SF Update - Patch Sorting, Guest Voting & God Page Visuals

Thanks for the explanations Wayne. So I do liked everything with just this little thought about the guests voting. I really appreciate your (and everyone behind the upgrades) efforts to make this site even better.

To point on the current rating system, the biggest thing it does is create confusion.

A guide with 1 upvote shows about 60% of the bar is filled. It makes you think it got a score of 60%. It is absolutely not related to 1 upvote 0 downvotes.

That confusion, to most of us, seems more negative overall than seeing a # of downvotes on your guide. At least with seeing # of up and downvotes, you immediately understand where you're at.

All voting systems flaws show the most when there are insufficient votes to have any proper comparison. Like you mentioned with the 1 vote guide, 1 vote is not enough to know the true rating of that guide, and essentially all rating systems depend on having enough points of data (elo, MMR, bayesian) to be accurate.

Our guide ratings are weighted. The more votes a guide has the more confidence the system has in the accuracy of the score. Without this, a 1 upvote guide would be 100%, and be at the top of the listings, which I think we can agree is not a good idea.

Smite Guru's guides are also ranked by vote weighting, they just choose to show the up/down votes instead of the weighted score - we show the weighted score. This is somewhat a matter of preference. We show the end result of the calculation, they show the raw input.

Now, since less users have been logging in to vote, that has given our guides a harder time getting enough votes to reach a proper rating. This would be true no matter how we chose to display our scores, and that is why we've chosen to take this step first. In order to rate guides we need to know which guides the SMITEFire community finds most helpful, and for that we need them to vote.

You guys are amazing, you give your time and passion to the community, log in every day, write your own guides and even help others with their guides. Most of SMITEFire's users don't do that. They hop on to figure out how to build the god they want to play, then they hop off - but they are still the people your guides are written to help, and their voice matters. We're just making it much easier for them to share their opinion with you - because we think you guys deserve to know just how many SMITE players found your guides helpful. :)

I hope that helps clear things up a bit. I'm covering the night shift while Wayne is asleep and I'll be here if you have any more questions or concerns!

Thank you for the detailed explanation, Mowen, and you make some very good points. Let's see how this new system works.

I'm still against it, simply because I think the increase in "voting" will give bad guides recognition they don't deserve.

This new system will also make it more difficult for people who actively give feedback on new guides while downvoting troll/bad guides. Example: Let's say someone makes a crit loki build. Me, bran, kriega downvote it. On the flip side, 2 guests upvote and 1 guest downvotes. This +2/-1 vote will be the dominant display. That guide will create a false image to newer players. This is the serious issue with this site all of us regulars are working so hard to fix.

Now with all that being said, Bran did want to give it a chance. If Bran is ok with it, then I'll give it a chance too before voicing any further opinions.

Also another example: let’s say Bran doesen’t republish his Loki Build/Guide every patch/constantly, then more recent Loki builds will have more priority - as in builds that should never been seen by casual players will be given priority on the build page simply for being recent. This is especially a problem as archiving rules are too strict in some cases.

Jesuz guys, I guess we are complaining too much even before we see if it will work or not

In most cases it doesen’t work to allow guest voting. Smiteguru has some questionable builds/tierlist (there are decent ones but I’m not talking about them) that have more upvotes than they really should have. The people who play arena and stomp with an awful build against some of the worst Smite has to offer may upvote such terrible builds.

Not complaining. Just skeptical, and trying to explain why I'm skeptical. But if Bran will move forward with it, then I'll save future criticism/debate for later.

I understand everyone's reservations, as I have them too. But instead of just saying it's not going to work, you need to use the system, participate, and provide actual proof to the devs that what has been implemented is not working to their expectations.

And who knows, maybe it will work better than we think. The devs have put in work to improve the site. The least we can do is try it.

So I ask again, please make an effort to review builds, comment on them, and vote. Please make an effort who provide constructive criticism and educate, not inflame and provoke with sarcasm. Let's give ourselves a chance to provide hard data that we can use to further improve the site.