What's "Username HERO 2nd level"?

[Fifth Element]

We're 99.9999% likely to remove negative awards if we can figure out how to.

I think that's a really good idea. Things can get snippy and personal around here sometimes, and I can see certain posters giving negative XP to certain others simply for disagreeing with them.

 

[Brown Jenkin]

I'm not particularly happy with this. It comes down to this for me. ENWorld already gives me the feeling sometimes that it can get cliquey. Having xp based off of a reputation system only feels like that it could reinforce that. It gives me the feeling of High School where my particular popularity was low, as was probably many posters here. Having that feature turned on doesn't help. I already figure that I am not as popular here as others I really don't need that shoved in my face. I can already guess who will get high xp and the test so far has reinforced that. Yes some people here, like anywhere, are going to be more popular than others. The question to me is whether these boards want to reinforce that publicly or to try and reduce it to something that we just guess at in the backs of our minds. I personally would prefer the later.

If you want some manner to show contributions to the boards overall I am ok with that, such as xp for nominating threads or posting reviews or other non-popularity based actions.

The way it is set up though comes off to me is a way for the "cool" people to have some way to prove they are cool and important and a way to more easily marginalize the opinions of others who are not "cool." As it stands now this already happens to some extent with postcount. I have more than once seen posters dissmissed because they have a low postcount. I can see it being worse once we have xp based on a popularity system.

 

[Morrus]

My thought was that if you were earnest, you'd read my post in the same tone as your own; but if you were just being an ass, you'd also read my post in the same tone as your own. In this way, I could figure out which tone you had intended: and it worked.

I'm confused; so your reply was neither an earnest statement nor a sarcastic remark, but a magical tonally conditional statement? I'm very sorry, but I'm not getting into that game. Only you know how you meant it.

how about you just tell me how to disable this new waste of screen real estate?

I'm fairly sure you already know the answer to that. But if you're going to force me to say it yet again - you can't, we're tweaking things for a month, and we'll see what happens. I hope that is now clear.

 

[Umbran]

I'm not particularly happy with this. It comes down to this for me. ENWorld already gives me the feeling sometimes that it can get cliquey.

Yes, and this had been discussed before Morrus turned the feature on.

There are parameters for how many reputation points you can give to who. For example, we can set how many other people you have to give reputation points to before you can come back and give a second point to one of them. If this is set high, then self-repping cliques are discouraged.

This is why there's a trial period. We would like to see it in action, and see how it can be tweaked to fit our particular needs. If it looks to be a failure, then we turn it off after playing with it for a while.

 

[Arnwyn]

Why do the titles suck? (And make no sense.)

But yeah, Nifft is right, in any case.

 

[Brown Jenkin]

Yes, and this had been discussed before Morrus turned the feature on.

There are parameters for how many reputation points you can give to who. For example, we can set how many other people you have to give reputation points to before you can come back and give a second point to one of them. If this is set high, then self-repping cliques are discouraged.

Discouraged but not stopped. Even 50 isn't that hard to get around if your goal is to pump each other up. But my main objections came later in my post about how this feeds the who popularity culture I don't like. Its not just abuse by self-repping cliques.

This is why there's a trial period. We would like to see it in action, and see how it can be tweaked to fit our particular needs. If it looks to be a failure, then we turn it off after playing with it for a while.

I'm glad you guys thought about it some before the test. I realize that it is a test period. I am just posting my comments about how I feel about it so that my opinion can be taken for whatever it is worth when you guys end the trial period and make a decision.

Thanks for responding.

 

[Morrus]

I'm not particularly happy with this. It comes down to this for me. ENWorld already gives me the feeling sometimes that it can get cliquey. Having xp based off of a reputation system only feels like that it could reinforce that. It gives me the feeling of High School where my particular popularity was low, as was probably many posters here. Having that feature turned on doesn't help. I already figure that I am not as popular here as others I really don't need that shoved in my face. I can already guess who will get high xp and the test so far has reinforced that. Yes some people here, like anywhere, are going to be more popular than others. The question to me is whether these boards want to reinforce that publicly or to try and reduce it to something that we just guess at in the backs of our minds. I personally would prefer the later.

If you want some manner to show contributions to the boards overall I am ok with that, such as xp for nominating threads or posting reviews or other non-popularity based actions.

The way it is set up though comes off to me is a way for the "cool" people to have some way to prove they are cool and important and a way to more easily marginalize the opinions of others who are not "cool." As it stands now this already happens to some extent with postcount. I have more than once seen posters dissmissed because they have a low postcount. I can see it being worse once we have xp based on a popularity system.

That's exactly what we don't want it to be, and the largest reason for the one-month trial. If it turns into a positive enocuragement tool for quality posts and contributions, that's great; if it turns into a cliqueish popularity contesnt, not so great.

We've tried to mitigate it by setting a spread of 50 points, so you have to give XP to 50 other people before you can give XP to that same person again (and you cna only give 3 per day). We hope that will prevent cliques awarduing each other XP continually. And as the month goes, we can adjust those settings - if the 50 needs to be increased, it can.

It is an experiment, and one-month one only at that; we're under no illusions that the experiment will necessarily work; we just have some hopes. We cna spend the month making changes, and at the end of the month, if it hasn't worked out well, then it only takes one mouse-click to turn it off.

[Ah, just seen Umbran already said all that! That'll teach me to press "reply" and then go play with the dog before hitting "submit"! ]

So, in short - we're acutely aware of that possibility, and that's the reason we've never used rep before. And it may end up being the reason we don't end up using it this time, too! But we'll see; hopefully, your fears won't come to pass, or we can tweak things to prevent it.

 

[Morrus]

(And make no sense.)

What doesn't make sense about them? We're just playing with them at present, and they'll probably change a few times. Right now, there are three elements, coded to XP levels:

HERO/PARAGON/EPIC
LEVEL
A monster type of that level

I'm not sure which of the three I like best at present, but monster type seems more colourful and fun.

 

[Morrus]

OK, it is now possible to hide your XP stuff from others if you don't want to participate. There's currently no way to hide other peoples' XP from you, though.

You also can't leave negative XP (a setting I thought I'd turned off, but hadn't).

 

[Blackrat]

I'm not sure which of the three I like best at present, but monster type seems more colourful and fun.

Just in case you'd like opinions, IMO the monster names are coolest.