During my time on AG I have tried to consistently write helpful comments and suggestions to give back to the community. Merits are very special things that I know are rewarded for extremely helpful game reviews or prizes in a competition etc. In Gantics thread on merits he says:
After you post your comment, it can take anywhere from a few seconds to a few years. The moderators take time to read through the comments of new games and old games. They cannot read everything at once. If you keep writing good comments, you may get one. Merits are not guaranteed.
This extremely variable time limit I know is very hard to gauge as there are thousands of games with hundreds of comments and with under a hundred staff members there is a one in a million chance that your comment may be seen by a mod or admin. My suggestion to make the process of finding a merit worthy comment smoother and to make an admin/mods job easier is by the use of voting. How would this work? Under a games window on the right displays the five or so recent comments and then a bit below the "see all" button. By each comment there is a red flag for reporting spam, instead/additionally to this there could be a an up arrow and a different coloured down arrow. All users will be able to vote if it is a spam comment or a good review of the game, one up vote is +1 and one down vote is -1 with one vote per user. The "score" would be displayed on the right. For the most up voted comments there would be a tab above or below the comment box, similar to the Facebook and Twitter tabs where there will be a tab for the most up voted comments starting with the comment with the highest votes. Mods and Admins will then be able to simply click the most popular comments tab and judge whether the user deserves a merit. This would save a lot of time as there would be no need to trawl through pages of comments.
This came to me in an epiphany when I wrote a game review that I was proud of but is now lost in pages of spam comments. Oh well you guys can shoot me down saying its a stupid idea or already been down before yada yada yada.
Nope I have heard about it but I'm not into MMO games so only just checked it out. Ah it changes the top header to old AG style the way I remember it :' anyway sorry yes my suggest would be similar to that with some adaptations as the comments are still just a long list of normal, spam and unrelated comments.
May I add something to this? There could be a way to sort them(kind of like the highscores). People could see the the most 'up'd' comment by either day, week, month, year and all-time. And it could be easier on staff too seeing as they're busy enough.
We used to have voting in game comments where the comments with multiple up-votes would increase in size, so if moderators were patrolling the game comments, the upvoted comments would stand out. I'm not sure why the feature was disabled, or at least I don't remember.
There could be a way to sort them(kind of like the highscores). People could see the the most 'up'd' comment by either day, week, month, year and all-time
Yeah that's how I thought it could work, a method of organisation so it makes it rather simple for an admins/mods job. It would really help both player and staff.
We used to have voting in game comments where the comments with multiple up-votes would increase in size, so if moderators were patrolling the game comments, the upvoted comments would stand out
Not only would the most up voted comments stand out but also down voted comments would also alert you mods more rather than the flaging/reporting button, or maybe that already works sufficiently enough I don't know fully how it works.
We used to have voting in game comments where the comments with multiple up-votes would increase in size, so if moderators were patrolling the game comments, the upvoted comments would stand out. I'm not sure why the feature was disabled, or at least I don't remember.
This is working fabulously on Kongregate,just take a look at a game and you'll see.
I used to be a member on Kongregate but I never liked their layout so moved to the more superior site Armor Games. Obviously if my suggestion is added to the site it will be much better than Kongregates one.
