Idea for ranking players

[bessarabov]

How you have a leader board. It is a great thing, but to get for the first position is not an easy task. My proposion is to split users into 4 groups and give them information:

• you are in the top quarter
• you are in the top 50%
• you are in the top 75%

I've heard about this type of ranging in the US schools, I think this way is better than using absolute rating. It is easier to get in the top quarter and to be proud of it, than to be the first.

[berekuk]

Thanks for the idea, but I think it's a total non-issue right now, let's not get ahead of ourselves and overdesign mechanics which are not necessary yet. By now, to get to the first quarter, you have to complete one quest.

Telling people that they don't have to apply any effort is a bad thing too, I think :)

BTW, If you want to brainstorm for ideas on how to hack people's motivation systems, here's a tough question: how can we let people know that creating very small tasks and doing them fast is completely ok?

Because I think that's an important question. We need to signal the following message:

Do the first small step and don't add a "release Dancer 2" quest which you won't close in a year or so!

Are there any better ways to do it, other than adding this text in a "new quest" form?

[garfieldnate]

Maybe we could add an input for estimated time to complete? We could do some coloring thing where it's green for a small task, yellow for a bigger, and red for large ones. Maybe we could tell people to aim for green (or they'll naturally want the green), or if they're in the red then we can suggest they look for buddies. Adding estimations might tie in well with future stuff (like joint quests, bounties, etc.).

On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 12:06 PM, Vyacheslav Matyukhin < notifications@github.com> wrote:

Thanks for the idea, but I think it's a total non-issue right now, let's not get ahead of ourselves and overdesign mechanics which are not necessary yet. By now, to get to the first quarter, you have to complete one quest.

Telling people that they don't have to apply any effort is a bad thing too, I think :)

BTW, If you want to brainstorm for ideas on how to hack people's motivation systems, here's a tough question: how can we let people know that creating very small tasks and doing them fast is completely ok?

Because I think that's an important question. We need to signal the following message:

Do the first small step and don't add a "release Dancer 2" quest which you won't close in a year or so!

Are there any better ways to do it, other than adding this text in a "new quest" form?

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/berekuk/play-perl/issues/79#issuecomment-13575502.

[bessarabov]

One more idea. When the tags feature appear on the site mark tasks with #estimate_5m, #estimate_10m and so on. When a lot of completed tasks will have such tags with a short period of time, and this will encourage people to create tasks that can be easily done.

[bessarabov]

And one more thought. Now the button "New quest" in only on the main page. I think that the process of adding new quest should be simplified. I think it is a great idea to add the button "New quest" on the top menu.

[ichesnokov]

@berekuk, hi, just looked at the issues and found this one. And I remembered that I thought about something similar recently. When someone wants to complete a big task in a real life, the common scenario is to divide it to subtasks. So maybe it would be useful to let people create subtasks out of their tasks. This will allow them to legitimately add big quests like "Release a Dancer 2", and add several sub-quests for it, like e.g. "Get more coffee", "Design a class hierarchy", "Give up and use Mojo instead" :)

[berekuk]

@ichesnokov, I'm planning to copy github's markdown feature which lets you create simple lists using [ ] and [x] markup. That should be enough for almost everyone :) (Completing these subtasks will display some kind of event in news feed, so it won't be just a quiet quest description edit with pretty formatting.)

"Real" subtasks, with deep nesting (not just one-level), are really hard to implement right, because adding them creates tons of new possible features and actions which players should be able to do: convert task to subtask, convert subtask to task, forbid task completion until its subtasks are all done, presenting this nested tree in quest list, etc. So I don't want to deal with them until absolutely necessary.

[bessarabov]

Super idea about [ ] and [x]!

There is one more simpe task that will simplify using lists. The link to the quest should not show the big url, but should show quest tittle.