Should the episode forum be like the levels forum?

Ness-Wednesday · Postby **Ness-Wednesday** » Fri Jan 01, 2016 12:57 pm

So I was thinking about how much it looks like a mess that both good and bad episdoes are unorgainzed.

Of course since I was thinking "Hey, since the level judges run the episodes forums, they should probably do something that will be more organized like the levels forum.", and so I came up with this idea.

They should be orgainzed by rating, but there would be two exceptions.

Rating idea:

Fantastic work - Episodes that have a rating of 9 to 10 will go here
Interesting stuff - Episodes that have a rating of 6 to 8 will go here
Neutral about it - Episodes that have a rating of 3.6 to 5.9 will go here
Bad as it sounds - Episodes that have a rating of 3.5 or lower will go here

There would be two different forums:

1. Contest episodes - Episodes that are part of a contest (Tower of Biased for example) will go here

2. Lunalua hey - Episodes that aquire Lunalua will go here to prevent the confusion with the other episodes

This sounds pretty pointless, but I was thinking about this since Thanksgiving.

Marina · Postby **Marina** » Fri Jan 01, 2016 1:03 pm

But that would require level judges to actually play through all episodes and I'm pretty sure they don't have time for that.

Ness-Wednesday · Postby **Ness-Wednesday** » Fri Jan 01, 2016 1:20 pm

Marina wrote:But that would require level judges to actually play through all episodes and I'm pretty sure they don't have time for that.

I realized that they're only seven (including the group leader, Valtteri) judges but would they have go through everything?
So if there was to be something like this, there would have be like 12 to 20 judges to do something like this?
Point taken....

Though, I do think that if a contest episode does use Lunalua, it dosen't matter if it goes in one of the two categories.

Zeldamaster12 · Postby **Zeldamaster12** » Fri Jan 01, 2016 1:20 pm

This wouldn't be a bad idea if it weren't for what Marina said.

PixelPest · Postby **PixelPest** » Fri Jan 01, 2016 1:27 pm

No way! It's timely enough as it is judging a handful of levels a week, but judging episodes of 10, 20, 50+ levels? Not a good idea. There's really no problem with the episode forum the way it is now. Categorizing episodes wouldn't do much good, as you can get a good sense of an episode's quality by the screenshots and the way the main post is layed out. With the release of 2.0 Lua will be built in so there's really no point for a Lua forum and you can just search Tower of Biased in the episodes forum and find all of the past contest episodes.

Ness-Wednesday · Postby **Ness-Wednesday** » Fri Jan 01, 2016 1:31 pm

PixelPest wrote:No way! It's timely enough as it is judging a handful of levels a week, but judging episodes of 10, 20, 50+ levels? Not a good idea. There's really no problem with the episode forum the way it is now. Categorizing episodes wouldn't do much good, as you can get a good sense of an episode's quality by the screenshots and the way the main post is layed out. With the release of 2.0 Lua will be built in so there's really no point for a Lua forum and you can just search Tower of Biased in the episodes forum and find all of the past contest episodes.

Yeah... to kind of think of it, it does seem like a little too much for level judges especially if the episode has 50 levels in them.
But the search engine we have sucks and going back just to find a past episode feels very weird...

Tango · Postby **Tango** » Fri Jan 01, 2016 1:42 pm

About the Level Judges judging all the levels from the episode, what about the rating be by the a normal user experience with a poll?

PixelPest · Postby **PixelPest** » Fri Jan 01, 2016 1:42 pm

There's not much of an issue with the search engine, because if your query is too common, just go into your browser and type "http://supermariobrosx.org/forums: <query>".

Ness-Wednesday · Postby **Ness-Wednesday** » Fri Jan 01, 2016 1:45 pm

Miles Troopa wrote:About the Level Judges judging all the levels from the episode, what about the rating be by the a normal user experience with a poll?

That sounds like a good idea, alot of other people do rate levels, but of course its just way too much on how yet the only ones that are being counted are the ones that are done by level judges.
Polls also sound like a good idea too.

PixelPest · Postby **PixelPest** » Fri Jan 01, 2016 1:47 pm

I don't think that's a good idea. That would give people the chance to base their vote off of screenshots without playing an episode, so a terrible episode with maybe one substantial level could do really well. Another issue is that so many people base everything off of graphics, so really bad level design but good graphics could do really well. It just wouldn't work imo. People could also just say, omg that person has a green name so their episode must be good, I'm going to rate it 10/10. There's just too many things that could go wrong from people who don't really know what they're doing and won't play through the full episode, which may be at least 50% of the people here, so the vote would be corrupt.

Enjl · Postby **Enjl** » Sat Jan 02, 2016 4:13 am

I think it's redundant. We get no more than 9 episodes per month (200 over 2 years), a majority of which would end up in the trash tier. Featuring good episodes on the Episodes page is good enough imo (the page lacks 2k1x tho :3)

Also it's "require lunalua", not "acquire lunalua". Speaking of which, this is gonna be the norm in close future, so an extra cathegory is pointless and goes against your proposed system. Right now these episodes openly warn the player that they'll need the extension, anyways.

Postby **MarioHacker** » Sun Jan 03, 2016 2:45 pm

I'd rather not.

Imaynotbehere4long · Postby **Imaynotbehere4long** » Sun Jan 03, 2016 3:07 pm

I'm all for this, but the unfortunate truth is, like others have stated already, few people, much less qualified people, have the patience to go through with it. Not only was there this thread which suggested the same idea and was shot down just as quickly, but I also made a thread for this in the Judge Discussion Board (back when I was a level judge) which got a grand total of 0 replies.

Postby **HenryRichard** » Sun Jan 03, 2016 3:23 pm

I just think we should bring the featured episodes back, except have someone other then Joey who actually has time to play the episodes through (no offense intended) choose them. Maybe we could have the community nominate three or four to play through.

Enjl · Postby **Enjl** » Sun Jan 03, 2016 3:40 pm

HenryRichard wrote:Maybe we could have the community nominate three or four to play through.

I think a monthly or seasonal topic with a poll for best episode of the month/season is a good idea.

PixelPest · Postby **PixelPest** » Sun Jan 03, 2016 4:15 pm

Enjl wrote:
HenryRichard wrote:Maybe we could have the community nominate three or four to play through.
I think a monthly or seasonal topic with a poll for best episode of the month/season is a good idea.

I think that when the wiki is back up we should have a page containing a monthly featured episode, project, and maybe even the LJs could discuss a few deserving levels that could be put up there. (Not necessarily the highest scores.)

CynicHost · Postby **CynicHost** » Sun Jan 03, 2016 4:51 pm

HenryRichard wrote:I just think we should bring the featured episodes back, except have someone other then Joey who actually has time to play the episodes through (no offense intended) choose them. Maybe we could have the community nominate three or four to play through.

Why did we even stop doing them in the first place? Is it also because of... laziness?

Imaynotbehere4long · Postby **Imaynotbehere4long** » Sun Jan 03, 2016 4:56 pm

MightyMerlinStyle wrote:
HenryRichard wrote:I just think we should bring the featured episodes back, except have someone other then Joey who actually has time to play the episodes through (no offense intended) choose them. Maybe we could have the community nominate three or four to play through.
Why did we even stop doing them in the first place? Is it also because of... laziness?

Well, there were plans to make a forum newsletter and integrate featured episodes into that, but the newsletter never came to be, and the tradition of featuring episodes was slowly forgotten.

Cedrik · Postby **Cedrik** » Thu Jan 21, 2016 1:35 pm

I think this idea is good, but there must are more persons in the level judge, a lot more!!!!
Or a second judge team for episodes.

Saltlord · Postby **Saltlord** » Thu Jan 21, 2016 2:05 pm

I think I don't really add anything new to this discussion, but I don't think that would be a good idea. There are thousands of episodes which would get into the thrash can, and less than 10 which will get into the best. Furthermore, writing a review about an episode is nearly impossible. The standard classic designer gets better after some levels, maybe even so good that the flaws of his/her older levels fully disappeared.