Community interest in User Made Missions?

[the_demongod 31]

As sad as I am to see you go, I can certainly understand your reasons behind doing so. Hard work isn't appreciated enough here it seems. I have poured hours into lengthy forum posts about improving weapon systems in general or fixing how air-to-air missiles, and while I get a few replies back and some helpful insight, the thread gets buried in a few days (despite the fact that I researched thoroughly and wrote more than 2000 words). Don't even get me started about BI's decision to ignore all the forum feedback.

Anyways, I hope you'll eventually decide to come back or create some content every so often, because I personally fully enjoyed your missions and still play them regularly.

Cheers.

[Night 1]

I find all the community missions from the BIS Forums or from Armaholic. I just don't like interacting with Steam a whole lot.

[Variable 322]

I've come to the conclusion that putting hundreds of hours into a mission only to have it buried deep in the Workshop due to poor ratings mechanics is not worth it. I had a thumbs down due to the fact that 30mm is underpowered in Arma3. If more people could enjoy my missions it would be worth my time, but that's not going to happen with the idiocy that's occurring in the Workshop.

I'm going to have to look for another creative outlet. Have fun, StrongHarm out.

I have a lot of criticism over the Steam WS rating system. We practically all go and vote up a mission we find as good right after we play it, and I have yet to see votes of up to 18 players give a mission even one star (I believe it starts from three stars, which are given for something around 25 votes), and that is pretty frustrating. As a community that play public missions from all sources, it's disappointing to see wonderful missions getting no ratings at all, or very few, and certainly not getting any stars.

However, your missions have lots of subscribers, 5 and 4 stars, and a lot of comments of gratitude, which most of the mission makers can only dream of. What exactly do you find missing?

[rakowozz 14]

I should be releasing a multiplayer mission in a couple of months now, but I honestly have zero intention of using Steam Workshop for that. Why would I? Not only is it a mission directed to closed communities, using dedicated servers, I couldn't care less about the amount of people playing it.

Maybe the Workshop works better for you to reach your target demographic with singleplayer missions, as folks playing alone tend not to frequent these forums, or even Armaholic. But it's definitely not an appropriate indicator as to whether your mission is good or not. C'mon...

[haleks 8212]

I should be releasing a multiplayer mission in a couple of months now, but I honestly have zero intention of using Steam Workshop for that.

I'm not fond of Steam workshop (nor of its users...) either. Still, I'll probably release my next mod there too, for one good reason : prevent people from uploading there themselves.

I've seen many addons uploaded to the WS without the author knowing it, and once it happens it is usually a pain to have it taken down...

...And here am I, saying I'll use this WS eventhough I hate it... Really wish BIS didn't fiddle with modding & Steam : to me it seems that it created more problems (for the modders) than anything.

[the_demongod 31]

I'm not fond of Steam workshop (nor of its users...) either. Still, I'll probably release my next mod there too, for one good reason : prevent people from uploading there themselves.

I've seen many addons uploaded to the WS without the author knowing it, and once it happens it is usually a pain to have it taken down...

...And here am I, saying I'll use this WS eventhough I hate it... Really wish BIS didn't fiddle with modding & Steam : to me it seems that it created more problems (for the modders) than anything.

Yeah the users themselves are most of the problem to be honest. Early on in A3's lifetime, most of the people were there who loved Arma 2 and were genuinely interested in Arma. Now that many players play nothing but King of the Hill, Altis life, Wasteland, etc we have a whole group of players who are not as old and mature as some of us are, resulting in worse content and unreasonable voting. I recently went back to the workshop and was dismayed by the state it is in. Instead of a place for skilled mission makers such as Oksman, RobJ and StrongHarm to post their work, it has become a place where just anybody puts up their missions. Going to "most recent" reveals a million missions that don't even have thumbnails, and are named things like "stratis mission 1," "flying mission" and similar.

I already said this earlier, but my personal suggestion would be to have a system where people who produce great polished content could be marked as "verified" or something (similar to how famous people's accounts are marked on twitter), so that players could choose to only display said polished content. Perhaps there could be some other part where only trusted users could vote and comment, but I don't really know how that could work.

[Imperator[TFD] 444]

Yeah the users themselves are most of the problem to be honest. Early on in A3's lifetime, most of the people were there who loved Arma 2 and were genuinely interested in Arma. Now that many players play nothing but King of the Hill, Altis life, Wasteland, etc we have a whole group of players who are not as old and mature as some of us are, resulting in worse content and unreasonable voting. I recently went back to the workshop and was dismayed by the state it is in. Instead of a place for skilled mission makers such as Oksman, RobJ and StrongHarm to post their work, it has become a place where just anybody puts up their missions. Going to "most recent" reveals a million missions that don't even have thumbnails, and are named things like "stratis mission 1," "flying mission" and similar.

I already said this earlier, but my personal suggestion would be to have a system where people who produce great polished content could be marked as "verified" or something (similar to how famous people's accounts are marked on twitter), so that players could choose to only display said polished content. Perhaps there could be some other part where only trusted users could vote and comment, but I don't really know how that could work.

As a budding mission designer nothing annoys me more than to see missions that lack polish in even their most basic presentation. Descriptions, thumbnails and proper briefings are quite often missing and seeing this lack of dedication to all aspects of the mission creation process is disheartening.

[the_demongod 31]

As a budding mission designer nothing annoys me more than to see missions that lack polish in even their most basic presentation. Descriptions, thumbnails and proper briefings are quite often missing and seeing this lack of dedication to all aspects of the mission creation process is disheartening.

Exactly. If I ever see a mission without a thumbnail and description (as many in the "most recent" category have), I will automatically downvote without even playing the mission. As a mission maker, it is your duty to the community to provide at least the bare minimum of presentation, including thumbnail, description, and a catchy/descriptive title. I believe that all missions should be required to have at bare minimum a thumbnail to even be made public in the workshop. It does a massive disservice to the other mission makers to be posting worthless/poor quality content on the public workshop, because it turns the workshop into the messy state it is in today, which contributes to the problems such as the ones StrongHarm mentioned. It turns people away from the workshop for good, severely hurting content creators who polish and put large amounts of effort into their missions.

If I had things my way, the workshop would function more like Armaholic, where you would have to submit your mission to a thread on either the steam or BI forums to get it published publicly, which would act as a barrier for people who want to post a worthless mission for shits and giggles.

The default filter would be these submitted missions, and then players who want to see everything can disable the filter so that they may see all the other unaccepted/unsubmitted public missions.

[haleks 8212]

Excellent idea! I hope someone at BIS is reading this!

[danius 13]

I've downloaded plenty of SP missions from the workshop. The problem I have with it is it is really difficult to sort out the crap from the gold. The issue is that when you want to browse the workshop and look for highly rated missions, you really only have two options:

1. Top Rated All Time - This returns a pretty much static list of missions. I would imagine it is exceedingly difficult for a newer mission to break into the top list here.

2. Most Popular (by "This Week" or "Today") - The problem with these is that it is far too EASY for a mission (whether it be total crap or totally awesome) to appear on these lists. I just clicked on the fourth mission in the weekly list, and it only had 840 subscribers. Most of the missions have zero stars, which makes it really difficult to determine which missions are worth your time investment.

What would greatly improve the current situation is if they added longer timelines to choose from (e.g. Monthly) on the Most Popular list, and list other options for Top Rated other than "All Time" (e.g. Top Rated Monthly again)

[simon1279 52]

@the_Demongod, i prefeir to make my own missions and play them with my group/friends/italian community, my missions are designed just for a large number of players, i just used to download from workshop a couple of time and what i've downloaded was stuff made by inexpert with many bugs, the best way as usual since lot of time ago is the mitical Armaholic, there you can find just good and tested stuff

[KidB 10]

I play only SP missions from the workshop. I don't think interest in the missions changed so much, but it's harder to find the good ones. There are so many missions published on the workshop now. People using the tags incorrectly are also part of the problem, I think it needs some sort of moderator. The workshop is quite good for easy downloading, but not promoting the missions.

P.S: I didn't know about your ECAS mission until now, I loved Day 1 and 2. Looking forward to playing it tomorrow :)

[Rydygier 1317]

Yeah, it was like that earlier, and the more is now, with the Workshop Syndrome (handful of gems flooded by the ocean of crap). How to find all, what really is worthy of attention? It bothers me for a long time now, I saw too many great creations, with lots of work put, that was completely forgotten and never really discovered for the wide audience, just because there is too much of the stuff to check, follow or even be awared about existence of all. Life is too short. How should we name a fact, something, that costed hunderds hours of hard work with proportional resulting quality was noticed, not mentioning about appreciation, by less than 1% of players?

Numbers of views/subscriptions aren't reliable for few reasons (the snowball effect - people are checking only most checked things due to above reason - lack of time to check everything; personal taste isn't same as quality evaluation; as for views/downloads - it's done before playing, so nearly worthless...).

Perhaps some kind of organized initiative of dedicated players is needed here. To create a kind of thrustworthy, comprehensive and always up to date list of all of high quality out there. But how? Amount of content to review makes it a job for a crowd. Crowd of players. But how to use crowd effort avoiding duplicating same effect, as we have for judging by votes/subscriptions? Moderated list needs moderators. Who would perform such work constantly and well? Who has time, trust and dedication?

So maybe rather some self-moderated hybrid? Let's say, anyone can point something worthy of putting on such list (not, what he likes, but what he recognized as high quality, maybe with some filter, maybe a kind of extra effort required, to sift of "lol votes" of bored kids (registration? Described reason of pointing?)), that acts like placing something on the list of potentials or upvoting, if on that list already. And then anyone, who checked pointed creation can evaluate his choice. Pointer's voting weight will be known and determined by that public evaluation of his previous pointing, and that would affect both, his voice influence for his future pointing and evaluation of pointed by him projects. Collecting such influence may be motivating to point more, but point wisely, while keeping all this running doesn't require constant time and effort from no one, except technical maintaing of the framework, whatever it could be. That way a group of most trustworthy "quality finder guru" may emerge. Creations with big enough weight of votes will be automatically placed on the final "high quality" list. Such project could be purely community-side, but any kind of BI's support may help a lot.

Do not know, if this has any sense, just an idea.

Edited September 14, 2014 by Rydygier

[Variable 322]

Perhaps some kind of organized initiative of dedicated players is needed here. To create a kind of thrustworthy, comprehensive and always up to date list of all of high quality out there. But how? Amount of content to review makes it a job for a crowd. Crowd of players. But how to use crowd effort avoiding duplicating same effect, as we have for judging by votes/subscriptions? Moderated list needs moderators. Who would perform such work constantly and well? Who has time, trust and dedication?

We have been doing exactly that for coop missions since OFP. See here the Comrades in Arms Online Coop Mission List. Link to BIS thread can be found here.I think it's safe to say that any coop mission that its page look reasonable and above can be found there.

[Rydygier 1317]

Wow, great to hear. Anyway, such kind of thing, I described, may be good idea for all other types of missions, and this should be commonly known place.

[Variable 322]

Wow, great to hear. Such thing is needed for all other kinds of missions then, and this should be commonly known place.

Yeah, you are right. We started the mission list as an internal tool to keep track of the missions we have on our server. Which ones were tested, which ones are broken, which ones are good, which ones were completed, that kind of stuff. And since we are Coop only group (and with no respawn), the list contains only that kind of missions. At some point we figured the community can benefit from it as well, so we published it.