New Guide Scoring Changes

[quote=Swuft]I assume this was tested before being rolled out to the entire site; did it work well in a controlled environment? I guess I'm also interested in how the popularity or meta ranking of champions play into this, if at all. Surely even a less popular Yasuo guide is receiving more traffic than, say, a Volibear guide (sorry Bear Bois), and thus by extension has a greater chance of receiving votes.[/quote]

[quote=Vapora Dark][quote=Swuft]I guess I'm also interested in how the popularity or meta ranking of champions play into this, if at all. Surely even a less popular Yasuo guide is receiving more traffic than, say, a Volibear guide (sorry Bear Bois), and thus by extension has a greater chance of receiving votes.[/quote] That's exactly what the changes address, more popular guides getting more votes and thus having an advantage over guides that don't receive as many votes because they're not as popular. And within the same champion's guide rankings, that created a self-fulfilling prophecy where a guide would stay less popular because it was getting less votes and would get less votes because it was less popular. Now the advantage that a Yasuo guide has over a Volibear guide, or a #1 Yasuo guide has over a #2 Yasuo guide, is substantially lessened.[/quote]

[quote=Mowen]Vapora explained it pretty well I think. The change is about evening the playing field a bit. To start off we simply looked into how big of a discrepancy the most popular guide had between it and the guide below it. At the time it was Mordekaiser (Morde rework happened recently) and the top guide had 395 votes in the past 30 days and the 2nd guide had 23. This is by no means the average discrepancy but shows how significant the difference can be for really popular champs. With the new change the top guide still has a significant advantage but is kept within a much more reasonable vote difference of the 2nd guide so that the 2nd guide always has an opportunity to compete with the top guide. Also like Vapora said top guides for unpopular champs vs popular champs can compete with each other now on our overall toplists. We are always wary of making changes to the scoring system since it affects every author. We did test the scoring changes in a test environment before rolling it out. However, these sort of things always act differently in practice so everyone should keep their eyes out and report anything that feels off to you. :)[/quote]

[quote=Swuft][quote=Mowen]With the new change the top guide still has a significant advantage but is kept within a much more reasonable vote difference of the 2nd guide so that the 2nd guide always has an opportunity to compete with the top guide.[/quote] Makes sense. Hopefully this works as intended! Another question in the same vein is how (if at all) the rankings of guides affects search engine results for said guides. A cursory search for "mordekaiser guide" in Google brings up the current top-ranked mordekaiser guide, as well as a mordekaiser guide last updated on January 22, 2019 (listed under the link to Mobafires list of all Mordekaiser guides). Something like this is undoubtedly a factor influencing which guides are viewed the most. Is there any insight that can be shared regarding this part of the equation?[/quote]

[quote=PsiGuard]I could be wrong but I don't think the site rankings account for much in terms of google search results. That should have more to do with SEO and the number of views the page has. Could be wrong though, I'm not an SEO expert. :P For example, there's currently a [[Morgana]] guide called "Morgana Mid" that has really high placements on google, but isn't anywhere near the top of the rankings. I'm pretty sure it just has a good title and enough views to catch google's attention.[/quote]

[quote=Swuft][quote=PsiGuard]I could be wrong but I don't think the site rankings account for much in terms of google search results. [/quote] Interesting! Thanks for the responses everyone. Always interesting to learn a little about how things work "behind the scenes".[/quote]

[quote=Sovereign Kitten]Seems like a good overall idea. Hopefully it works as intended and doesn't kerploof the entire site stability :O[/quote]

[quote=Dzopilant]So far so good ! The idea is pretty neat and clever, implementation seems to have been made smoothly and without obvious issues, well done the Mobafire team (as usual <3)[/quote]