Some improve site suggestion-Overhal the whole system

Overhaul the whole system.
Wait, come back! Don't run away, hear me out please. I've done a lot of thinking about this issue lately, and I think I've finally figured it all out. It's a lot of work, but I believe it'll lead to a better Smitefire in the long run. Also, you can't say you didn't ask for this ;p

The basic core idea is to separate "Builds" and "Guides" into their own categories. Right now, they're basically the same, and grouped together as such. It's confusing and leads to bad guides and bad builds alike.

In my separated system, a "Build" would simply be the items at the top, and no more than a paragraph below explaining why those items work in that build. No formatting is required, just the basics. There would be very few guidelines to follow, and people would be able to share whatever builds they want, others can vote up or down, and everyone can discuss the build in the comments. You can sort by daily/weekly/monthly top-rated builds, hottest builds, etc.

In my separated system, a "Guide" would be held to much higher standards. It would fulfill the job of guiding new players as they take their first steps into playing a certain god. Builds would not appear at the top of a Guide, they would appear either at the bottom, or inside a specific builds-related chapter. Instead, the table of contents and the opening chapter, usually an Introduction, are seen first, welcoming players into the world of playing that god. Simple formatting of some kind is required for ease of reading (either through a bot, or manual moderating - I talk more about that further down).

It would probably help to guide the guide-makers, to be sure they know exactly what's expected of them in making a Guide. That is, make the table of contents for them, like a base or a skeleton, and let them fill it in, then allow them to add extra chapters as needed. If you think that's a little too controlling, there's also the option of having a set of rules posted, and forcing players to read them before submitting a Guide. Then you can make whatever punishments you want related to not reading the rules.

If you go with the first option, here's my rough draft of a "skeleton guide":

Introduction

Basic How to Play God

What abilities actually do

Combos between abilities

What to Build on God and Why (build could be inserted into this chapter?)

Core Items

Usual build

Situational item alternatives

Advanced How to Play God

How to act in the PvP game modes (play safe/be aggressive in the early/mid/late game, focus on farming minions/singling people out for kills, group up with team/backdoor towers, etc.) (I couldn't think of a great name for this)

Note: Allow people to sort guides based on which modes are discussed, to incentivize guide-makers to discuss more modes so their guides are seen more often.

Conclusion

Changelog (optional?)

This is, again, just a rough draft of a skeleton, but you get the idea. It's a lot more work. But, I believe that work is justified. The guide-makers are claiming themselves to be knowledgeable enough about a certain god to be trusted as a teacher for others to follow. If the guide-makers are telling the truth, they'll have no problem whatsoever writing up all of that information, because they already know it. Also, all of that information is necessary if new players are really going to learn anything. You can't half-*** a Guide in my system.

Now I'll return back to the issue of moderation. For "Builds", no moderation is needed. The voting and comments will easily take care of that, and there will be so many builds getting submitted, that it would be impossible to do even if you tried.

For "Guides", moderation is necessary. Not a lot of it is needed, just a simple check to make sure all areas of the skeleton are filled out, and a check to make sure it's not a giant grey wall of text. I talked with u/branmuffin17 about this a while back. In the current system, manual moderation is totally impossible because there is just too much stuff being submitted. In my system, however, I've eliminated most of that traffic by separating "Builds" and "Guides", making manual moderation feasible. To elaborate, there will many very many Builds coming in, but only occasional Guides. It doesn't have to be instant or anything, just going through a backlog of new guides and doing a quick glance over them. Of course, this relies on the moderators' collective cooperation, and you all might not want the extra work. If you think it'll be too much, there are other options.

Alternatively, you could code a bot to review newly submitted Guides and check for a series of parameters. Parameters that would only be found on trash guides, or that wouldn't be found on good guides. The exact parameters might be tricky. One idea would be to look for a lack of any line breaks or brackets in the guide. Even the most rudimentary formatting has brackets or line breaks, and thus, only gray walls of text would lack them. It wouldn't be too harsh, because even one simple indent, icon, or item/god reference would pass the whole guide through. This is just an idea, and admittedly, I have little experience working with bots. I'm not sure about the back-end code of your website, but it might also be possible to code those parameters into the Guide submission process, so that a guide literally can't be submitted unless it meets the requirements. That's just another idea, and again, I admittedly have little back-end code experience. I've always been a front-end guy.

So, now that the existing site features and site moderation have been covered, let's talk new features.

Tierlists. Let us rank gods based on whatever conditions we like. SmiteGuru already has this, but Smitefire could use it too, both for the betterment of Smitefire and for being able to compete with other similar sites. In my system, Tierlists would basically be a third category and operate exactly like Builds. You'd give the Tierlist a name, drag and drop the gods into the different categories (SS-D), and write a few notes above or below it about what the tier list is attempting to compare. Tierlists would also have voting, comments, sorting, etc., just like Builds.

A new Streams page. You currently have "SmiteTV", but barely anyone uses that. At the top should be a small section devoted to Hirez's own official Twitch channel, HiRezTV. It should say if Hirez is currently streaming, and have a link to that stream. If Hirez is not streaming, it should link to their most recent video. On the front page, either where you post announcements or in its own separate section, you could have some kind of automated bot posting Hirez's official streams for people to watch. Aside from that, designing this page can go many ways. You could have a list of popular Smite streamers' Twitch and/or Youtube channels on one side with a red light next to their name if they are currently streaming. Clicking on the streamer's name should link to the stream. One option could be having the top three Smite streamer's videos, ranked by current viewers, featured. You could have an integrated chat room separate from Twitch and have some equivalent of an automoderator to censor stuff, although that might be tricky.

There's a lot of ways to go about it, but in general, the Streams page will have to be up to par with Twitch's basic functions, or else people will simply go directly to Twitch instead. That's what's happening right now, in fact. In that case, why have a SmiteTV page at all? If you don't go big and rework it, you might as well remove it entirely.

Update the site's layout. Remember how I said I was more of a front-end guy? I don't need words for this, I'll show you. That image assumes you've taken my previous advice, just for clarification. Aside from that, I also get a very "stuck in season 1" vibe from the aesthetics. Smite back in Season 1 was black and gold themed, like Smitefire is now. Smite today is blue and brown/gold themed, and Smitefire should consider changing their colors to match. That said, I actually do like the dark theme, and Hirez is reworking Smite's UI again when Season 5 arrives, so updating the visuals now is optional I guess.

And, um, yeah that's pretty much all I've got. I spent over two and a half hours writing and rewriting this, so I hope something good comes of it. Finally, thank you for giving me the time of day. I'm sure reading this was painful, so I appreciate it.

We don't have enough reliable contributers to make many guides (especially in a similar format to the one you listed), the community manager/one of the moderators was supposed to help with this but I haven't seen much to come from it.



Wait a minute... Season 5? Something here is very odd.

gotta say the guide build divide is kinda happening already only the "automatic" parameters are bad (10000 characters or something to be a guide or a build)

honestly I would also suggest you to take a look to MOBAfire as that is pretty much where development goes to the most. function and look wise.

Hey amitroyal,

You have some good ideas here...but a lot of what you're requesting might be fairly difficult to implement. Like you, I'm mostly front-end rather than behind the scenes, and so programming, creating bots, etc., are all over my head.

That said, there IS a semi-differentiation between builds and guides, though the only "bot" that works to differentiate is based on # of characters written. So a build remains listed as a build if it has a small writeup (or basically no writeup at all).

Further to that point, when you go to the "God Guides" page (accessed by clicking that phrase/box at the top of the page), it defaults to those identified as guides, and doesn't list just builds. You can look for builds, but it means you have to change the option from "full guide" to either "build only" or "all."


I do admit, a different presentation of this might be helpful. Maybe a column for guides, and a column for builds, though that would be easier to use on a PC screen than a mobile device.

But I'm thinking that creating a bot to help identify what might be a quality guide (or at least worthy of allowing it to be posted) is a lot more difficult than it might sound. The other option, as you'd mentioned, is manual moderation. Though, if we had enough time and/or enough people, it might work, determinations would still be subjective. We really do need to give people the opportunity to post, whether it's good or bad. Posting bad builds/guides, and listening to feedback, is sometimes the best way to start the improvement process. Not allowing those bad ones to be posted immediately prevents that possibility for improvement. Also, if that was implemented, that would somewhat negate the use of a voting system. Either they'd be approved and basically given a thumbs up, or not approved and given a thumbs down.

Or...you might say that the manual moderation would have us not allow a current post, but provide feedback on how they might improve so we can reconsider for approval. That would also take a lot of time for those moderators, and as of right now, it just doesn't seem reasonable to expect that.

There are other parts that would be very difficult to have others adhere to...requiring chapters reduces flexibility of those creating "guides" to write about the things they want. Maybe they want it to be an in-depth build and tips/tricks guide, but created the guide with the intent of targeting generally experienced players rather than new ones...so they might not want to go in-depth on things like general ability use, or how to play whatever role in a simplistic format for newer readers. Or requiring them to read and agree to a certain standard...don't know how we'd implement that.

We do have a "quick chapters" section in the build creator to help give people ideas for subjects. That is personally about as much direction as I'd be comfortable giving...though maybe as a slight compromise, perhaps we can have the start of the build creator automatically populate those chapters. (They don't actually show up in a guide unless there are characters written inside them, so they wouldn't have to actually use them if they didn't want).


One other idea that I think might actually work okay would be, rather than just a build creator, the creator first starts with an option...create a build, or create a guide. If they choose build, they can still write whatever and however much they want, but it will only ever be listed in the build listing.

As for choosing to create a guide, they won't be able to publish until they have enough characters that the site's regulations recognize it as a guide. Total characters is still probably the best solution outside of manual moderation. I do like that concept, giving people the option of it being a guide or a build. If we could get to a point where we could display builds and guides in separate columns or something, that seems like it could be very functional.

Again, those aren't bad ideas you've proposed, but they've definitely been discussed internally prior to your post here...there have been a lot of ideas tossed around, and some of those ideas go against the spirit of the site, in being able to freely post your thoughts/concepts. Yes, it could definitely lead to much better content overall, but it might also limit things so much that people don't want to bother taking the time to post due to the various restrictions...and that's a recipe for a dead site.

Definitely appreciate your feedback and the time you spent to lay it all out. We will definitely discuss some of these things internally.

What we really need are more people posting quality builds and people who do post builds to be receptive to constructive feedback and explain why they chose items and/or builds that aren't considered effective. Also, the community as a whole needs to stop lambasting the site and start actually contributing, but that's a pipe dream that I don't see happening. As I've said before, you get out of the site what you put in: if all you do is complain about it, nothing will happen. However, if you actively participate, you improve the overall quality of information here. "If you don't vote, you can't *****."

Kriega's instincts were correct on this one. This post is copied from a reddit comment from 2017. It also included a seemingly unrelated link which I've removed. Seems like it was just meant to draw attention and get clicks on the one link in the post.

I'll leave the thread up if you guys want to discuss some of these things further, but I wouldn't bother directing comments at OP. Bran I think your idea of publishing as a build or guide separately isn't bad since it would improve clarity, but it might be a little annoying for those who are right on the edge of qualifying for guide-hood. They'd have to add more content and switch their guide type over to Full Guide which might cause more problems than just some people not understanding the character minimum.

It's always good to get more feedback about what you guys would like to see in the future for the site. It's just too bad that this particular thread was just copied from an old reddit comment. :/

Well damn that fooled me. Ugh.

I don't see how this is different than what is in place now other than having to select "Guide" instead of "Build".

Also, we've only had 4 new guides created in the past month. How many people are you worried this small change would scare away?

The difference is that while it's clearer what's happening, it requires more action on the user's part to put themselves in the correct category, rather than the site doing it automatically for them. I don't think this would meaningfully cut down on the number of cases where someone is confused on the distinction between builds and guides.

This kind of change requires dev work which means they have to take time away from other projects to make it happen. I'd need a good justification to pitch the idea to them in order for it to happen, but in my eyes it seems more like a net neutral change.

When the devs have time to work on SF projects, I think their time would be better spent on more substantial improvements like a notification system.