Level up Thread

Well the member profile karma system hasn't worked. Mainly because it was a last minute feature and was never spared a great deal of thought. Therefore it shall be removed and in it's place I'm thinking of deploying an "activity / leveling system"

i.e. when you first join the site you start on level 1 with 0 activity points. As you post news, comments and do stuff you gain points and move through the levels. If your content is deleted you will be subtracted points.

Each level will be arbitrary to reach. i.e. 1000 points = level 2, 1100 = level 3, 4000 = level 4 etc and each will have a title "n00b", "hardcore".

The benefit of reaching a certain level is nil except for knowing how much you have contributed vs. your peers. It is possible however that certain things like MOTY voting maybe restricted to only level 10 members, but nothing is planned at this stage.

What are your thoughts? Good or not? If good, start proposing level titles here and i'll implement the system now.

Hmm it does sound interesting. I certainly like the idea. I know there was something simliar on another forum I used, though I never actually missed it when they got rid of it.

as long as i can put my exp into melee attacks im fine with it scotty . In fact i feel its an awesome idea gives people incentives and what not!

Yeah great idea makes me want to post more things if there is a meaning now there will be with this feature maybe have certain items that you can gain maybe level 10 gain a new theme ect would be great though .

There was another forum I was on that did this. After you gained a certain amount of points you could use them to buy things in a store to stick under your name (like the Manager, Video, etc. categories you've got now). There were also special ones, and I honestly don't know what they did.

They were like secret items that would do something cool when you got them...Only the staff knew what the effects were. Made it a bit fun.

Though I probably won't participate much. I'm not the forumsing type anymore. Well, not as much as I used to be.

This won't show in the forums, this shows in your personal profile. I have included a sample image below for you - anyone care to design a cooler looking level / progress bar?

I'm just waiting for the "how do i get level 10?" n00bstorm of spamming to kick in...

Ok these are the names of the levels, this order will change - i'm just throwing out titles atm (note most of these titles have something to do with modding):

1. Newbie
2. Player
3. Gamer
4. Designer
5. Developer
6. Maker of Stuff
7. Game Changer
8. I WANT TOAST
9. Come get' some
10. Unstoppable
11. End of Transmission
12. Finish HIM
13. GOD
14. IMPOSSIBLE
15. CAEK
16. ModRealm
17. GaminZone
18. Wally
19. Every game, every mod
20. Indie
21. Standalone
22. Creativity
23. Gameplay = KEY
24. Counter-Strike
25. Natural Selection
26. They Hunger
27. OpenArena
28. Wanted!
29. GarrysMod
30. Fall from Heaven
31. A Path Beyond
32. Red Orchestra
33. Day of Defeat
34. Action****
35. Desert Combat
36. Dragonball
37. Shockwave
38. War in Europe
39. True Combat
40. Urban Terror
41. Instagib
42. Team Fortress
43. Rocket Arena
44. Hammy-bob
45. Forgotten Hope
46. Earths Special Forces
47. Point of Existence
48. Last Man Standing
49. Knights of the Farce
50. Alien Swarm
51. World of Padman
52. Discovery Freelancer
53. Tremulous
54. Project Reality
55. Insurgency
56. The Ship
57. Foxed
58. Total Conversion
59. Vanilla
60. Headshot
61. Machinima
62. Copyright Infringement
63. Abandoned
64. RTFM
65. Free
66. Hot Coffee
67. Are we there yet?
68. AddonDB
69. Codename Gamecore
70. Go figure?
71. When its done

Let me know if i've missed anything.

Naming levels after actual mods doesn't really make sense, or seem fair to the other 7,500. Also people will probably think anyone with that rank is part of the mod.

Not to mention, it's like ranking mods. Why is Counter-Strike ranked lower than Alien Storm? People are going to ask that.

Yeah, I'd avoid sticking mod names in there.

If you're going to have 70+ levels, I almost don't think you should name all of them, just name every 10 or so.

Mage level 4. Mage level 9! etc.

Seriously don't know what you can do to name the levels that won't cause people to start asking why A is better/worse than B.

why should you really care about the order since it seems random after the third one anyway.

I think it'd be better if the ranking levels made some sort of sense.
Perhaps when one has reached say...5,000 or even 10,000 activity points, they get to choose a custom rank from a list.(In time this mark would be reached and therefore raised)

In all, I'd say in-game voice commands and phrases should be used instead, but only the ones that would make some sense with what rank you're at.
Say...like one of the Unreal Tournament ones, when you're nearing the highest mark, it could be "Holy Sh*t", whereas if you were one of the lowest ranks it'd be something like(this is from TF2)..."AH AM VERY HAPPY!"

Could even change them a bit...so like the Age of Empires they say "Food please" it'd be changed to "Mod please" or something like that.
Just swaying ideas, it seems better than just have titles of mods thats all.

Highest level could be: "Cow Level!"

(For all you..uh..diablo nerds? All I know is it's from "There is no cow level.")

The levels are basically random, and will be ordered as such. I just thought it would be nice to recognize some of the mods which have achieved different things over the years. Their positioning doesn't mean anything, it is just a way to keep level names relevant to modding and different than the standard LEVEL 60 MAGE.

I'd like to get this system live in the next 24 hours, so please speak up if you want to see changes.

Edited by: INtense!

scotty im disappointed i never saw balls of steel in the list

Visitor - Visitors earn EXP for each visit - they loose XP for making spam and overly negative comments - visitors merely need to sign up to become this class.
Gamer - Gamers earn EXP for each download - they loose XP for making spam and overly negative comments - Gamers merely download to become this class
Developer - Developers earn EXP for each successful release (refering to media, downloads and news), they loose XP for misleading the public, for not delivering on set release dates and for going a full year without any releases. Developers merely need to set up a modDB profile to gain this class.
Admin - Admins earn EXP for every Mod authed they do not loose XP. Admins are assigned only.

This is how I would have liked to have seen the system work.

Mr_Cyberpunk wrote: Visitor - Visitors earn EXP for each visit - they loose XP for making spam and overly negative comments - visitors merely need to sign up to become this class.
Gamer - Gamers earn EXP for each download - they loose XP for making spam and overly negative comments - Gamers merely download to become this class
Developer - Developers earn EXP for each successful release (refering to media, downloads and news), they loose XP for misleading the public, for not delivering on set release dates and for going a full year without any releases. Developers merely need to set up a modDB profile to gain this class.
Admin - Admins earn EXP for every Mod authed they do not loose XP. Admins are assigned only.

This is how I would have liked to have seen the system work.

admins do more then auth media.

Mr_Cyberpunk wrote: Visitor - Visitors earn EXP for each visit - they loose XP for making spam and overly negative comments - visitors merely need to sign up to become this class.
Gamer - Gamers earn EXP for each download - they loose XP for making spam and overly negative comments - Gamers merely download to become this class
Developer - Developers earn EXP for each successful release (refering to media, downloads and news), they loose XP for misleading the public, for not delivering on set release dates and for going a full year without any releases. Developers merely need to set up a modDB profile to gain this class.
Admin - Admins earn EXP for every Mod authed they do not loose XP. Admins are assigned only.

This is how I would have liked to have seen the system work.

The system is unable to distinguish what you are "gamer, dev, visitor, admin" etc when issuing karma, but it in the profile it could see if you have added mods / downloads and determine your role based on that. I guess based on what I have read in this thread - there are four ways this can work:

1. Standard Level-UP
   Get points for good stuff, loose points for bad stuff. More points = higher levels = random title from list above
2. Starwars type Level-UP
   Start as a player and level up as in #1. HOWEVER the titles would have a good side / dark side depending on if you get lots of positive or bad karma. So you could end up as Level 10 Dark Side Trooper (as an example, we would have to think of our own level characters)
3. Role based Level-UP
   System attempts to determine if you are an "admin, blogger, developer, groupie, gamer, reviewer, tutorial writer" and you level up within the category you are assigned

There could be a mixture of the above - try and get your suggestions in ASAP because I want to launch this. The information I have available in the karma system is:

- Activity Points
- Overall Karma
- Positive Karma
- Negative Karma
- Influence
- Rank

Use the force.

RE: Starwars type Level-UP

I don't like anything that puts an official title on Negative Karma. You just know some idiots are going to interpret that as a competition to see who can Max their Spam Reward the quickest

I'm not even sure we should even have a rank system - and you certainly can't base the rank system over things that don't work, such as karma.

Whilst the karma stuff is now gone from view, it'll be tracking in the background and should be more accurate now. ATM every person on the site has negative karma pretty much lol. This happened because i made it easier to get negative points vs. positive points which was a mistake.

Oh and it isn't a RANK system, it is a level system. It is there purely for fun (which is why I wanted the random title names) - your level will not dictate what you can / can't do. However in future beta testing new stuff maybe limited to members level 10 and above for example.

Edited by: INtense!

And what, pray tell, is the difference between a rank system and a level system? It's exactly the same thing - even more so when you're talking about potentially limiting features to users with certain levels.

INtense! wrote: Whilst the karma stuff is now gone from view, it'll be tracking in the background and should be more accurate now. ATM every person on the site has negative karma pretty much lol. This happened because i made it easier to get negative points vs. positive points which was a mistake.

Oh and it isn't a RANK system, it is a level system. It is there purely for fun (which is why I wanted the random title names) - your level will not dictate what you can / can't do. However in future beta testing new stuff maybe limited to members level 10 and above for example.

ahah im 70% positive there scotty as much as i like the idea of having a good/bad level rating ill have to agree with Gib as people would just be evil for the sake of being able to shoot lighting outta there hands

ambershee wrote: And what, pray tell, is the difference between a rank system and a level system? It's exactly the same thing - even more so when you're talking about potentially limiting features to users with certain levels.

well from what scotty has told me the levels would be used to help limit the ammout of needless spam like for instance you can only vote on the moty if you have lvl 10 so that itself would stop people from spamming the votes for one mod. It would be nice if we could issue karma on forum posts as well but not like +1 -1 i mean like selecting from things like +ditto or +agree or +wtf or something like that, it wouldnt really do too much to the persons overall karma but it would make the forums more intersting.

If you limit features based on level, watch site activity drop to zero.