the following discussion took place in count to 100 just after i made this post:
camy999: 11. I kinda wish that I'd participated more [when the AP system was around]. I only ever got to Gold Serf rank. Also I just realized that my profiles sixth birthday passed by without my notice
armorplayergc: ne::two12) another thing, besides joining AG earlier, I wish I had also bought Minecraft earlier, I only started in 2012, I wish I had started like 3 years earlier, then I could be better on it too
Chryosten: 13. My laziness when it came to gaming is why I only managed to reach Gold Knight. There was the contributing factor of constantly posting in FG.
SirLegendary: 14. Wish I could be here more often, I'm trying.
as far as i understand from this, it was more fun to be active on ag when there were armor points. would this be a reason for bringing them back?
I find that it's fun to get AP back, because it'll boost activity overall, and could do well for the site. I wouldn't support having the old system back in its entirety though.
For one, I wouldn't like it if comments were given points as well. Seeing how Disqus makes people comment much much more, and given that some MMOs receive hundreds of comments per day when the comment section becomes a mini-chat, you can see how the spam will start flooding in rather fast.
Some problems though: A large part of getting AP was to unlock armatars. But seeing that they are all unlocked now....there's little point to it.
I guess bringing back AP would help, but we need more than that now. Back in the day, where loads of people used it, competing just for the points (Hopefully not by spamming), was sufficient to get activity. But now that the pool is dry, AP wouldn't really help. Having prizes, unlockables, titles, armatars etc at different AP counts might help. But it's a massive thing to aim for.
I have never seen AG with that AP system, I don't know how it used to be, but I think that they removed them because people were spamming in the forums to get some AP... I don't know, let's ask admins if they have ideas for that...
edit: ninja'd
as far as i understand from this, it was more fun to be active on ag when there were armor points. would this be a reason for bringing them back?
Well, actually, this is a psychological phenomenon known as the Overjustification Effect.
[lecturemode]AP was introduced at a time when the AG community was small and/or inactive, as an extra incentive to post and comment. Although it succeeded, this incentive also encouraged rampant garbage posting "just for the AP" and replaced the intrinsic motivation of participating in the community.
Because AP was trading quality for quantity, it was removed in a later update, but this caused the perceived value of user participation to drop far below the original motivation. This upset many users, even driving some away, and the community languished again because it seemed unrewarding to contribute, despite being no worse than it was before AP.[/lecturemode]
[tl;dr]People took AP for granted, abused it, and blew it way out of proportion afterward.[/tl;dr]
Any system which rewards the worthless, unconstructive, spammy activity as much as it does the well-written, thought-provoking activity will suffer from the same flaws. If AP is to be revived, it must also be made to avoid this.
one post per x seconds. before the new forums were introduced, there was a limitation like this and after each forum post, u had to wait for 30 seconds to post again
captcha (what if someone uses a bot to post random text every now and then?)
the following warning with the same big letters:
Posting inappropriate stuff for the sake of Armor Points may result in bans that last for months or years. Permanent bans may be issued in extreme cases.
I quite enjoyed the AP system but it was removed for a valid reason in that it just turned into people spamming for the AP.
I'd probably like it to make a return but there would have to be changes so as to make spamming not worthwhile to anyone.
Yeah perhaps quests would give huge AP so it wouldn't make sense to spam the forums and comments sections. Hard quests could give the most points while easy quests could give the least (but still enough to make spammers just want to game instead).
oh wow. Armor points? thats a blast from the past!
i was a wood knight according to my quests it looks like.
off topic, but i have other suggestions other that AP:
1. the quests on your profile. they have pages you can look through, but there is no "skip to end/beginning of pages" button. that would be nice. (on the rare occasion you want to immediately go to the back of your quest pages, like i just had to do.)
2.the AG competitions. the competitions on AG dont seem to be very popular anymore. for example the spring picto-hunt. the 3rd place winner only got 7/12 answers... i think the competitions need more publicity, to get more people involved. i have asked some of the people on AG if they wanted to do the competition with me, and most all of them were like "what competition?" "what's that?" they didn't even know there was a competition! what if there was a banner at the top of the page like when AG has maintenance? that would be a simple way of "advertising" the competitions.
Wow! after some time trying to do something, I managed to make a very crazy formula, it uses "Games Rated", "Comments", "Posts", "Merits", "Quests" (divided by difficulty) and "Games Submitted".
Here, the Games Rated, Comments and Posts are mainly a multiplier to the total number, each game rated is worth 5 comments (which is worth 10 forum posts), and besides being a "multiplier", it increases slower and slower (it's nearly impossible to get it at like, 4x), and as the games rated are worth much more than comments and forum posts, the chances of spam are... lower
The quests can also be worth lots of points in it, and harder quests give more points, merits can give lots of points, and Games Submitted is also a multiplier.
Good Points:
posts and comments are a multiplier that can hardly go above 4 (or maybe 3 sometimes), so, there would have fewer spam
as games rated are worth much more than comments and posts (and are also a multiplier), if people hunt some AP, they would likely rate games instead of spam
quests may give a lot of points
merits also give lots of points, and they can only be achieved by contributing to the forums or something really useful
games submitted also increase the points, so, there could have also more (good) games in AG, and so, maybe even more quests
But the problem is that the formula is complicated:
ceiling(3*(log10((10*(g+1)+2*(c+1)+p+188)/20)*(9*((e*2+q*4+h*7+I*12)/25+1)+80*(m/2+1))*sqrt(s+1)-89))
Where "g" means Games Rated
"c" means "Comments"
"" means "Posts"
"e" means Easy Quests Completed
"q" means Medium Quests Completed
"h" means Hard Quests Completed
"I" means Insane Quests Completed
"m" means "Merits" and
"s" means "Games Submitted"
notes:
"ceiling" means rounding up to the nearest integer
"sqrt" means "Square Root"
"log10" means logarithm of base 10
if the formula is too hard to visualize, you can go here and copy-paste it to visualize
