Hello everybody! We have some Vault projects now that have built up a respectable number of votes. What do you think should be the criteria for a project to achieve “Hall of Fame” status? (The vote deadline is April 30, 2018.)
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I’d rather not try to resurrect the Hall of Fame. It served a purpose back in the day, but things have moved on. For NWN1 we have a number of ways of looking at modules, which hopefully tell players all they need to know.
In any case, unless Vault admin has committed to providing resources or automation to implement this, it won’t happen.
I voted for 10 as the minimum number of downloads because the number of downloads is reset to 0 if you upload a new version of the hak/module. If a project is updated on a regular basis it needs to get 100 downloads or more per week to even reach 200.
The Hall of Fame lists already exist and are accessible from the front page, so it’s not a matter of resurrecting them. What we lack is a criteria for the new Vault, so the lists consist solely of NWVault games. I.e. new, well-designed modules don’t get the same level of recognition.
Maybe we don’t bother with a download count then, since it’s hard enough just to get the necessary votes?
@rjshae do you have the resources to implement a new HoF?
Otherwise, this is a pointless discussion.
The old HoF is frozen in time, dead to new entries, so you really are talking about resurrection.
Did you look at the ranking links in my last post?
They illustrate what we can already generate automatically here.
I’m not sure what you mean by “resources”. Donuts perhaps?
Yes I did. They don’t list scores, so they’re a bit limited. Do you have equivalent lists for NWN2?
The resources you’d need would be a commitment from Vault admin to develop something new, and confirmation of its feasibility in Drupal. That’s two sets of hen’s teeth, I imagine.
You can create an NWN2 version of the rankings I did for NWN1 by going to the modules listing, setting the equivalent filters, sorting on the appropriate heading, and saving the url.
It’d be easy enough to just set up a page on the wiki and hold nominations and votes in the forum in regular intervals, if anybody wants to put in the time to organize and curate a new Hall of Fame page. It’s not really something that needs attention from Niv - we’ve got access to the wiki pages, and we’ve got the ability to set up gLorIous pOlLs. ::dramatic lightning effects:: 
So the resource cost is probably just the lifetime on part of the person who’s organizing it all.
I dunno. I’m ambivalent. In absence of improvements of the project search (pretty unlikely to happen, Niv being busy and all), some more user-curated “Best Stuff”-lists that’re being kept up to date don’t seem like an altogether horrible idea, and the acknowledgment might be a nice “Yay, I am loved!”-mood boost for the nominees. On the other hand, fame tends to go to people’s heads. Tacking shiny badges and titles onto them doesn’t seem to be super healthy for people, in general. If we start handing out badges to people, I bet you all there will be two things sooner or later - people getting upset about not having received a badge yet, and people pointing to their many shiny badges to lend weight to their arguments when getting into conflict with people who don’t have badges. Probably also a slightly increased tendency of badge-owners to start conflicts with non-badge-owners.
So if we start up a hall of fame again, I’d favor keeping it as informal and casual as it possibly can be, in hopes of avoiding or at least somewhat reducing the “BEHOLD MY BADGES AND TITLES I AM A SUPERIOR PERSON BOW TO ME”-buildup. I’ve no opinions beyond that.
+1
As an author it boosts your morale to know that your work is liked, but classifications are not good.
What I would like to see is a better visibility of people’s work, not a classification or ranking, just a better visibility. For example actually we have “custom content”, that’s very vague and someone who search for a building is perhaps not interested in armors.
As a player I like to have some means to identify the works which are considered to be the best ones by the majority of the players, especially when you have to pick between a lot of modules as in the case of NWN1 (for NWN2 there are less modules available, therefore it’s a little easier). Having said that I have always found the Hall of Fame system to be flawed for many reasons. When I look for a module to play there are a lot of aspects I look at besides the vote, i.e. its content, its setting, the gameplay but above all whether it is part of a finished series or not, whether it is still supported by the author or not and whether a complete walkthrough is available or not, and these are information that you can find only in the description and/or in the comments from other players. Rather than a voting system I’d try to find a way to make these information as easy as possible to retrieve. I am perfectly aware that the community nowadays is merely a very small piece of the oldest one and that we cannot expect to see 20 pages of comments like in the IGN Vault, but I’ve seen some requests of help in the comment section of some modules that never got a single answer and this is a thing that can discourage a newbie or a simple player like me who cannot fix its module by himself. And I assure you that the worse thing that can happen to me is not to play a bad module, but to be stuck in a module that I am enjoying because of a bug or a puzzle that I can’t overcome. Or to reach the end of a module which finishes with a “to be continued” scene only to find out that the continuation was never released. Because in the first case I just quit the module and move on to another one, in all the other cases I may also stop playing NWN for a while.
TL;DR - A voting system (be it a HoF or not) with a focus on the quality is nice for us players, but these days there are also other aspects that should be highlighted imho.
The resources you’d need would be a commitment from Vault admin to develop something new, and confirmation of its feasibility in Drupal. That’s two sets of hen’s teeth, I imagine.
Creating and maintaining a project page does not require an Admin’s intervention.
From experience of indexing Dragon Age mods manually (a trivial exercise by comparison) I’d say you’re going to need automation here (or a dedicated team of editors).
Which is mainly why I ask what’s wrong with the automation we already have - for the specific purpose of helping players find the best mods.
For NWN1, at least, a more pressing issue is probably going to be understanding what’s happening on Steam.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. I am very grateful to the people who have provided and maintained the site and gave me the opportunity to upload and offer my works.
As an author of large and somehow appreciated campaigns, my only concern is visibility.. Anything that can improve visibility of modules would be appreciated. For instance if 16 Cygni appears regularly in the NWN2 top modules, Sarmates! doesn’t (not enough votes?) and Al Andalus doesn’t appear anymore for months (too many votes?). I’d bet that some other modules that would deserve it don’t make it to the top nwn2 modules too. In addition new modules leave the frontpage rather fast.
Even if it’s easy, not that many players vote, let alone give feedback. Besides if a module is ranked above 9 any vote except 10 would lower the ranking so a player may just choose not to vote.
Let’s forget about ranking and downloads counts, let’s improve visibility and lists (by settings, hours of play, themes, level at start, level at end, heavy magic / low magic …). Endorsements ala Nexus could be a simple way for a player to advise a module.
Just my 2 cents. Anyway be sure I’m happy with the site as it is and thanks for all the work.
The vault has a serious visibility problem.
A lot of it is poor search tools / and bad tags… But some of it is just User Interface in general.
For NWN1 there are these fantastic Article Pages that Outline “Class Specific , Romance , Adult” styles of modules that you can just go down the list in table format and pick out.
Examples:
https://neverwintervault.org/article/reference/romance-modules-list-rough-copy-nwn1
https://neverwintervault.org/article/reference/adult-content-modules-nwn1-means-not-kids-sex-and-dark-themes
We need more of this… And we need them to be editable to new module makers so they can submit and classify their modules correctly.
This + Voting allows players to quickly find the type of modules they want and rank them in order of quality. The vault should act more like a library of content instead of a blog site. IMO
The Hall of Fame feature was kind of cool at first but quickly became a incentive for toxic behavior. I remember the comments and voting schemes that went on at IGN to get modules artificially on the HoF because of the belief nobody would play your module unless it was a “HoF”
Instead of Hall of Fame we should have Monthly / Annual rewards or Contests that your module can win awards from… Something that isn’t based around Download / Vote counts but stimulates new content to enter the community.
Incentivize mod makers to create new and fun stuff… instead of hoarding 10 star votes and download counts.
Just my opinion.
If it’s a question of creating content that:
Then how about a community-led series of ‘My favourite NWN1/NWN2 campaign’ retrospective articles?
The only series rules: 1) each campaign or module can only be mentioned once. 2) Content creators can’t mutually praise each other’s work.
It’d be a bit of work to coordinate and organise, but it’d be a great way for community members to highlight and celebrate each other’s work, and to create a new body of Vault content.
(I’d also be genuinely interested to hear from prominent modders about the content that’s influenced them the most.)
It’s entirely possible that a well-written, independent review for a well-received module could get published on the RPGWatch site. From prior experience, I know that they are open to a variety of review articles of that nature. That would certainly improve the exposure.
See for example: The Aielund Saga Review
The Hall of Fame isn’t perfect either: the standards for a “good” module then are different from now (arguable, some I think were just as bad then as now). So, instead of resurrecting obsolete things, it would be better to create new ways to improve module and resource visibility.
A ‘Random Module’ or ‘Module of the Day’ on the sidebars would be good.
The metric may not be perfect, but it’s certainly much better than nothing. Also, it’s not a matter of resurrecting it; the HoF pages still exist, as do the icons. It’s a matter of providing suitable representation for newer modules.
What good does serving up a random module do? That’s just as likely to serve up sub-par modules as good ones.
One further issue to consider is our small surviving membership. On the old vault modules were downloaded often thousands of times. Still only one or two percent of users ever bothered to vote. Download counts now are a small percentage of what they used to be with voting in the single digits.