149198-wildstar-rating-systemyay-or-nay

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I first want to preface this by saying that my mind is currently frayed after taking the SAT today. If my post looks like a random jumble of words, I apologize. Now, let's get down to it.
 
Wildstar is a great game and I love everything about it. But, I know Carbine is always looking for ways to make it better. So, I propose an idea:
 
What about a rating system?
 
Now before you all think "Oh, this is bad" and jump to the next forum post, let me explain.
 
In Assassin's Creed: Syndicate, once you get to the end of each "memory" (quest), the game offers you a chance to rate the memory on a scale of 1 to 5 stars, 5 being "I love it" and 1 being "I hate it." This info is then sent anonymously to Ubisoft to help them understand what players like and dislike, so that Ubisoft can make better Assassin's Creed games. You do not have to give it a rating if you don't want to, and all information is kept confidential, so Ubisoft does not know who it is that gave the rating.
 
So, do you think Wildstar should adopt a similar system?
 
I mean, sure, there's always the forums, but I guarantee you that forum posters make up only 10-20% of the total Wildstar player population. If Wildstar adopted a rating system and used it for not only quests, but for dungeons, expeditions, challenges, and other things, it may help Carbine figure out what to make next. This rating system would solve two problems:
 
1. It would eliminate many problems in finding out what players want, and eliminates the need for email surveys that most of the time lands in people's spam folders.
2. If the rating people gave was kept anonymous, it would give people who hate being public a voice. Sometimes, a small minority who want a change are silenced by a vast majority, so much so they are afraid of speaking about it. This rating system, if kept anonymous, would give them their voice.
 
So, do you approve of this idea of a rating system, do you think that it should be modified a little, or did I just pass the "King, are you insane?" line?
 
Love to hear your opinions on this.
 
King Crazy	
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BnS actually does this as well, with player surveys as characters hit different levels. They give out some small rewards for filling out the survey, so it's worthwhile to do it but you never have to. Each survey has a few multiple choice questions and a chance to write a brief message of 200 letters or less if you want. The surveys are not for public discussion, the answers you provide go to the developers for their internal metrics.
 
For developers, it provides direct feedback from the people who are playing your game, while they're playing it. 
For players, your opinions get counted whether you're the development team's most prolific cheerleader or someone who never bothers to speak up on forums or send back email requrests for comment.
 
I think it's a great idea. Why more games don't do it, I can't imagine.	
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			 I like the idea of the rating system to get feedback on certain aspects of the game.. im not sure if they do it on the ptr but in beta they did have a rating system in check. 	
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This would be great, but you have to have some kind of action behind it on their end.
 
We're not all entirely sure that's possible right now, and a whole lot of people are completely convinced that the management staff at Carbine are incompetent of doing so ever. Hopefully that's not the case, I'd love to see something like this happen.	
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I think it's a great idea. Why more games don't do it, I can't imagine.
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Put this option on the cash shop STAT. 
 
 
EDIT: Okay, just teasing. They already have this ability. They used it fairly extensively in the early Black Ops betas. Every so often, we'd get a little pop-up menu to give feedback. Like, finish the Lopp village questline in Whitevale, the window would pop up.
 
Did you enjoy this quest line? How would you rate the difficulty of this area? And like two or three other short questions that you could rate and a little box for feedback.
 
Of course, back then you could just X out of it and not answer. If they brought it here, they'd have to make it optional, but it was rarely an annoyance, because it usually didn't trigger until a quest was over.
			
				
	Edited January 24, 2016 by Tex Arcana	
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I don't really know if this is going to be worth it if im being honest but if it does get added they do need to allow people to exit out of it without filling in any details.
 
If they do not do that then what you will find is people will just fill in any old nonsense just to get rid of it and then you end up with the situation of crap in = crap out. 	
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I know why Wildstar doesn't do it. It's because all those 200 character paragraphs would take SO MUCH DATASPACE! They'd have to charge us money for the space needed to hold our comments! They are actually doing us a favor, you see. They can't hold our holo-wardrobe AND hold our direct feedback. That would be madness.
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			I would be genuinely surprised if they can even get such a system properly coded into the game.	
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Rating systems are good, but they can confirm those things already with in-game metrics and by simply observing trends in other games. (people will generally do content that they enjoy and will not play content that they don't enjoy.)
 
In many cases a rating system is quite redundant, again the metrics can do the same job; also players will always have a bias towards/against certain content which means the ratings may not be representative of what is beneficial to the game.	
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			there was a rating system in the beta and its good that there is none in the game.	
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Rating systems are good, but they can confirm those things already with in-game metrics and by simply observing trends in other games. (people will generally do content that they enjoy and will not play content that they don't enjoy.)
 
In many cases a rating system is quite redundant, again the metrics can do the same job; also players will always have a bias towards/against certain content which means the ratings may not be representative of what is beneficial to the game.
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I can't get behind a ratings system that prompts you while you're playing the game. Talk about an immersion breaker. I'm surprised a bunch of people actually like this idea!
 
I don't personally play games to become a QA agent for the developers. I feel like this idea would be just as annoying as telemarketers.  <_<  	
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I don't personally play games to become a QA agent for the developers. I feel like this idea would be just as annoying as telemarketers.  <_<  
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			As others pointed out earlier, there was such as system in Beta. It was annoying, but it made sense being in Beta... I haven't been on the PTR here, but I would think IF we had such a system still it should be there (on the PTR) and not the live servers.	
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Care to explain your reasoning as to why feedback isn't good?
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			Sounds like the problem wasn't with actually asking for feedback but with the frequency.	
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Sounds like the problem wasn't with actually asking for feedback but with the frequency.
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			I wouldn't care as long as I can completely opt out. I don't want a flashing alert and GPS-lady voice telling me "a survey has arrived". Also don't want the icon at the bottom of my screen at all, let me unpin unwanted bottom bar icons.	
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I'm pretty sure you can unpin things by going to the bar menu button on the bottom left and clicking on all the highligted pin icons, so it shouldn't be a problem at all if they ever implement this thing.
 
But maybe they should also put a 'Don't give me more surveys' button alongside the 'close window' button of every survey window. That way, you only have to endure the terrible intrusion of the very first one and no other. A needed evil, as otherwise nobody will ever know surveys are a thing and the first thing you need for surveys to work is for people to know they are there.	
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If you don't come to the forums, odds are that you don't even know the PTR exists--and even if you do know about it, you're not going to actually go into it unless you're so heavily invested in the game that you can afford to divert a fair chunk of your free time to playtesting content that is still being checked for bugs. 
 
That's a completely unrepresentative sampling of the playerbase, which makes it pretty much useless as a gauge of how the general playerbase is going to respond to content.
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BnS makes it very easy to simply ignore the surveys--you don't even have to click "decline" to pass them up. I'm sure any game could do the same for people who simply couldn't handle taking a moment to give some feedback.
 
And none of us play games to become QA for the devs. But all of us want to have enjoyable content.
 
When that's not happening, which is better: having developers who have a lot of information about what content players do and don't like, or developers who know that lots of people are leaving but don't have much feedback as to why they're leaving?
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Didn't they have a small racing challenge in the Main city?  They could always try to implement those in a large scale.  Heck they even have the "Run to the church in this amount of time."  So the programming is there.
 
Though if people want more competition I'm thinking they will have to make a new "dungeon" for that.  Protostar Racing anyone?	
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And yet there's a reason virtually every MMO has a test server. Whether the participants in the PTR are representative or not depends on factors we don't have information on. With enough participants the sample size becomes sufficiently random to be useful, if not precisely representative.
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There will always be some players who simply couldn't care less about ever providing any feedback to the devs. But people who want to give feedback will become more likely to do so as the effort required to provide feedback goes down. That's why companies who want feedback make it as easy as possible to provide it, and usually even sweeten the deal a little with a modest incentive to those who do so.
 
So to answer your question, all we need to do is ask the following question.
Which of the following options is less effort?
1. clicking an in-game icon that pops up a survey that asks you a few multiple choice questions.
2. downloading a second version of the game and playing it after transferring your character over, then providing your feedback through bug reports, forum responses, or direct communication with developers.
 
The answer is pretty obviously "1", so that approach will get feedback from not only those players who want to provide it and are willing to go to the PTR to do so, but also those players who want to provide it but aren't willing to go to the PTR to do so. So yeah, it's a better representation of the playerbase than just the PTR. Given how much difference there is in effort between the PTR and an in-game icon, probably a much better representation of the playerbase.
 
Is it worthwhile?
In a game that's doing really well, probably not. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
In a game that's doing really poorly but has a chance of recovering, almost certainly. The game needs to figure out where the problem is and fix it rather than screw around fixing things that aren't really driving people out.
In a game that's doing so poorly it's a lost cause, nah. It's already FUBAR, there's no point in throwing good money after bad.
 
I'll leave it up to you to decide which of those three categories fits this game.
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