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If we allow people to post a thread about their guide in the forums, everyone will want to do it and we'll get piles of them every day. You will still all be on the same field except now the forums will be spammed.
You are on the right track though. I would love to hear some clever ideas on how to get more exposure to more guides.
Definitely hit up the various review threads, and also ask your readers, if they like your guide enough, to head over to the Scout nominations thread and suggest it. Just don't pressure or coerce them into it. A paragraph at the beginning/end of your guide explaining how to nominate your guide to the scouts and linking to the thread should suffice.
One thing that might help is some more granular categorizing and searching options. That way, instead of just looking at the top guides for a champ, you could look for jungle guides, or AP guides, etc... Giving more guides a chance.
I thought it might be handy, at least for newcomers, to have a guide recommendation tool. Kind of a wizard. Basically it would ask you a series of questions... What play styles do you prefer (jungle, support, ranged, skill shots, stealth, etc...), what is your level of play, what map do you prefer, what champions do you own, what champions do you hate, what situations do you have the most trouble in, what champions you fear the most, etc... And then it recommends some guides based on your responses. Basically it's an elaborate way of choosing filters from the browse page for MOBAFire (and LoL) beginners.
This would of course require a lot of that information to be added as fields on guides, and for authors to fill it out. Some of it could be gathered automatically based on the champion and build though.
You are on the right track though. I would love to hear some clever ideas on how to get more exposure to more guides.
Definitely hit up the various review threads, and also ask your readers, if they like your guide enough, to head over to the Scout nominations thread and suggest it. Just don't pressure or coerce them into it. A paragraph at the beginning/end of your guide explaining how to nominate your guide to the scouts and linking to the thread should suffice.
One thing that might help is some more granular categorizing and searching options. That way, instead of just looking at the top guides for a champ, you could look for jungle guides, or AP guides, etc... Giving more guides a chance.
I thought it might be handy, at least for newcomers, to have a guide recommendation tool. Kind of a wizard. Basically it would ask you a series of questions... What play styles do you prefer (jungle, support, ranged, skill shots, stealth, etc...), what is your level of play, what map do you prefer, what champions do you own, what champions do you hate, what situations do you have the most trouble in, what champions you fear the most, etc... And then it recommends some guides based on your responses. Basically it's an elaborate way of choosing filters from the browse page for MOBAFire (and LoL) beginners.
This would of course require a lot of that information to be added as fields on guides, and for authors to fill it out. Some of it could be gathered automatically based on the champion and build though.
^I like this idea, but will it still show other guides as alternatives? Is it an "on/off" sort of wizard?
I think the main problem is just that whenever people look for a guide they only ever open the top rated guide. This makes it really hard for newer and lower rated guides to ever get any feedback. At the moment it really feels like you have to succeed early or your guide will get lost among the crowd. Because of C2V it's also easy for guides to climb very high very fast from friend votes alone.
I'm guilty of doing the same myself, whenever I play a champion I'm not at all familiar with I tend to click top rated guides, search in the champion and open up the first two or three guides, ignoring the rest.
I'm guilty of doing the same myself, whenever I play a champion I'm not at all familiar with I tend to click top rated guides, search in the champion and open up the first two or three guides, ignoring the rest.
Yep. Not all the top rated guides deserve to be there, but they stay there because they are the top rated guide and people never realize a lower rated guide might actually be better.
Let's stop complaining about the issues we already know are there and come up with some ideas to solve them.
I suppose we could play around with expiring votes to further level the playing field. I'm just afraid this would open us up to all kinds of new issues. Like good guides sinking just because they're old and everyone thinks they've already voted on them so they don't refresh their vote. Or all guides dropping X days after they were posted because of the initial rush of votes expiring all at once. Now we're building systems on top of systems to deal with new issues.
The scouting feature still needs massaging too, don't forget its main purpose is to solve the issue of good guides getting passed by due to their score.
When you land on the champion page the guides could be shuffled around a bit and not ordered by rank? Ex. the top 10 (or top 5 or something) guides are listed separately in a randomized order each time the page is viewed, the rest are listed in order below. This doesn't really help the REALLY new guides but, it's not all that hard to make it to the top 10 for a champ right now I don't think.
If we get more categorization information into the database for guides then we could list guides on champion pages based on those categories. Top jungle guides for this champ, top tanking guides, top AP guides, top dominion guides, etc... Would have to find a balance to spread the guides out without making the page useless.
The scout nomination process could be smoother. Users (maybe limited to only certain users based on some criteria) can click a link on guides that asks them for a short review of the guide that shows up in a central nominations section for scouts to read, or something. That way these users can just vote on a guide, and then if they REALLY think it's good they can nominate it.
Other ideas?
I suppose we could play around with expiring votes to further level the playing field. I'm just afraid this would open us up to all kinds of new issues. Like good guides sinking just because they're old and everyone thinks they've already voted on them so they don't refresh their vote. Or all guides dropping X days after they were posted because of the initial rush of votes expiring all at once. Now we're building systems on top of systems to deal with new issues.
The scouting feature still needs massaging too, don't forget its main purpose is to solve the issue of good guides getting passed by due to their score.
When you land on the champion page the guides could be shuffled around a bit and not ordered by rank? Ex. the top 10 (or top 5 or something) guides are listed separately in a randomized order each time the page is viewed, the rest are listed in order below. This doesn't really help the REALLY new guides but, it's not all that hard to make it to the top 10 for a champ right now I don't think.
If we get more categorization information into the database for guides then we could list guides on champion pages based on those categories. Top jungle guides for this champ, top tanking guides, top AP guides, top dominion guides, etc... Would have to find a balance to spread the guides out without making the page useless.
The scout nomination process could be smoother. Users (maybe limited to only certain users based on some criteria) can click a link on guides that asks them for a short review of the guide that shows up in a central nominations section for scouts to read, or something. That way these users can just vote on a guide, and then if they REALLY think it's good they can nominate it.
Other ideas?
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yeah dat's the problem, some people don't vote guides down because they are too afraid to get downvotet themselves :/
Revenge votes, the #1 problem with this community IMO.