Development News (v2.1)

[Gary]

As most of you are aware we've had several problems with the rating system; people have been making multiple accounts, decks are being downvoted just to get them out of the top 15 on the homepage. To sum up; the voting system just doesn't work very well, it's worthless.

All of this caused us to start working on a solution, we needed to find a fix for this even if it meant replacing the entire voting system and starting from scratch, it's worthless anyway, right?

We have indeed been working on a solution and believe we have found a way to fix it; remove the need to downvote other decks by removing the top rated decks from the homepage and then switch to a bayesian averaging system (similar to imdb.com). People will be able to vote from 0.00 to 10.00 (up to 2 decimal places) and these will then be averaged using the bayesian formula but only once the deck has received a set amount of votes. The bayesian average rating will be shown on each deck along with stars and the total number of votes. Hopefully all of this will allow decks to have a true (and therefore meaningful) rating rather than take into account the hundreds of down votes that have been given simply to increase the chance of their own decks hitting the homepage.

Did we forget to mention that accounts setup just to vote decks down won't work because the average will be worked out using a weighting based on that account's previous votes? A rating of 0 from an account that has voted way lower on decks than those decks average rating will be worthless! You also won't be able to vote on your own decks anymore, cheaters!

So, we've got a solution - why haven't we launched it yet?

We've found other stuff to do! Ian and I have been talking a lot about the sites recently and how we can improve them; there's so much that can be done, we know it and I'm sure everyone here does too. We decided that rather than just release a solution for the rating disaster we might as well do a couple of improvements and launch it all together, so for version 2.1 we're hoping to get the following done:

• Rating system - Bayesian averaging system replacing the old rating system; bye bye cheaters.
• User profiles - Your new personal "hub" will become the center of your vault world.
• Friends system - you will be able to follow any user and any user will be able to follow you.
• Activity stream - an active news feed of everything you and your friends are doing.
• Private messaging - Send PMs to the users that are following/mutual friends with you.
• Improved deck search - New deck searching options, find the decks you're looking for!
• Improved card search - Better card searching options.
• Bulk importer - A faster way to create decks if you have a list of cards.
• Nested comments - rather than your comment being six below the one you're responding to.

As well as our old favourites:

• Ability to delete decks
• Ability to delete your own comments
• Ability to report abusive users

The only problem with wanting to do all of this rather than just one thing is of course it all takes time, I originally said in a couple of decks to do with rating problems that we'd be working to release stuff by the beginning of December but we're now working on all this stuff and I'd say we're only about 50% done. We know there's other stuff people want too; deck stats etc but we can't do everything! The list above is what we've chosen to do for this release so anything else will be have to go into the running for next time, we'll get around to it eventually but we need to do this in managable chunks.

So with all this said I'll leave you by asking that you to be patient with us; we are working on the sites and even if nothing is going live yet know that when we do get around to launching all of this it will improve the vault experience for everyone. In the meantime I'd ignore the current rating system if I were you!

[PaladinPlus]

First off, I want to thank all of you guys for the great resources you have given us. It has been a huge resource for me and others I know. "Take your time, do it right, they'll wait." as I always say. Keep up the good work!

[Trajian]

Originally Posted by PaladinPlus

"Take your time, do it right, they'll wait."

I second this motion. Phenomenal job fellas.