Forums → The Tavern → AP: Goods and Bads
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It's come to my attention that some people want to discuss AP. As a result, I made this thread for general discussion relating to it. In another place, a discussion was brought up dealing with how AP might increase activity right now.
If you don't know what AP was, it was a reward system. Quests replaced AP a while back. AP rewarded users according to how much activity they provided.
And the actual question: Is AP good or bad?
- 47 Replies
It's come to my attention
Translation: I was creeping in on Nilo and Nurv's conversation...
AP was something that gave me incentive to participate on the site; not because it pushed me up the rankings or made me feel better than anyone else, but because it made me feel like I'd been rewarded for participating on the site. It gave me not only recognition but personal satisfaction. Looking at it objectively, however, recognition for users is still possible in many ways, not only through the character of your actions, but also the date you joined, and the number of games you've rated and comments you made displayed on your profile. I mean for goodness sakes, your forum posts are displayed underneath you every time you post.
I wasn't around when AP was abolished, or when quests became a thing. But for me I think it would be neat to re-install armor points and just assign enough points to quests that they become a valid way to gain AP, but not so many points that great gamers have sixty or seventy thousand armor points by sweeping the site.
My turn.
AP, Good: It basically encouraged users and gave a reason to talk to each other and post on the forums.
AP was a great motivator to get people to talk to each other because comments were worth 2. But as for posting, I doubt it. 1 point to put twice as much effort into something was a huge discouraging device. And not to mention that activity started declining towards the end of the cormyn era anyway...
Bad: It encouraged spam.(Although spam is STILL going on just not as much since the removal of AP)
I don't think there was much forum spam, but comment spam was terrible. I remember people would have conversations with one-worded comments. I don't know if they were doing it because they wanted the AP or because they were downright lazy, but I'm pretty sure it was a bit of both. And who remembers that obnoxious AP farmer who would rate a hundred games in a day?
Quests: Good: Encouraged users to play games and gave them rewards for it.
No argument here.
Bad: Actually there doesn't seem to be anything bad with them that comes to mind.
I know a few people whined because there wasn't much notice before they came, and it caused a big shock. With an update as big as Quests, the methodology undertaken is understandable, but I don't understand why they didn't allude to it a little. Keep in mind that this was happening during a time when we were craving a big update, and we would've thrived from getting this knowledge.
Another small drawback with Quests is that they're limited to games, and because AP encouraged game playing (or at least rating) and profile-to-profile conversation, comments slowed a bit. But you could say that this yielded spam rating and spam commenting so whatever.
Maybe under the quest pages there could be 2 buttons. One leading to your quests and one leading to your AP, that way we could have both.
Having both systems could help. But I think some people would choose the AP route while others would choose the Quest route. Plus something like this is terribly confusing and would push away a lot of possible newcomers. That's why Community Quests would serve so much more, because diehard questers would force themselves into the community. But then again, they might just spam anyway.
AP was great, I loved the little hats under our names that instantly showed how active we were. I still calculate my AP every week just so I can know how many I would've had.
*Checks join date*
10/29/2012.
How much did you really know about AP? I'm not intending any offense, but weren't you pretty much constrained during the Forum games during that time? And don't forget, those little hats also showed how much you spammed.
I can see where this is headed, and I must say that I agree with you. I do believe that if AP were to be brought back for some strange and mysterious reason, activity in this site would increase. Not very much at first, but it would nevertheless...
Why would it provide more quality activity? Why wouldn't it just be spam?
Because Sal apparently cannot use the internet to get what he wants, I was nice enough to go and link the player ranking when AP was still around. Yes that is right, your very own was at 7.
Outdated. I took these hours before the leaderboards were deleted:
http://imgur.com/a/Lvi0j
Gracias muchachos.
On a more serious note, I'll ask that you all remember way back when to a time where you were all blasting the AP system as nothing more than a system which perpetuated spamming and AP Farming, which was declared worthless in the face of the upcoming Quest System, and lambasted by the general population. Now that we hav the Quest System, the very people who most championedthe areival of Quests are now longing back for the good ole days, when apparently AP was good.
You all disgust me.
Not a hypocrite.
i feel the same way. AP was a desire i had to become in the top, and made me want to play and rate more games then i do now. i still remember silver knight...that was a really good concept.
But why would people play games as opposed to simply rating them? Quests actually MAKE people play games.
Translation: I was creeping in on Nilo and Nurv's conversation...
Actually Nilo asked me personally in the FGA chat.
AP was something that gave me incentive to participate on the site; not because it pushed me up the rankings or made me feel better than anyone else, but because it made me feel like I'd been rewarded for participating on the site. It gave me not only recognition but personal satisfaction.
Understandable, and with the current Quest system you don't have that same satisfaction from posting and commenting. You do, however, get more satisfaction out of playing games. But then there's the point of the post count system: why aren't we posting more to get satisfaction out of foruming? Why isn't there a post count leaderboard yet? Would it even be a good idea?
Looking at it objectively, however, recognition for users is still possible in many ways, not only through the character of your actions, but also the date you joined, and the number of games you've rated and comments you made displayed on your profile. I mean for goodness sakes, your forum posts are displayed underneath you every time you post.
Yeah, I agree. But I think users craved that public, universal attention, which is prevalent in the leaderboard. It was far easier to get noticed on that thing as opposed to hoping someone would come to your profile and say "Wow, this person is active! Maybe I should do that too!". Plus the little cosmetic icons that went with your rank were attractive and iconic.
I wasn't around when AP was abolished, or when quests became a thing. But for me I think it would be neat to re-install armor points and just assign enough points to quests that they become a valid way to gain AP, but not so many points that great gamers have sixty or seventy thousand armor points by sweeping the site.
Like the karma system that was supposed to be installed?
Oh, that.
Heh.
Maybe under the quest pages there could be 2 buttons. One leading to your quests and one leading to your AP, that way we could have both.
I think that might be a good idea. Of course there is the possibility of it warding of newcomers who don't know their way around the forum as Sal had said.
But I think bringing back the AP would be a good idea. It would make you feel like you actually accomplished something. There is the great possibility for spam but there is spam now anyways. I don't think it would make too much of a difference.
I don't like the quests. So I play about three our four games that I enjoy, and wasted time getting quests for games that I don't like. And then there's some people who just attack all the games with quests just to have a huge amount of quests. That serves the same purpose as AP to me, except with a different medium of it. "I HAVE MORE ____ THAN YOU!"
And that's how it stands with me.
But I think users craved that public, universal attention,
That is the single greatest cause for the spam that got AP done away with in the first place. A bunch of eleven year olds who wanted to be firetail_madness. There may be less activity on the site nowadays but there isn't an offensive amount of spam in the forums either.
That is true. The Ap is a major influence on spam, but also activity. I think that there were a bunch more users when AP was still around and many left after AP was gone.
ATM I can't think of a better way to curb the AP spam than that CAPTCHA a ways back lol.
Here's what I say.
I think that quests and AP could both stay around and be good for the site. Quests would encourage games and AP would encourage commenting and feedback. I've discussed this with some other users but I think quests should be worth AP depending on their difficulty level(easy- 5, medium- 10, hard- 20) and you would get additional AP for every 50 quests you complete. (10 or so)
I don't know if you guys think this is a good plan or not but please tell me.
I don't know
This conversation has been spoken about a lot in the forums, but ultimately a lot of good has come from removing AP. AP will not return, meaning that any previously earned AP is off the table to ever be resurrected. A lot of that has to do with people getting it unscrupulously.
That being said, there has been discussion of some sort of Quest board, and also to add new types of community or site quests for users to achieve that wouldn't welcome spamming. That's what I would like to see personally.
How do you really feel about the AP topic Ferret? Lol.
Also I would be interested in community quests that would not encourage spam. Sounds interesting and I would want those but I don't have any ideas of how you would.
Also I would be interested in community quests that would not encourage spam.
Maybe "Win a Poetry Contest" and "Make an Armatar" for starters,
Community Quests are good. Emp and Daleks have the right idea.
I think we should operationally define and then get some stats so we have some empirical evidence to use. it would make discussion a lot more clear-cut and it would allow us to argue objectively. Merely spewing out an opinion isn't going to convince anyone of anything if you don't have the facts to back it up.
I'll worry about the definitions of terms in a minute. For now I think it would be a better idea to get some stats that reflect the change in activity. So, when i was thinking about this, something came to mind. Who remembers the AGCAI? I'm not going to bring back any of the ideas made there or anything. But do you remember when Xeano wanted to get stats showing how activity has changed? Yeah, that was a fantastically brilliant idea, buddy. We should have done that then. Here is the actual post where he proposed it. I don't know if we should undertake that same method, but dang would it help.
Now, operational definitions. How do we objectively define activity? An operational definition needs to include stats. I was thinking we could do something like average posts per year in a forum. We'd essentially choose one forum (like The Tavern for example), count up all the posts from page x to page x, go a year back in the forum, count up the posts from page x to page x, and do this until we reached 2008. At that point we'd have comparative data that would be relatively easy to find and relate to. From there we could determine when activity declined and repeat utilizing a smaller page to page gap to specify the exact month. Then we could look at historical recordings to see what happened during that time. We'd essentially be proving what made activity go down in the first place. And yes, I understand that activity has declined multiple times.
*Sips coffee*
Continuing:
The Tavern has 617 pages. A bunch of them are locked and/or are spam, so we can ignore those. If we start on page 500, we can get 6 sets of data represented by 11 pages each (not counting stickies or locked threads). This is how I envision it:
Pages 0-10.
Pages 100-110.
Pages 200-210.
Pages 300-310.
Pages 400-410.
Pages 500-510.
The sets of numbers above would be the 6 sets of data I previously mentioned. We can calculate the total amount of posts divided by the number of threads in each set to get the mean. This is done so we can average them out and prepare them for comparison. If you could fill this out yourselves, that'd be great:
0-10
Posts: Threads:
100-110
Posts: Threads:
200-210
Posts: Threads:
300-310
Posts: Threads:
400-410
Posts: Threads:
500-510
Posts: Threads:
This part will take forever but it is necessary.
0-10
Posts: Threads:
0-10
Posts: 10712 Threads: 197 (Not including locked or stickied)
10712 ÷ 197 = 54.4 average posts per thread.
That's all there is to it!
Sal, what is that supposed to do? I don't get it.
Right now we're just getting stats. We're describing how activity has changed, if at all. From there we're going to make a guess at why this happened. As this is all correlation, and causation isn't implied by correlation, we can't completely prove anything. But because this is merely a game forum I doubt it matters much. We're just speculation anyway.
I counted all the threads and posts from pages 0-10 on The Tavern (not including stickies). The Tavern is simply our focus area. After I counted, I averaged to find the average amount of posts per thread. I hope that answers your ambiguous question.
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