Mod ratings

[MadGear]

I was just browsing through the modules pages and I've noticed that quite a few mods get low scores. I might just be a softie on that regard, but I find it a bit disheartening to see mods get a low score.

For example, the 'Shiva & Lisa Trilogy' only getting 1 star... really? I might remember it wrong, but I thought those mods were received quite well back in the day.

It's all opinions at the end of the day, of course. It's just that I think no mod should receive only 1 star. The authors probably put their hearts and souls into those mods and may be discouraged seeing the mods getting such low ratings.

But, like I said earlier, I might just be a big softie about this and maybe I'm overthinking it a bit too much.

 

[DCurrent]

...

You're free to disagree with others' opinions, but not to tell them their opinions are wrong or that they shouldn't express them.

Frankly, I think it's unfair and insulting to give praise to something just for existing. I happen to agree with the rating of S&L. There's simply no way you will ever convince me it belongs in the same conversation with World Heroes, Balacera Brothers, or pretty much anything @Mr.Q! made through the years. Those guys put just as much heart and soul into their work... except more, because they bothered to get the fundamentals right first. That of course is my opinion, and I don't expect everyone to agree.

That all said, why not just give your own ratings and feedback? That's what the system is there for.

DC

 

[MadGear]

You're right. And perhaps it was a bit childish of me to post something like this. I mean, people have the right to rate something. Just like with movies. You either like a movie, or you don't. The same applies to the mods here. At the end of the day, no actual harm is being done. I guess I just felt kinda sad to see the low ratings.

 

[machok]

We should be required to write a reasons if we want to give a very bad rating so at least the authors know what causes it and can provide solutions such as updates etc.

 

[O Ilusionista]

We should be required to write a reasons if we want to give a very bad rating so at least the authors know what causes it and can provide solutions such as updates etc.

I strongly disagree with you. For sure, the forum should not let someone just writing "this game sucks" as a reason.
But who gives his rating doesn't neeed to provide solutions or even updates. You don't need to know how to cook to say that a dish is bad. Nor do you pass a recipe on to whoever cooked the dish.

I agree that when someone dislikes something, it could be helpful to give feedback and explain why, because this helps the coders (at least, the serious ones). We know that some people doesn't listen to feedback, but that is another story - but, to be honest, those people can't complain if someone gives his work a low rating).

I might just be a softie on that regard, but I find it a bit disheartening to see mods get a low score.

With all the proper respect, I think you are being too softie here.

Maybe this will sound a bit harsh, but is exactly how I think about it.

I'm not referring to this game specifically, but many old games (and unfortunately some current ones) were just a clone of BOR and in the end, instead of promoting the engine, they ended up damaging the engine's reputation - I had it myself a bad impression of the engine, before learning to work on it.

I don't want this to sound like self-centeredness, but recently I saw a user on a live saying that he didn't like OpenBOR games because they all had a problem or were broken (and seeing what games he was testing, I agree with him). I indicated to him my Avengers game and he changed his opinion about the engine, and I was recommending good games for him, who started to like the engine after that.

If I were to be honest, extremely sincere, some games didn't even deserve a 1, because they were (or are) very bad.

When I saw this grading system, I was afraid that someone would complain about it because of the grades. Unfortunately, that's what happened. Personally, I think it's a very interesting idea and I hope the community doesn't end up screwing it up because some people can't handle bad grades.

 

[MadGear]

@O Ilusionista It wasn't meant to be a complaint of mine. I can handle seeing bad grades (Me and my classmates had plenty of those during my school days when I was younger ). I certainly didn't mean to provoke a reaction with this topic if anyone would think that. Oh, and I'm not talking about my own mod having a lower score than usual, if anyone was curious. I can accept that. The mod had its run and was, judging by the comments I saw on YouTube, well-received. I just felt a little bad for the other authors.

 

[danno]

I'm not referring to this game specifically, but many old games (and unfortunately some current ones) were just a clone of BOR and in the end, instead of promoting the engine, they ended up damaging the engine's reputation - I had it myself a bad impression of the engine, before learning to work on it.

This is great, I've been around since before OpenBor was a thing (almost 20 years) so I do feel a little hindsight is needed in regards to the current play of things and going forward. In the beginning it was fascinating to be able to create your own beat em ups but I use the term create loosely because at the start all you could really do is swap out what was already available inside of Bor hence Bor clones and everybody and their aunty was doing it because they could.

There were maybe 2 or 3 people at the time of Bor that could really push it to its limits and see it's potential and thus after a little in house tussling OpenBor was born but bor clones remained and as time passed the engine grew and grew but Bor clones still remained and remain to this day. there's been 2 major shifts in the scene LavaLit and now this current version of Chrono Crash which brings me to going forward.

I've been playing a whole ton of OpenBor games recently since the old download section is kaput, all sorts from all over the internet, there's some fantastic gems out there that need to be reuploaded and preserved but I have to say 95% of what I've played is utter trash and I feel going forward we should keep the trash to a minimum and although I can't stop trash from being uploaded I'm really happy for a rating system, don't get me wrong I like a bit of trash for the sake of documented history but I don't think someone going through the download section with pages and pages of trash is a good idea, a feature of the rating system gets rid of this and being able to sort by highest rating is perfect.

All that being said, one man's trash is another man's treasure but I'm thankful for a rating system so new comers can see what kind of creativity and level of skill is being produced using the engine, what's actually possible with the engine and the overall impression of using the engine for their own projects. the rating system is a good step going forward for the engine and it's future developments to be taken seriously.

 

[machok]

I strongly disagree with you. For sure, the forum should not let someone just writing "this game sucks" as a reason.
But who gives his rating doesn't neeed to provide solutions or even updates. You don't need to know how to cook to say that a dish is bad. Nor do you pass a recipe on to whoever cooked the dish.

What I mean are people who care about openbor games, with the forum.
People who wrote reason this game suck not part of them and people like this will always be everywhere and whenever. The author doesn't have to respond to something like this.

I agree that when someone dislikes something, it could be helpful to give feedback and explain why, because this helps the coders (at least, the serious ones). We know that some people doesn't listen to feedback, but that is another story - but, to be honest, those people can't complain if someone gives his work a low rating).

agree this is what I mean

 

[MadGear]

I agree that when someone dislikes something, it could be helpful to give feedback and explain why, because this helps the coders (at least, the serious ones).

I know this from experience. I remember when you, @nsw25 and other members provided me with some feedback for my mod. Admittedly, I got a little tired of updating the mod after a while because I wanted to finish it. But your feedback was actually very helpful to me and fixed a couple of things when I uploaded the most recent version back in 2019. Despite all the feedback and me listening to them, the mod still has a lower rating now than I would've liked to see to be honest, but it is what it is.

 

[DCurrent]

I've been playing a whole ton of OpenBor games recently since the old download section is kaput, all sorts from all over the internet, there's some fantastic gems out there that need to be reuploaded and preserved but I have to say 95% of what I've played is utter trash and I feel going forward we should keep the trash to a minimum and although I can't stop trash from being uploaded I'm really happy for a rating system, don't get me wrong I like a bit of trash for the sake of documented history but I don't think someone going through the download section with pages and pages of trash is a good idea, a feature of the rating system gets rid of this and being able to sort by highest rating is perfect.

All that being said, one man's trash is another man's treasure but I'm thankful for a rating system so new comers can see what kind of creativity and level of skill is being produced using the engine, what's actually possible with the engine and the overall impression of using the engine for their own projects. the rating system is a good step going forward for the engine and it's future developments to be taken seriously.

Ding, ding, ding. We have a winner. This is precisely why the rating system is in place, and I'm not likely to change it. Of course we prefer feedback, and originally I had the rating system set to require it. Unfortunatly human nature always wins, and nobody bothered doing anything at all until I opened it up.

I want to be fair to all creators, ones long gone and yet to come. That means keeping a repository of every OpenBOR game out there, and welcoming new ones regardless of my personal feelings about their quality. Who do you think wrote all those download descriptions in the resource manager? Try coming up with 80+ ways to describe something in a nice way when the majority of it is... (IMO) not so great.

On the opposite side of that, the engine and our community most certainly do suffer from the proliferation of shovel-ware. I've seen the conversations out there, and it's disheartening. Lots of potential lost because the clones and throwaway stuff give us a bad rep. It's so ingrained that high quality games are often described elsewhere as "using a modified OpenBOR", or "pushing OpenBOR to the limits" when they do nothing of the sort.

The rating system is the best middle ground I can see, because it promotes higher quality while taking me out of the equation. Anything else (like a historical archive section, editor's choice, whatever), requires that I pass judgement on creator works as an admin. That's not the kind of community I'm running.

DC

 

[MadGear]

Aww... Now I actually feel bad for maybe giving the engine a bad rep. I never realised that the mods could give the OpenBOR engine a bad rep and it certainly wasn't my intention to do so if I have done that. You know, I may be shooting myself here, and this may be an awkward question, but I need to know: Am I partially responsible for giving the engine a bad rep? If so, I never intended to do that!

 

[O Ilusionista]

But your feedback was actually very helpful to me and fixed a couple of things when I uploaded the most recent version back in 2019.

This is what feedback is for: to improve things. And we are here to help.
It's normal that when you develop something, some things may go unnoticed by you and someone will notice and help you with it.

I've always believed that if someone took their time giving you feedback on their work, it's because they thought their work was worthy of recognition and worth it - because what's bad, you don't even spend time on it (I do that , for example), so the least a person can do is listen. Whether the feedback makes sense and what you are going to do with it (and if it will) is another matter.

Aww... Now I actually feel bad for maybe giving the engine a bad rep. I never realised that the mods could give the OpenBOR engine a bad rep and it certainly wasn't my intention to do so if I have done that. You know, I may be shooting myself here, and this may be an awkward question, but I need to know: Am I partially responsible for giving the engine a bad rep? If so, I never intended to do that!

Dude, you are overreacting a bit I was afraid someone could do this, but it wasn't my intention.

 

[Miru]

Ding, ding, ding. We have a winner. This is precisely why the rating system is in place, and I'm not likely to change it. Of course we prefer feedback, and originally I had the rating system set to require it. Unfortunatly human nature always wins, and nobody bothered doing anything at all until I opened it up.

I want to be fair to all creators, ones long gone and yet to come. That means keeping a repository of every OpenBOR game out there, and welcoming new ones regardless of my personal feelings about their quality. Who do you think wrote all those download descriptions in the resource manager? Try coming up with 80+ ways to describe something in a nice way when the majority of it is... (IMO) not so great.

On the opposite side of that, the engine and our community most certainly do suffer from the proliferation of shovel-ware. I've seen the conversations out there, and it's disheartening. Lots of potential lost because the clones and throwaway stuff give us a bad rep. It's so ingrained that high quality games are often described elsewhere as "using a modified OpenBOR", or "pushing OpenBOR to the limits" when they do nothing of the sort.

The rating system is the best middle ground I can see, because it promotes higher quality while taking me out of the equation. Anything else (like a historical archive section, editor's choice, whatever), requires that I pass judgement on creator works as an admin. That's not the kind of community I'm running.

DC

ALL games? So does this include the stuff using unauthorized forks, too? Or are they an exception?

 

[DCurrent]

Aww... Now I actually feel bad for maybe giving the engine a bad rep. I never realised that the mods could give the OpenBOR engine a bad rep and it certainly wasn't my intention to do so if I have done that. You know, I may be shooting myself here, and this may be an awkward question, but I need to know: Am I partially responsible for giving the engine a bad rep? If so, I never intended to do that!

Dude, no. No one person did anything. We're talking about a collective result over years. There's also nothing wrong with lacking the talent or resources to make a good game (I'm not talking about anyone specific). Ratings are not some kind of punishment, hierarchy, or reflection on a person. They're a consumer driven organizational tool so people outside the community downloading games can easily see high quality productions and get a good impression.

It's important because that is by far the largest source of traffic on our site and where we attract new members from.

At this point, I'm feeling like the discussion is devolving into a round robin and I've said my piece, so I'm out. Feel free to continue, just keep it respectful.

DC

 

[MadGear]

@DCurrent Oh, alright. My bad I guess I understood it wrong. I got it now Having autism can sure be a pain sometimes during conversations. It causes me to not always be the sharpest knife in the toolbox.

 

[masterderico]

Well, i remember in the past, Shiva & Lisa 3 was the very first mod to have cancels into super, propper juggle, movelist in real time and practice mode.

S&L3 game was indeed praised in the past, people liked!

Jennifer become #1 most downloaded file per years on the previous forum, and lots of google and youtube reviews praise the game as the best use of the engine (artistically), most innovative and different. Jennifer was the first mod to have fatalities too.
Of course i want my babies to be loved, but i really don't care about the stars...Like DC said, tastes and opinions. Another fact that can make a mod receive low stars its because their age, and today OB is another beast.

Im secure to say i created some tendencies. But i never see this mentioned ever, and im fine with it, because other creators also did the same, they created tendencies. So it's a win-win.

The only issues i think its possible: Personal vendetta, vengeance, envy, and things like that, also the guy give you low stars for competitive reasons, etc...

But in the end, if u see people playing and happy with your mod, that's what matters! And i saw that a lot with my mods, so stars is pointless for me.

(I just did this post because my mod was mentioned, but im really fine with the new forum features)