Discussion Forum by Lizard Boy
August 16th, 2007 7:03 PMWhen a player completes a task, they would submit proof, as usual. However, they would not immediately gain any points. In order for them to gain the baseline points awarded for the task, some number of other players (probably 1-3) would have to "approve" the completion (like flagging, but in reverse). Any points gained from votes would be immediate, even if the requisite number of approvals have not yet been accumulated. While in the unapproved state, the votebar would look like this:
Once a task has been approved, it would look like it does now.
This has a number of benefits in my mind, mostly having to do with new players.
First, on the negative side. It's happened several times. Someone joins, gets really enthusiastic, and says "Hey, this is great! I can make almost all of these tasks relatively easy to do if I think about them right. I can rack up tons of points really quickly this way!"
Scenario 1, as it currently stands, they get to level 3,4,5 or whatever, and then all of a sudden their completions start getting big red Xs through them. Slowly their points dwindle away and they're back down to level 2. Meanwhile people have been posting comments like "That's alright for a 10-point task, but you need to try harder on a 75-point task." and "Sorry, we need something more than a comment about what you plan to do." Is it any wonder people start to get defensive
Scenario 2, as it would be if this were implemented, they submit tasks and a couple low-level ones get approved, then as they start to complete more and more and higher level tasks in the same manner, fewer and fewer are approved.
It's a lot less antagonistic, I think people will be a lot less likely to respond as if attacked, and maybe even more likely to *request* information from other players as to how they could do better.
Secondly, on the positive side. When a new player submits a task, they don't have much experience with the writing of proofs and completing of tasks. I know when I first joined I was shocked to see that I could basically award myself points, and was afraid I had done so unjustly. It wasn't until my first affirming comment or vote (I forget which) that I gained a little confidence. This would give an easy early affirmation that the player was doing things "right".
A couple comments on implementation. I think there should be one caveat to this, the player photograph task. I think those points should be automatic, and that the player photograph should stay off the new tasks ticker. I also think a new message should be added to the submitted task dialog that says something like "Before you receive points for this task, (1-3) players need to confirm it as a valid completion. If, after a couple days, your task remains unapproved, feel free to contact any veteran player and ask them if it has slipped past peoples' notice." I'm pretty sure that enough players read every new task that comes through on any given day that it shouldn't be an issue, but I don't want to leave it unsafeguarded.
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This is a very neat way to stem the tide of lame completions that sometimes clog up the praxis. It would be good to be able to reward someone who re-works a half arsed completion without having to actually vote to show your favour.
So a system along these lines used to exist. And while it was fun for the light to turn on whenever someone posted a task, it started (pleasantly) happening too often. So we scrapped that, decided that everything was "approved" until "denied", and set up flagging.
Part of this was that it was just three people with "approve" powers, which meant that it could take a while. It also meant we had to deal with making Final Decisions in some difficult cases. Like with fake watermelon players.
So at first flagging was just flagging. And we'd peek at things with a few flags - if we didn't see them anyway - and deny the dregs. That came up enough that we got around to the Auto-X thing (currently after 5 flags). Flags were anonymous so people would feel free to flag "borderline" things if they wanted to.
And as for Over-Enthusiastic New Player Syndrome, we set it so that people can only submit five tasks within 18hrs - and I've still gotten a few complaints about it!
Those carazy SFØers wanting to submit a task every hour for a whole day!
The more I think about this, the better an idea I think it is. I think it'd be one step better if you could also 'flag' the completion in the approval stage- keep the number of flags needed the same. Then people won't have tasks languishing in limbo forever; when they submit a task that would probably be flagged anyways, it'll be a more gentle rejection and hopefully give them a message along the lines of "The sf0 community has voted not to approve your task at the moment. Please feel free to add some more to your completion or try a new approach and then submit it again." Or something like that.
I think that this idea would benefit from a feature which allows players to resubmit a proof after it has gone through some changes if it failed/wasn't approved the first time so that the task could get back onto the Praxis.
Also, you could make it so that once someone submits a task it remains on their list of uncompleted tasks until it is approved, so that you can prevent people from submitting long strings of crappy tasks if none of them ever get approved.
Sean's intimation about the old days of the blinking light are a great story and a hint of potential issues. With great power comes great responsibility: if people insist on this, and insist that it would solve some problems, they must also be willing to take on the enormous responsibility of reading through a bunch of unapproved tasks, including slogging through some really bad stuff hitting "disapprove" or flag or whatever. The time might come when this well meaning theoretical player just snaps and instead of giving time and attention to these n00b tasks, just starts deciding "poorly completed" or "veteran player hates it" and those n00bs never improve.
Perhaps an automated solution as a kind of governor for the weakness-of-flesh these theoretical "veteran players" will eventually experience could be to stack up a randomly assigned group of unapproved proofs and prohibiting a veteran from posting his/her task until doing some of this "homework."
check.
balance.
drive.
Well, I know that I already read every new task completion, at least enough to get the general impression. My suspicion based on the fact that I do this, is that enough people do so to make this not a burden...unless you consider 4-5 extra mouse-clicks a day a burden.
I think we will, in time, be surprised by the volume. But sure, i'm an optimist. I'm up for it.
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