map there should be possibly may statistic, on the map browsing pages, a minimap, and some simple info to decide if that map looks interesting or not. So I would vote for something like that:

MAP NAME

AUTHOR

DIFFICULTY set by author (like in CW1 how hard the author thinks this map is, targeted difficulty)

STARS (how fun/interesting is the map, also a map could start with something like 3-4 votes for 3 stars so a map with 1 5-star vote from the author is not 5 stars :P Or start votes form mapmods like in CW2)

SKULLS ( or emitters :P how hard is it to finish the map decided by people who played it, starts with 1 vote form the author on the difficulty set by author)

NUMBER OF (scores or download or votes whatever gives the most info about popularity i think it should be downloads or votes.


Another great feature would be a voting prompt when submitting a score I think much more votes would be given in such a way.

[MizInIA]

Another great feature would be a voting prompt when submitting a score I think much more votes would be given in such a way.

I couldn't agree more with that statement.

[Kharnellius]

I like these ideas so far.
Another search parameter that I think would be great.

AVERAGE PLAY TIME
Some people like long slogs while others like quick games they can play during a short break.


As for the issue with people downvoting a map because it was "too long"...perhaps add a note that says something to the effect of:
"Please rate this map by how well it was made and how much fun you had, but keep in mind your personal preferences.  For example, If you dislike long maps and felt it was too long, then don't give it one star.  This is a personal preference that does not necessarily mean it is a bad map since there are others who will like long maps"

To make this work, I think it should be made so that one does not have to vote a star rating at all if they only want to rate the difficulty or post a comment.

Or perhaps people could have multiple things to vote for on a scale of (1-5):
Quality
"Fun"ness
Difficulty
Flow (How the map played, did it keep your attention?  Too fast, to slow?)

People should also be able to add tags to maps to help people find "types" of maps they may like.
These could be searchable then by checkmarking tags you are looking for. 
(There should be stock tags with new tags requiring an approval process so we don't have 1 million "thismapsux" or "ilikellamas" tags)
Examples:

Puzzle
Uphill
Turtle
Islands
Large Voids
Flat
Hilly
Campaign
Intense
Cheese
Limited Building
Etc., etc., etc.

[Lord_Farin]

One of the things that has surprised me is that these sorting systems always use average time. But average time is skewed: one player taking 2 hours to complete a map has a lot more influence on the average time than some speedy guy taking 10 minutes off of the average time (say 25 minutes). More so as there will in general be less (at least, not more) of the speedy guys than of the 2-hour sloggers. Therefore, the median (that is, the time faster than precisely half of all times scored) seems to be a more accurate measure of the expected time a player will take to complete the map.