Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Cory S <fubeca AT gmail.com>]

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 15:26:15 +0100, Ladislav Hagara
<ladislav.hagara AT unob.cz> wrote:
> > As I've looked for games to install on my machine for my son to play,
> > it's been a little difficult to determine what the best games are.
> 
> With my two students I am working on a small project named Source Mage
> Stats server.
> Try http://83.240.17.229/~babca/
> Read about.
> It is a beta version and we plan to rebuild it from the scratch.
> Now students are quite busy but after they pass exams (if they pass
> exams :-)) they will continue.
> 
>  From statistics it will be easy to find out how many times spells are
> installed.
> Probably: more times installed = better game.
> 
> - lace -
> 
> 
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> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/sm-discuss
> 

That's a great idea.

A ratings system just wouldn't be effective unless there were a rating
for every spell in the grimoire. For instance, if someone were looking
for an MTA, and 2 out of the 5 had ratings, would that really help?
That's the main problem with user-submitted ratings -- actually
getting people to submit them.

The reason I proposed to put them in the grimoire was so the submitter
could put in an initial rating when the spell was created (solving the
problem of every spell having a rating) and then an aggregate rating
could be determined as people submitted them. (And yes, I realize we
would have to go back and retrofit every spell.) Having the ratings in
the grimoires themselves provides a little more immediacy, and (I
think) makes it easier for people to want to submit ratings. I also
think it's a logical extension of the spell's description, which does
go in the grimoire.

lace's idea wouldn't be quite as accurate as someone submitting their
opinion, since users may be casting just to try things out, but there
may be some tweaks that could be done to mitigate that. And it solves
the problem of not having a rating for every spell. But for it to be
the most effective it would have to monitor all installs of SMGL,
which could cause privacy issues.

Bleh, I'm starting to wonder if this is more trouble than it's worth :).