What did you like about the event? What didn't you like? What can we do to improve?

I'd like some feedback specifically on the livestream and new best of show decision making.

Feedback:
1. Try and make it easier for people to find there own game on the livestream. I never saw my own game which is a little disappointing. One reason is that I was really looking forward to the feedback and another is that I don't even know if it was ever played or just never uploaded. Suggestions on how to improve: create a topic with a listing of what game was played on what day. I'd also say create a listing in advance or a request topic but that may be pushing it.
2. Give beter insides into the decision making. I find no fault in the descission making but have liked to know how the other projects have ended. For example: my Zelda game and that of king Tetiro were really close in terms of votes and review score. I would have like to have seen how we both ended.

This isn't really an issue with this NCFC specifically, but I don't care for when it takes place. You should do it when most people have breaks, like around Christmas or even Thanksgiving - that way there would be so much more time to get things done and to have cool events and competitions. I'd say one of the biggest reasons participation in competitions and stuff may have been low in the past is that people are really busy during the week, which wouldn't be the case over a vacation.

I'd say the biggest issue with this years NCFC was a lack of special events during the week, which I admit isn't something you can just magically make happen - but yeah, moving it to over a vacation could help that.

As for the livestream, I think it worked really well most of the time and I'd love to see what else could be done with it.

Note that I'm an NCFC retard so these may not make sense or sound stupid, but here you go anyway:

THIS IS IN MY OPINION ONLY ;)

positives
1. The chat was cool
2. I liked the large amounts of games
3. I liked the forum design; very cool ;)

Nevatives
1. I didn't like how the main site and the forums correlated almost exactly. I was confused several times such as me thinking I'm on the forums when I'm on the actual site, since they look almost identical. MFGG sor of perfected this since the main site and the forums are easily distinguisable.

2. It would be nice if the navigation was a little more user-convinient. Like, if there were actual buttons or something rather than just clickable links at the top. They seem a bit unorganized/unaligned too.

3. Like gookum said, I think the date should be were a most people have breaks like Christmas or whatever.

4. Discuss more about the radio and livestream. I didn't have a clue what those meant and I still don't now. (sorry if it was and I'm just a big retard)

5. More explanation about NCFC in general. I was lost the minute I joined here. :( but again, this is probably a fault on my part.

6. I'd like more of a democracy on the voting. Such as everyone doing the ballot thingy and whoever gets the most voting wins the "best of the show" or whatever.

sorry I listed so many cons and I hope this doesn't sound harsh or discouraging :|

I would like to see the livestream specifically attempt to play every game from every booth over the course of the event. Set-up a schedule of what you will play and when, then make sure your recorded videos label which game is being played.

In addition, I think that the best in show set-up is a bit broken. Honestly, I could probably have gotten a lot more of the people on our forums to come over here and write reviews for AM2R and just artificially boost it's score. Heck, even without much intervention that started to happen anyway. (Not that AM2R isn't an amazing game and worthy of it's win. I'm just pointing out that the current system is exploitable.)

Well here is my feedback:

Pro:
-Good chat and streaming system
-Good site design
-Well prepared alternate booth design

Con:
-Booth take a while to get accepted
-Web browsing is inconvinience, should be at the left side with large buttons (Example)

Well, I don't know what happened to the popularity, the visitors seems dropped a lot than the previous NCFC events.

The event worked out really nice, though I kinda wish there was more workshops and competitions (then again, that generally requires more people too I guess). The chats were fun, being able to try a whole lot of different games was a blast, and I definitely enjoyed tuning into the radio from time to time.

As for the livestream, it worked out rather nicely. Seeing the gameplay of each fangame as well as the shenanigans had both in game and in the interactions of the people streaming and the people in chat was a nice way to keep things fun.
EDIT: I should also mention that the gametrailers was a cool concept and a nice addition to the live-streaming experience. Definitely something to bring back next year.
However, one of my serious gripes is how some of the fangames were put off being tried/critiqued till the very day of the NCFC in favor of having multiple streamings of select fangames to show the full content of that game earlier in the week (For example, Psycho Waluigi in showing the extent of it's content/levels). Unfortunately, having that kind of coverage really puts a huge bias to the selected fangames and doesn't really help the other games get the proper attention/critique that the game's makers are hoping for. So maybe for future livestreams, maybe trying all entrants early in the week, then doing a in depth look into the content of others would be ideal. That way, bias can be avoided and everyone can get their chance to have people see their game and be critiqued.

As far as the best of show decision making, I like the format of how it was handled, but I feel there may had been too few judges to really get a solid determination of why each place earned it's place. Just two judges posting their choices tends to make it seem more of a popularity contest. Ideally, 3-5 is better number to get a diverse decision of who deserves their place. Any more, and things likely will get too complicated.
Also, it might be ideal for judges to have a tentative list of their choices earlier in the week, so if one or more are not available by the closing/announcement of the winners, then the organizers can resort to that to determining the best of show while not having to delay for too long.

Another thing that I found difficult as far as the registration was the lack of clarity of what day it was happening, and where. I remember checking the front page and forums constantly to see if I could glean any information at least for a few weeks prior to when it actually, only to be frustrated by a lack of information. It would be nice for next time to try to have the information posted ahead of time in a space that is easily viewable to everyone... or at least post ETAs of when to expect stuff.

Again, great to see that the NCFC is growing and improving over each year, and I know how difficult it is to get right so that just about everyone is pleased, but keep at it! I look forward to see how the NCFC grows for next year.

I was kinda surpised myself by the low turnout. Perhaps moving the convention to the holidays would be better. Also, s'more advertising might bring more people in.

I agree with Chaotix Bluix that there wasn't very much info put out before the convention.

Sorry if I couldn´t participate that much in the forums this year. Too much work.

Anyway, my humble thoughts about the event:

- Good registration system, it worked fine for me, just like last year.

- Both the radio and the livestream were awesome. They were entertaining, and worked perfectly. And that´s a bit of a problem. I found myself checking out the convention at work and kept going from the chat/radio to the livestream/chat again and again. It would be cool to have the talent of DJ Yoshiman and the visual entertainment of the livestream all together in one centralized stream.

- I wanted to enter the minigame competition, but unfortunately my schedule this week was pure chaos. How about if instead of making a competition you guys organize a community game, where creators participate with resources (graphics, music, etc) to make a common game, within the days of NCFC... that could be interesting. Just thinking out loud.

- I´m really thankful about the Best of Show award. I´m not quite sure if reviews should be part of the deciding factor. I wasn´t able to write that many, but the ones I did were to mention games that I thought were awesome, and didn´t seem to get that much attention in the rest of the forums. Reviews are supposed to give people a reason to try out something (movies, games, etc.), not simply a unit of measure for popularity, IMHO. Also, having links to reviews in the booth list could be helpful for people to get extra info on the game, besides the thumbnail.

- Site navigation was a little confusing at first. Big buttons could help a lot.

Yeah, the scoring system is horribly broken. Namely, the review system is, in my mind, terribly flawed, because if a game is more well-known, it will probably be reviewed more. The game getting 10 5-star and 4-star reviews might be great and worth the 5-star reviews it's getting, but it might not be necessarily better than a less popular game that only has 2 5-star reviews. But the way this event was scored, the one with 10 reviews gets tons more points than the one with only 2 reviews.

The solution I would propose in the next NCFC is to give more points for a higher average rating, rather than for being rated by more people.

EDIT: I've changed my position, so I edited this post to cut out the stuff I don't stand by any more (to make the part about reviews, which I still stand by, more visible). This is what it said before:

Quote:Yeah, the scoring system is horribly broken.

First off, the simple "likes" rating system is flawed. For example, a game could get 50 likes, while another gets only 10 likes, but what exactly this means depends on so many factors. It could be that the one with 50 likes is liked by 5 times as many people proportionally, but the one with 10 likes could have been played by only 20 people, while the one with 50 likes could have been played by 200 people. In this case, it seems more people, proportionally, like the one with 10 likes, even though it has only 1/5 the number of likes the other one has. Another problem, though, is that not liking a game doesn't necessarily mean that the person thinks the game is bad. It could also mean that the person thinks the game is OK, but not enough for a "like" (i.e. he/she would rate the game ~3 stars out of 5), or it could mean that the player liked the game, but simply didn't bother clicking the "like" button.

The review system is also, in my mind, terribly flawed, because if a game is more well-known, it will probably be reviewed more. The game getting 10 5-star and 4-star reviews might be great and worth the 5-star reviews it's getting, but it might not be necessarily better than a less popular game that only has 2 5-star reviews. But the way this event was scored, the one with 10 reviews gets tons more points than the one with only 2 reviews.

The solution I would propose in the next NCFC is to:

1. Replace the "Likes" system with either a "Likes/Dislikes" system or a 5-star rating system (I myself would prefer a 5-star rating system, but "likes/dislikes" would be fine).
2. Give more points for a higher average rating, rather than for being rated by more people.
3. Sort the booths by average rating, so that ones with an average of 4.5 stars will be closer to the top of the page than ones with an average of 3.5 stars.
4. Have the staff periodically scan for, play, and rate any games that have not been rated, to prevent good games from being left unnoticed due to the sorting, or give extra attention to games that haven't been rated much (say, less than 10 ratings).

These changes would make the event much more fair.

I just have a quick thing to say about this...

(10-29-2011, 06:09 PM)onpon4 Wrote: 1. Replace the "Likes" system with either a "Likes/Dislikes" system or a 5-star rating system (I myself would prefer a 5-star rating system, but "likes/dislikes" would be fine).

The problem of adding a "dislike" side to any voting is that when in a competition like this one, it will be used by other people/games with a larger community to easily skew the results against games that really deserve it. This was pretty evident in 2010 when a similar system was in place and games in the same categories would duke it out and bring down those who were placed highly at the time. With the system we saw this year, you essentially could vote for what you wanted and what really deserved it... but again... it is abusable by people who have access to multiple internet connections or proxies. It's a nice idea, but unless you can find a way to curb the competitive tendencies that will erupt in a competition, it's likely going to work against the idea of really being fair.

Quote:3. Sort the booths by average rating, so that ones with an average of 4.5 stars will be closer to the top of the page than ones with an average of 3.5 stars.

Unfortunately... if that was the case, it would present an unfair bias to those who were already in the lead... something that would kinda work against the idea of making things fair... plus [/quote]. If you knew already that all the good games were at the top, why even consider venturing to the bottom of the list at all? If things were to be truly fair, you would have to make it so that every time you visit the booth page, all the booths would randomize positions so everyone has the same chance to be on the top... which honestly is a nightmare for finding a game, and then voting for it later... as well as problematic for just coding the site to do on it's own. The current system does have it's bias, but unless there's another suggestion posted that is ultimately better, it still works at giving everyone as much of a fair chance as possible.

--------------------
The scoring system does need some work for it to improve, but what was in place this year worked well for the most part. Reviews, like you said, will likely need to be considered a little more heavily as far as their weight determining the best of show.

I'm going to have to agree fully with Chaotix Bluix in response to the Likes suggestions. In previous years we had a five star rating system, and it unfortunately didn't make things fairer - instead we had people down rating their competition. This was the first year we strayed from that, and the amount of likes each game had worked far better than the popular games having 5 star ratings and all the rest having 2-3's. A game with say, 8 likes, doesn't imply that it's a bad game, just that people haven't "liked" it all that much. And the point of likes isn't to give quality indication, where as a rating scale is, and can skew games negatively unfairly.

Also, bear in mind that the likes themselves really weren't that important towards judging. They were mainly in place for someone to easily show they liked a game, and the top liked game of each category only received one extra point.

I do agree that reviews this year were a bit skewed though, perhaps averaging the review results would work better next year.

One thing I personally would like to see next year would be a wider range of awards in addition to the "Best Of" ones. Quite a few people look at the awards and instantly assume that the objective of NCFC is to win - when it's not. The awards aren't meant to be a critical part of the convention, but the fact we only have one kind of award doesn't help this.

Hm... Yeah, I just looked over the scoring, and I guess the likes were almost completely negligible. I remembered it completely differently for some reason. And hearing about past rating system abuse, I suppose only allowing positive feedback is for the best.

I still stand by my position on the reviews, though.

Quote:One thing I personally would like to see next year would be a wider range of awards in addition to the "Best Of" ones. Quite a few people look at the awards and instantly assume that the objective of NCFC is to win - when it's not. The awards aren't meant to be a critical part of the convention, but the fact we only have one kind of award doesn't help this.

Yeah, I strongly agree with this. Some awards like "most challenging", "most original", etc.

Oh yeah, almost forget that make an inform to streamers that read the game instructions first before play the game. I found out few cases that player missed some features on certain game.

Overall, I enjoyed this year as my first year at NCFC. A few things I didn't really like though, were that there weren't many events outside of watching people Livestream NCFC booth entries. I mean, I enjoyed watching most of the Livestreaming, but IMO, there should be more community events during the time NCFC runs for.

The Fight Night event was kind of lackluster, and there was what, only one (Me vs King Tetiro vs martijndh)? If there was another one, I must've missed it do to a lack of news posts, or just me not seeing it.

I think some cool events that could work out well (For the most part) next year are:

- Game speedruns. Two people stream themselves playing a game (Whether it be a fan game or just a Nintendo game in general, as there aren't many complete Nintendo fan games that were entered from what it seems...Maybe that'll change next year), and the first person to complete the game, or whatever goal they set, wins.

- Development showcases. Developers can show of what's gone into their game, or stream them working on it for a while. Just something that could help developers share/display their games even further.

Also, I agree with the more "Best Of" categories thing. A few other people were talking about that as well, and I'd love to see it next year.

The likes were an excellent idea and they worked perfectly. It was great for people to find cool games and great for the creators to see how many people were excited for what they were making.

Reviews should be the only way scoring is done, but at the same time review standards need to be... a lot higher. I read some reviews this year that didn't tell me much of anything or were scored really poorly.

(10-29-2011, 09:34 PM)Supernova Wrote: Oh yeah, almost forget that make an inform to streamers that read the game instructions first before play the game. I found out few cases that player missed some features on certain game.

Actually, I personally found it to be very helpful for my game to just be played for the first time and streamed. It helped me learn what was not obvious enough, what to improve on, etc. If he'd read a manual beforehand, it wouldn't have helped as much, since not a whole lot of people would familiarize themselves with the game before playing it.

On the other side of the coin, watching a new player's first reactions to a game is far more interesting/useful for players than watching an experienced player playing a game.

Echoing what was mentioned above, the only real problem I had with NCFC this year was the livestream game playing.

From what I saw, if someone with producer status happened to be on and felt like recording a game they could do so. No plans were made or rules set. If you were on and felt like recording, knock yourself out. While this setup worked fairly well and encouraged people to experiment with all the available games when streaming, it also meant that you could never be sure when/if a game would be streamed.

My suggestion for next year would be to schedule a few livestream game recordings. There would still be plenty of time for people to stream whatever they wanted to, but some time would deliberately be set aside for the game demos that are available. For example, "8:00-9:30 EST on Monday such-and-such will be playing Game #1, #2, #3, and #4 for 20 minutes each with a little extra time left over just in case." If a developer saw their game listed, they would know when to view the stream or could even ask for a different time. More games would be shown overall since there would be an actual plan instead of "play until you get bored of it, or feel guilty for taking too long," and more people would be on during these timeslots which would liven up the chat.

My first point would be about the spam filter on forum account registration.

I tried to register using my normal email (hotmail) but was refused: "your details match that of a know spammer" (which I'm not). I had to use my gmail account to be able to log into the forums. Of course, since I couldn't register an account, I couldn't raise the issue.

Once I did decide to use my gmail, it was too late to register my game on here. I have to wait until next year.

For the record, I did propose CSS changes to make many areas look a bit better, but they weren't applied in time. Whereas I'm still confident it looked better than last year's attempt... I felt I could have done better in many areas.

But I had no access to the site's contents - I just put foward proposals and mockups. It's a challenge to convey things through AIM/MSN or whatever and things like the radio information were added at the very last minute.

For the record, the original mockup.

oh and during development I tore apart the old site for fun
http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/7272/...ection.png

and something that probably won't happen
http://img252.imageshack.us/img252/9228/logo3tg.png
http://img89.imageshack.us/img89/1558/ncfc20121.png