Unlocking Stories - An Update to the Reputation System

[Claire]

You might be wondering, what are these two new symbols next to the notification bell?



Star: That is your current reputation. If you click on it, it will redirect you to your reputation page that shows you who rated which of your posts how high and when.

Diamond: The number next to the diamond are your RC, your Ravishment Coins. RC is the forum's currency and its primary purpose is to allow you to unlock stories in the Community Favorites board. Unlocking a story costs 100 RC for normal users, and only 50 RC for Pillars of the Community (users with Reputation 50 or higher). You earn RC by gaining reputation, 100 RC for one reputation point. So each reputation point let's you unlock exactly one story. Over time, we will lkely add different ways to spend your RC.

Ravishment Coin is a provisional name. We would like to hear suggestions from you what we should call our forum currency.

If you go to the Community Favorites board, then most likely you will see a lock-symbol next to Record Chaser that looks like this:



If that is what you see, then the story is locked. But if the lock-symbol is open like this:



Then you can read the story in the usual manner.



There are three ways to unlock a story:

1) You enter the locked topic and pay 100 RC to unlock it. If you have 100 RC you should see this:



Check the confirmation checkbox, click the button, and you're good to go.

If you don't have enough points, you will see this:



If you don't have enough points, read some other story, leave a genuine feedback comment and earn at least one reputation point for your post. That's all it takes and you're good to go.


2) You might be worried that you might shut yourself out from reading a story if you support our authors. This is where the second way to unlock a story comes in handy. If you comment on a story before it becomes a Community Favorite and that post receives a positive rating from at least one user, then that will be enough for the story to be unlocked. Let's look at an example:

The story next in line to become a Community Favorite is @Shocker's Fugitives. When that happens, @joey will have access to the story even without paying 100 RC because of this post:

viewtopic.php?p=3029#p3029

He left a feedback comment on the story and I gave that post a rating. That is enough for @joey to unlock Fugitives once it becomes a Community Favorite. The rating doesn't even need to be from the author, a rating from anybody will do. So even if @joey were to decide to upgrade his rating of Fugitives and that upgrade would push the story above 60 points, it wouldn't hurt @joey at all.

The point is: If you truly support our authors here, you will never be punished for that. All the stories that you comment on and rate will stay available to you even after they become Community Favorites.


3) A story will also be unlocked for you if you are the author (technically: topic creator), moderator or admin.


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So, if you haven't unlocked Record Chaser yet, go and do so! If you encounter any bugs, please let us know. If the unlock doesn't work although you have 100 RC or more, please tell us. If you have access to Record Chaser even though you shouldn't, let us know that too. Don't worry, we'll reward every legitimate bug report with 5 reputation points, so you won't lose access to the story even after the bug is fixed.

If you're new here and you're curious about the highest rated story, then go now and read, comment and rate another story and gain that first reputation point. And to our authors: If you get good feedback on a story, please make sure you rate that feedback back. Our mods and admins will help with making sure that readers who write feedback get reputation. But your support in rating feedback posts is much appreciated.

Before I end this post, I want to assuage one final concern: You will not see the vast majority of stories suddenly becoming Community Favorites and having to be unlocked. I always aimed for the following distribution of stories:

90% Public - 8% Popular - 2% Community Favorites

We currently have 440 stories on the board. So that would be 396 Public Stories, 35 Popular Stories and 9 Community Favorites.

We are currently far away from reaching those shares and if we ever exceeded them, we would adjust the reputation thresholds for Popular Stories and Community Favorites to lower them. So help us get a few more stories into the Popular Stories and Community Favorites boards so that our authors get more feedback and all of us more stories!

I hope to read a comment from someone who unlocked Record Chaser soon.

[AdmiralPiet]

@Claire
Unlocking seems to work without issue.
Now, what to do with the remaining 14k RC

[Claire]

@AdmiralPiet Thanks for testing!

Now, what to do with the remaining 14k RC

The rich man's problem.

But seriously, is there anything you would like to be buyable on the forum? I can't promise you anything because I can't code new features myself. But we absolutely want to add more value for earning RC over time.

[Shocker]

@AdmiralPiet Thanks for testing!

Now, what to do with the remaining 14k RC

The rich man's problem.

But seriously, is there anything you would like to be buyable on the forum? I can't promise you anything because I can't code new features myself. But we absolutely want to add more value for earning RC over time.

I think the unlocking is a good thing, as for buying more stuff, not a fan of that let’s all get rich here )

[Shocker]

@AdmiralPiet Thanks for testing!

Now, what to do with the remaining 14k RC

The rich man's problem.

But seriously, is there anything you would like to be buyable on the forum? I can't promise you anything because I can't code new features myself. But we absolutely want to add more value for earning RC over time.

I think the unlocking is a good thing, as for buying more stuff, not a fan of that let’s all get rich here

[AdmiralPiet]

The rich man's problem.

But seriously, is there anything you would like to be buyable on the forum? I can't promise you anything because I can't code new features myself. But we absolutely want to add more value for earning RC over time.

Hard to say. But you either have to up the price or limit the amount you can amass if you don't find anything.
I have right now enough to unlock hundreds of stories, while the current offering is one.
But that might hurt the intended goal when the threshold becomes higher.

I am above the average user here, but me and a number of users will collect lots of coins.

I was once on another forum that had a game section.
Just basic stuff like Solitaire or minesweeper. Perhaps there is a way to use coins for playing.
So you have to comment to keep on doing that. But why go through hoops to play minigames? Would have to be something special.

Maybe buy cosmethic stuff? Like a bigger avatar?

[Claire]

Hard to say. But you either have to up the price or limit the amount you can amass if you don't find anything.
I have right now enough to unlock hundreds of stories, while the current offering is one.
But that might hurt the intended goal when the threshold becomes higher.

That's not an issue for me to be honest. The purpose of story unlocking is to get people to stop lurking. Unlocking stories is not meant to be difficult. And if we ever have 20+ stories to unlock, then it's ok if unlocking that amount remains easy too. We're no trying to turn this ino a difficult challenge like we are designing a game with a high difficuly level. The message is: Whether people comment or not on stories is what decides whether the community has a future or not. And the low unlock cost is meant to ease people into actually helping the community. So if people like you who have been participating a lot recently end up with a ton of coins to spare, that's great because communicates exacly the right thing in my book: it doesn't take much to have a positive impact on the community. If you put just minimal effort into this, you will have no trouble at all unlocking all stories. I said several times in the past, we just need a couple dozen people maybe who do as little as comment on three stories per week on average. And any user who does that, should have more than enough rep and RC to become a Pillar quickly and to unlock everything we have to offer.

I was once on another forum that had a game section.
Just basic stuff like Solitaire or minesweeper. Perhaps there is a way to use coins for playing.
So you have to comment to keep on doing that. But why go through hoops to play minigames? Would have to be something special.

Maybe buy cosmethic stuff? Like a bigger avatar?

Cosmetics was also something I was thinking about. A bigger avatar I don't know. The forum will always scale the image to fit into the post template.

[AdmiralPiet]

Cosmetics was also something I was thinking about. A bigger avatar I don't know. The forum will always scale the image to fit into the post template.

In that other forum I mentioned avatars could only be very small in the old days. I remember it being kind of a big deal when it was announced the new max size was 150px by 150px. Before that the common user could only use up to 90x90 or so. Mods and Admins had bigger ones than the standard user. But that was back in 2007.