Require the overall score

have that be the only thing that affects overall rating on review showing.

have the rest of them set automatically to N/A so we dont have to fill things in if their not in the movie, or we're too lazy to do it. that way we can still say what needs to be fixed with our scores without typing 'you get 10/10'

At 10/11/06 04:27 PM, Glaiel-Gamer wrote: Tom, if i were you i would just do

Originality
Entertainality
Overall

i like this guy's idea.

only a better word for entertainality lol

i think violence really shouldn't even be reviewable.
i think they scores should stick to the art of the flash itself.

i say replace "violence" with "animation".

I really think there should be one drop-down box for overall score. I just hate seeing zeros or tens across the board. It's happening too often.

At 10/12/06 11:57 PM, Fox wrote: I really think there should be one drop-down box for overall score. I just hate seeing zeros or tens across the board. It's happening too often.

yeah that is true.
because all the good animators will get all 10's no matter if it's their popular series or a new project

I think there should be no interactivty if its a movie and/ or no voilence if its not rated by the author, if the author miss rates it which would happen oh well. wait how do you spell violence.

I like this idea, It saves me the trouble of figuring all that stuff out when I'm wanting to comment on the flash (which is one of the reasons why I havn't done that lately)

Maybe change the catagories to vote on instead of violence and add something else. I like how it is now.

yes i agree, some things are pointless, but others are good.

I disagree with doing away with the whole kit n kabootle. For example:
Graphics: If an artist has awesome graphics, he/she should be commended for it. This way, if their work is blammed because there is no plot, they can focus on better writing instead of better graphics.

Style: A LOT of artists have a good style to their art that is more specific than just "stick figures." Some artists use a style, like anime for instance, and use it in a brillant way. I think this catagory is also useful for letting an artist know whether he/she is on the right track.

Definitely agree with the simplification. While "Graphics", "sound" and "style" are important review criteria, the rest is unnecesary aswell as completely irrelevent by cricumstance.

But, the three important menus all encompass the overall score as is and are the key elements brought up in a decent text review (though, all too often review are nothing more than "w00t this is sweeeeeeeeeeeeeet" or "blam").

I'm all for it.

At 10/12/06 08:38 PM, Teutonic wrote: I would say go with the (SINGLE) pulldown it would be much easier that way and to be honest i dont see that the others matter unless they actually worked towards the review total.

Maybe even giving the review total a % might even work.

NO YOU PEOPLE DONT SEEM TO UNDERSTAND! NG is NOT just about good animation...some animations are suppose to be shitty animated but really funny.

You need to make a whole Genre system here on NG, and put the drop-downs around the genre.

Great thinking Tom. One overall vote would encourage more reviews also, as people would feel they don't have to do so much?

On another matter Thomas, those freakin' mosquito's really spoil the Newgrounds experience daily.

Keep up the excellent work.

Yeah i like the one options, seems like it makes more sense, or atleast cut down the options abit say like 3 options...

Graphics
Sound
Effort

Overall

~X~

At 10/13/06 05:50 AM, XwaynecoltX wrote: Yeah i like the one options, seems like it makes more sense, or atleast cut down the options abit say like 3 options...

Graphics
Sound
Effort

Overall

I kinda like the style option, though. It could sort of replace humour, violence and interactivity - how well you've done what you're trying to do. How about that instead of effort?

Also, I'd like one for optimisation :)

I think that it should stay the same. But only take out stuff that doesn't really matter. Like leave the stuff in that the user can really take thought inot there next flash. Like graphics and sound you know what im talking about.

I would think there almost needs to be different view criteria between movies and games.

Movies are pretty much judged on 4 things...

art: is the art well drawn?
animation: is it animated well?
sound: is the sound any good?
overall: was it entertaining?

Games are judged more on
graphics: is it pretty to look at?
sound: Does it have cool sounds and music?
playability: does the game handle well? are the controls good?
overall: was it fun?

I think it's nice to see an overall score, but also to see grading on soem of the technical elements. I know I have some old stuff that people have said is extremely fun, but the art and sund and such is really lacking. These points help guide people in their written reviews and that results in constructive feedback.

And do a score for optimisation!

There isn't enough of that around >.<

i would say that the individual criteria are quite tedious to fill; however, i think there are important scores that shouldnt be eliminated, like graphics and animation. oh well...

I dunno, I think it's fine as it is to be honest.

I kinda like the individual ranking, as i somewhat do rank on an average of most of the scores...but there should be like a N/A for things like Violence and such.

I like it the way it is actually because it acts as a review for other people so if they didn't like a lot of violence or something then they would know not to watch this movie if someones review said it was very violent but I suppose some of the categories could be changed like having intereactivity on games and movies is a bit strange.

i agree with you tom somtimes i cant be assed to fill in 7 boxes so i just dont give much reviews

Maybe you should trim off the fat.
We don't need violence, so maybe there should just be 4 review criteria.
E.g Overall, graphics, sound and originality.
If there is only one it is too easy just to spam 0 all the time.

finaly u dont have to go through each box

At 10/11/06 04:26 PM, TomFulp wrote: Here's another one of those random questions that is really just meant to prepare you for something we might end up doing whether or not you like it:

We have been considering simplifying the review criteria, namely, the individual scores. Going through the different score dropdowns feels like a hassel and some of the criteria feels really dated. For example, we have a score for VIOLENCE... Why the hell do we have a score for violence?

It doesn't seem like anyone is really looking at the individual scores and they aren't being put to use elsewhere, so we're leaning towards just having the single OVERALL score. Instead of dealing with seven dropdown boxes, you can just write your review and pick a single number between 1 and 10 to represent your final opinion.

Thoughts?

I actually think that's a good idea, you see if people actually used them for what they're supposed to be, well then it'd be helpful, but no one does, so I think removing them would be a good idea.

If old scores are to be kept, please don't rename them. It'd mess up old reviews, obscuring old reviewers' intents.

I believe you should just add a N/A rather than delete scores. That way, they could be kept, as could the top ratings list.

When I started, I rated some things on interactivity proportional to how many buttons they used. So a movie would get '1' for 1 button, '2' for 2, etc. Now, I just use a '5' if it doesn't really apply but is adequately implemented/0 if there is none. I've finally gotten used to doing things out of 10 after all these years, and doing stuff out of 5 would kinda irk me. But I'd go with it, I suppose.

Also, it'd mess up old reviews. Unless you decide to have multiple review styles visible (old/new).

At 10/11/06 04:31 PM, TomFulp wrote: Hmmmm... Entertainality....

Maybe we should have a drag bar where one side is a crying person and the other is a laughing person. This determines whether the submission makes you laugh, or if it makes you sad... Or if it's just somewhere in between. :)

But if it's an emotive movie, we'll generally realise that by the comments and name anyway. Anyway, I don't think most folk read reviews before watching/playing. The only time I'd read reviews for someone else's submission is either if it's controversial and I'm entertained by them, or if I'm looking for enlightenment as to the meaning of a complex movie (happened once) or tips for a game (a few times).

Maybe a move to make reviews more useful would be to take the categories and actually display the averages of them all up at the top. So we'd get an idea of what the thing's like.

While I'm mentioning that, why don't we have a roll-over stats box for movies outside the newest entries? We should be able to roll-over and see average review scores, broken down by category, along with filesize and maybe other stats.

Also, maybe ask authors to write a playtime/length of time needed to play. For movies, authors should know this already. For games, it'd be the min. time needed to sit and get somewhere with it mebbe. So they could maybe write, "5-12 minutes".

The icons you started showing to differentiate between games and animations are great, but just not enough for viewers to know what's a good game to play if they wanna have only a 10-min. break and ensure they don't start up some long-winded game/something that needs more dedication.

I'd totally love to see that, even if the boxes were optional for authors and the ones that didn't fill them in would just see them not appear over their work.

At 10/12/06 02:53 PM, Glaiel-Gamer wrote: Here's another idea.

Back to a 4 general category scheme

Graphics/Animation
Originality and Style
Entertainment Value
Overall

Surely the overall score is the same as the entertainment value? Unless it's designed to teach or enlighten of course...

we should have 4 seperate text boxes, one for each category. That way, you'll get a lot less reviews with just the word "gay" in them and they will (or should) explain the score for each category, then post general comments in the last box.

With this way, you could format the reviews in a neat manner with headings and such too, plus it will give authors more of an idea on how their flashes are doing in each category.

Yes, it will take more time to write a review, but shoulding writing a review take time? What good does "AWESOME" do to the flash maker? It'd be much better this way IMO.

And if you wanted, you could even divide each section into pros and cons to force them to analyze each aspect of a flash. Although this isn't necessarily necessary.

I like the idea of reviews being more in-depth, but realistically, folk would just leave no review rather than an in-depth one. Sometimes, I post a game and I just want folk to let me know what score they got so I can change the difficulty or whatever. If folk tell me more, that's great, but if they let me know their score and nothing else, that's good too.

Furthermore, some folk (like myself) have their own system of giving reviews. I write down pros and cons as they come to my mind. If I had to force myself to either think of each category in order or keep changing text boxes, I'd probably despise reviewing.

At 10/13/06 10:24 AM, PsychoGoldfish wrote: I would think there almost needs to be different view criteria between movies and games.

Movies are pretty much judged on 4 things...

art: is the art well drawn?
animation: is it animated well?
sound: is the sound any good?
overall: was it entertaining?

plot/script? Was it funny/were the characters engaging/were there sections that should have been cut.

Games are judged more on
graphics: is it pretty to look at?
sound: Does it have cool sounds and music?
playability: does the game handle well? are the controls good?

I hate that word, but would rather see it used than 'interactivity'. Maybe "game mechanics" could work well?

overall: was it fun?

I think it's nice to see an overall score, but also to see grading on soem of the technical elements. I know I have some old stuff that people have said is extremely fun, but the art and sund and such is really lacking. These points help guide people in their written reviews and that results in constructive feedback.

Maybe in the review section, there could be a bit of text below
"You are currently reviewing:
xxxxxx"
where it says something akin to, "you may wish to discuss the art, animation, quality and use of sounds, voices and music. Other factors to perhaps mention in a review are plot and humour. "
for a movie.

For a game it may be: "Try to make your review constructive. You may wish to mention how far you got in the game and how you felt about the controls, level design, originality, game mechanics... art,animation, sounds, voices and music are also factors often worth mentioning. "

Just an idea to give folk more encouragement in writing their early reviews.

I think that you should keep the humor and style rating boxes.

I actually think it could work better than the system at the moment. 2 reasons. one, nobody really uses it propally they just put 10 on them all if they like it, or 1 if they dont. And two, if the author is reading comments i thinks its easier for him/her to see how good score they get...

how about if theres a little text box where you can type in the number instead of using the drop down thingies.