First of all, I apologize becaus of all the time it took.. I didnt think this could take all this time!
first bad news: it didnt work for the project I planned, it was a good sample, but it needed to be local or at least national. I guess I passes the boundaries.
good news: it is here! finally!!!! I cant belive it... just hope you like it and post your comments and appreciations about this I want to know what you think about this x-ray :).
I had not been in iSketch since ages, but I guess I'll join soon as I have winter vacations in about a month.. now I'm a little short in time, but I'll come and see your opinions and answer questions of there are any.
Thanks to everyone who helepd here, and also wanted to tel you that there's a mail with all this to iSketch feedback and to Rob who is in charge of the iSketch staff.

Links:

English summary

Spanish summary


Please respond survey in here or in the main site of the survey.

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wow, BenjaX. i'm very impressed, and i'm sorry that it didn't work out for the project you planned.

just a couple of things:
under "Nick Registrations" there's a link. i've clicked it a couple times, and it just sends me to some site advertising website hosting.

writing letters is usually not tolerated by an admin. perhaps the admin wasn't there to see it when the player wrote a full word, so i wouldn't exactly call it a "mistake."

i believe that quote is from a forum member's signature. :)

thanks for doing this, Benja. it was an interesting read for me.

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Thanks so much for the feedback! I was wondering when the results would be available! It's a shame that you couldn't use it though.

Best of luck for the future

Edit: Just gone through everything and it made for very interesting reading!

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Wow, a very well done to you, BenjaX! :) So sorry to hear that it didn't quite go as you had expected, but it's still very great. So much work went into that. It was very interesting to read all the comments :)

Look at us women taking over the world ;)

That was really interesting, well done! Like Gracie, I couldn't read the nick registrations part.

Good work!

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Nice!
Fun to see how popular the nickname registrations are.

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Wow that was interesting. Nice to see the effort put into this survey. Something that caught my eye in the comments that I completely disagree with:

"YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO WRITE letters not pertaining to the word"

You're welcome I enjoyed it, so it's not a big deal that it didnt work as it was planned, anyway it could help at improving the site, which would be beyond expectatives.

:) thanks, good luck to you too!

heh, women taking over the world!! it doesnt bother me, since that makes it better for us to choose from :D j/k

The registrations part is now fixed, it was a link into the same page, so you didnt miss anything

Yes, well there are any comments that may not be what we want to read, and maybe intended to be funny, but it's just that. In every sample there are extreme data (I gues is the transltaion) that is deleted. For example in hours/week playing online games, some put: 100000 hours, something impossible when weeks have only 168 :p

Yes!! they are, and it would help a lot to have that feature, because one could enter from another computer and have the buddy list, for example, or an amount of games won, or a ration between won/played games to make a ranking :) well there's a lot of ideas in the results, I hope this help for inspiration to the ones that can make such changes.

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Yeah, I've been thinking that it would be nice to have some form ranking type thing based on stats. Instead of newbie dots you could have different symbols or colours (yahoo games styley).

Funny that you mention it, I was just thinking the same thing about the statistics.

You could, for instance, add a score to the profile could be calculated as:
(W / N) x 100
W = amount of wins; N = number of games played.

But you'd have to let the numerator be influenced by the number of games, because if you would simply use (W / N) x 100 a newbie winning his first game would get a full score.

I've tried a couple of things, but I guess a better mathematician could come up with something...?

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playing isketch since 1999 and loving it? I think that's Finessa's.

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i'm baaaaaack!

Maybe it could be done in a way that to get a certain rating you need to have a certain amount of games AND a certain win percentage?

Edit:

I disagree...I don't think rankings would be fun or nice...

I don't see how rankings could actually be valid because there are so many ways stats are distorted: players just chatting game rooms, players only guessing and not drawing, players leaving just before the end of the game so the game played doesn't register on their stats...rankings would be quite meaningless...

My two cents.

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i disagree. i play yahoo games quite a lot, especially Yahoo Towers. almost everything is about a person's rating, and not the game. players can be kicked out of rooms for having too low a rating. it's not very fun.

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Statistical ratings and rankings are a great idea - but as many people use iSketch for chat rather than the game iself, such a system would give them a crap rating - but then I suppose the chatterboxes really couldn't give a fat rat's arse about rankings.

I wonder if we could ever split the screen or add a little more space at the bottom for a section called Personal Messages - NO CLUES OR HINTS ALLOWED.
MAYBE LIKE THIS:

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The reason people can get booted from playing with an other player (nothing wrong with not wanting to play with someone if they suck anyway) is that in most Yahoo things you get less points for beating someone with a rating much lower than yours. What we were suggesting would just be stats based. If anything, I think it would save people the hassle of joining a room where people draw "stork" as an apple stalk like the one I was just in: you'd at least know what sort of room you were in.

Edit: the other, and probably more significant reason is that on yahoo, if you get beaten by someone with a much lower rating, your own rating takes a plummet. Hence, people who like having a shiney badge aren't willing to risk too much.

My computer won't display the page =|

When's that ever happened though?

I don't understand what that would be for?

I think that's a great idea! I expect the newbies will get even more confused about what kind of letters are allowed and what are not, but that's okay. I'd love a PM box.

EDIT: tasha: a PM box would be for messages like lol/hi/bye when you want to respond to something in the chat box, but don't want people to think you're writing out a hint for the word.

If you want to play with people who know the difference between stork and stalk I think a room-ranking would be more useful than a player ranking. Maybe something along the lines of: Level 1: 'I can't spell' room; Level 5: 'I'm a brilliant speller'...I don't know what they could be called.

It'd make the game more confusing, but I wouldn't be opposed to playing with people who could spell - although I really don't think that they (players) should be ranked by their ability. They should be allowed to decide how good they are themselves and pick an appropriate room.

Having said that, I feel rather proud of myself sometimes when I manage to guess a word that's been drawn wrong

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That idea would make sense expect for the fact that such people are usually 110% convinced they are right.

Ooh, okay thanks. (I'm not gracie :P)

I don't think stats-based rooms would work particularly well. For one thing, if people are 'deciding how good they are themselves' then you'll end up with people thinking they're better than they are.
If they think a 'stork' is on top of an apple, then they probably think that's right.

Also, if you got an automatic rating based on the W/N x100 thing, and that determind what kind of rooms you could get into, then it wouldn't really fair, because someone might have a great rating if they only play in easy rooms, or someone might be playing expert & have a lower rating, even though in comparison, they're doing better.

Does that make sense? =/

tasha: Yeah it does... working out a valid ranking system wouldn't be easy!

sorry for calling you gracie, lol

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I think that would give us an excuse to start doing more PMs than usual, maybe. I wouldn't be surprised if the amount of messages would increase because of that section at the bottom. That might also create more votes to skip people, if they start to get carried away with the feature. Or if players get impatient about people not drawing. Sometimes you'll find players who know that PMs are not a form of cheating, but want to skip anyway, and are adament about letters not being used for a PM, even if they have read the rules. Even if it is just a 'bye'. Though I guess a PM box would make them realise that there is no need to argue over it.

However, on a general note though, like the /insult, /borg, etc commands. I can see that one creating more drama, too. :S I do think it's a clever idea, I just don't think it would work too well. I also think the rankings are a cool idea too, but again, not sure if it would work out too well - for the reasons that people have already stated. Also, in the PM box we might end up finding that those players who want to cheat by writing out their words might try to be clever about it and write it in the PM box (even in a sentence or something). So that might increase the ways that people cheat. lol, I can see a player saying "but I wasn't cheating, it was a PM", heh. And then the arguments would begin. *swears*.. *boots* lol. More irrelevant votes that admins have to chase.

my point is that in yahoo, the system makes it all about the rating, and not the game. no one can have very much fun, because most people aren't willing to let their rate plummet. people get kicked out because they're too good and the hosts don't want to lose their rating, or they're kicked out because they're too bad and take up space. people cheat for a long time just to get a high rating. it also gets quite exclusive, with the "elite" players and the rest of us. i guess it would be nice to "know what sort of room you were in" but i mean, you can figure that out almost right away. i just don't want iSketch to become very exclusive with very smug people that vote to kick once they see someone with a low rate.

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The chances of that happening are very small, when was the last time you saw anyone booted from a room at the moment for not winning often enough? And good players are already booted for winning too often sometimes so I dont see what difference ratings would make to this.

I know what you mean about Yahoo being like that though, I wouldn't want iSketch to adopt a Social, Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced sort of idea (relating to abilty, not word list); I was making the Yahoo comparison because they have colours (which cover quite a range) and tournament info in your profile etc.

For most people the rating would stabilise at a sort of equilibrium and missing a few games due to chat would have little effect. These chatty folk would only be seriously affected if they spend many more games chatting than playing, in which case they shouldn't care anyway. The rating system suggested is based on percentages, so is more stable than the Yahoo one where you get different points based on who you beat. Yahoo has the option to play unrated games, this could also be done in iSketch, apparantly it would be reasonably popular.

I was just saying that /stats is distorted, and chatting is one of the reasons why it couldn't be relied on (to make a ranking system).

I agree with you, gracie, mostly. I don't think in iSketch people will get booted for having a low/high rate, but I do think we'll end up having, as you said I do not want that.

What kind of rankings are you talking about, if not based on ability??

This is getting complicated...

To be honest, I like the simplicity of iSketch. Just log on, pick a room, play, chat, leave... With different types of rooms to pick so that you can fiddle with your ranking and whatnot, it's become more of a competition to get ranks and statuses than a simple online game.

I think I will always stick to the unrated games - i.e. the one we have now. I think iSketch is pretty fine as it is. I don't mind amendments to it, but a ranking system, sorry, not my cup of tea; it's doing too much to a beautifully simple game.

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