Supposing there would be a system where people who are giving feedback, comments or reviews of games are given “Pokitto credits”. Certain amount of credits would give benefits, like getting pre-release versions before others, getting badges, etc.
Would this increase your willingness to give comments, feedback or reviews of the games the community makes?
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If it was a project I was interested in, I’d be more likely to leave comments, but If I wasn’t very interested in the project, It wouldn’t encourage me to. For example there are a small amount of projects where I am very impressed with the technical skill that has gone into them, but the games themselves are not something I’d be interested in playing. On occasion I’m sure I have even made a comment to that effect, a credit system would probably not encourage me to leave more comments or suggestions.
On the other hand, as a developer, I’d be more than happy to happy to have a system where I could easily release early/beta versions to people who have shown the most interest or encouragement in that project.
It depends actually.
The idea is very interesting - even for doing something like getting a simple badge.
It might not change much for people not interested at all by a given project -since it’s basically work with a reward you cannot spend anywhere if you -, but it might give a bit of push to people who could have provided reviews/feedbacks.
If, as developers, we could provide additional Credits from our personal stash, it’d be great as well!
Now, things would need to be really smooth - that shouldn’t take more effort than the benefits it provides - for this system to work. Also I think it’d require a critical number of users to work properly as well. If a prerelease should be deployed to eligible people, having the developer build up this list, then manually sending the ZIP to every single one of said people would be a hassle
I’m not a big fan of giving some users special privileges like pre-releases, and of implementing systems with currencies, it’s starting to resemble Steam, kickstarter et al., not talking about all the downsides this brings (implementing and managing the system, users spamming low effort feedback to get credits etc.). IMHO this community should try to continue to treat all users equally, at least in sharing programs and educational materials. I would be okay with things like badges, titles, achievements and other cosmetic things, maybe even free or discount merch for the people who put a significant extra effort to giving feedback and helping with testing.
We already have the system of badges which is great and motivating, maybe promoting it a bit would help. If, for example, we had an overview of users at the main page, listing the users and their contributions, such as “user A is one of our best testesters”, “user B is one of our best artists” – based on the badges received – perhaps that would motivate newcomers to try to get there too.
We have a large amount of pokitto owners that play the games on the gamedisk or in the games page, but never sign up to the forum. This means they don’t even leave a like or increase the download count. It gives the impression that the games aren’t being played by anyone other than the regulars.
It would be good to have some incentive for these people to leave some kind of mark so that creators can see that their efforts aren’t in vain. Preferably something that doesn’t require a forum account, since that’d provide friction. People who don’t want to make an account probably wouldn’t be attracted by a forum badge. Is it possible to have something like the “like” button, but doesn’t require login? It might be good to have a WIP flag in my_settings.h that shows a notification in the boot sequence, telling users “check this link for updates”.
Well i usually give feedback…
But i have some projects i officially have to test stuff and give feedback for, so those always go first and consume most of my time i can spent beside my regular job.
I don’t think i could do more because i would be encouraged more.
Same goes for videos, tweets, and so on…
But i am always trying to respond if possible
@FManga has a really valid point there. I feel that most of our games must be seen by more people than what we see on the forum anyway. Adding anything like credits that can only be given by forum members wont change much as we would still have the same few users giving feedback anyway. As a game dev i would love to have real feedback from people that are just playing the games too.
To me it always feels like no one else than other few game devs are trying the games.
I said it already in the past and still strongly feel that for Pokitto to flourish more, we need to also focus on the gamer front a little more. As it is now its more like a dev friendly place where only devs are seeing a reason to log in the forums.
This is just my personal view and i might be wrong. I love this community and i understand both sides but i think we need to give an easy way for the people playing what we create to at least let us know they cared enough to download and tried what we worked on. At least for me it would motivate me to do more. Again, this is just me. Just thought i’d share.
If we’re talking about a “motivational” feedback then @FManga is spot on. For any single like/comment you see under a game there are a few dozens of happy users who haven’t left any feedback, a great majority of people are just lurkers.
One thing I’ve been missing in Pokitto community is some nice game page like the Arduboy one. If there was such a place with a grid of games with easy downloads and like buttons, it could help maybe.
haha I missed that. Yeah then just add the like buttons, download counters and that’s it.
Absolutely, that kind of an anonymous (i.e. without a forum account) like button would be great!
I don’t mind the idea of selected people getting advanced previews because although others get left out for a little while, it’s only a matter of time until everyone gets access, so someone who can’t afford advanced access only has to be patient. It creates two tiers, but only for a limited duration.
How effective it is would depend on implementation though.
A short lag and lowish prices would be sustainable, but if the ‘sneak preview’ tier were too costly then it wouldn’t attract enough people, and if the duration between ‘sneak preview’ and ‘everyone’ were too long then games might suffer from lack of input and people would be more likely to feel like they’re missing out.
That said, thinking about that has made me realise that theoretically we ought to be able to create topics that only forum members can view, which might encourage more people to join the forum.
(Though more people joining the forum would make funding the forum even more important than before.)
I don’t know about Kickstarter, but I think Steam copied its award system from Reddit.
I agree that it’s probably not a good idea though.
I like the idea of users being able to give each other awards,
but I feel it would be easy to abuse if implemented incorrectly,
and that allowing people to buy awards (to give to others) could be easily abused.
The only way I can think for an award system to work is if users are granted awards to give to other uses based on their time spent visiting the site and reading others’ comments. If you based it on giving or receiving likes and making comments then it would encourage people to just leave simple, unnuanced likely-to-be-upvoted comments like “this game is great” and to like-spam everything. Whereas if you base it on time spent reading comments then short of creating an army of sockpuppets it becomes a lot harder to game the system, and it rewards regular users the most.
That’s not to say I necessarily think that’s what we should do, just that if there were such a system, I think that would be the best way to handle it.
I wonder how many people download individual games and how many just grab the latest SD image. Those grabbing the SD image are not likely to come back after playing and ‘like’ individual games.
We might be overthinking it all. All i would really appreciate is just a way to keep track of hoe many downloads each game has on the game page and a way for people to click on like or not. I think that would already be enough to at least put some stats in perspective. But for that to be really working thr games might have to be really downloadable just from one location…
I really dont know what the real best idea would be, but i think it will have to be kept simple either way since a user will always choose the simpler thing to do anyway.
Agree … but still the SD image complicates this.
We should try to get Pokitto emulation and roms into the Retrocade / Retropi systems. Then there would be a much wider non-dev audience
Currently (13 answers) 77% thinks “Pokitto Credits” would possibly or surely increase their willingness to give feedback, which is imo a great result!
Plus an added bonus that the credit system can make more people to actually register instead of just browsing the forum anonymously.