Closed Guide Competition

Many fellow forum addicts are considering creating guides for the community, which I think is awesome! I'd like to suggest a contest held every so often for people who write guides much like the default avatar competition just recently. People might think that I might be suggesting this because I make guides all the time and want a certain reward out of it, but that's not entirely the case.

I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't mind trying my best to write a guide for a potential reward, but that will never deter me from giving my very best in every guide I make.

In my opinion, guides and helpful references on the forum really motivate the community and adds value when sharing knowledge and information amongst each other. People that make guides genuinely want to help and really drives the point home when giving back to the community.

I'd love to see something like an NX reward or a special chair reward for a favorite guide picked by the players or even a cool new symbol next to your name on the forum like a meso icon for donating. If this is something that others find interesting, please support this idea.

I'm looking forward to seeing all the new guides that people have in store for the future!

 

I can only support this idea because of obvious reasons. I, however, don't think it should be an in-game reward; the forum reward, such as an icon, would be a good reward, maybe with an appropriate title.

Everyone should only be able to participate with one of their guides, too, since there's some people (Plenty I'm looking at you and myself!) that have more guides.

 

I do and dont like this idea. Any time you reward people for doing something that normally they would just do out of kindness/selflessness, you'll get people who will start doing it *just* for the reward. And then the quality decreases drastically. The same idea would happen if we rewarded people who reported bugs- you'd get the handful who would report helpful things, and then you'd get a lot of "fluff" reports that aren't helpful at all.

 

I was part of a huge competition a few times in other forum sites much bigger than MapleRoyals and it went well. I've never seen this problem before because people took this seriously. As it stands now, there aren't many guides that are made outside of a few people and those of them who did make guides don't update the sections that need updating it add any new content to them.

I personally wouldn't mind looking at even lukewarm guides. In the beginning, I also made lukewarm guides when I started drafting multiple guides, but it was never done on purpose and I was still learning all the tricks.

@Marty proposed that we would make a 'Guide Guide' together in preparation for this event. Setting a standard early should avoid hastily made guides.

 

This 'Guide Guide' could possibly used as guideline (quite literally) for the staff to judge the guides and delete them if they don't fulfill a set of requirements. I'll discuss this in detail with a staff member, @Katsuruka possibly, since she's Forum Mod.

 

The whole 'Guide Guide' was always a joke for people that often read my guides. Feels kind of ironic seeing it potentially coming to life.

Although, I don't think it's fair to say that between our guides that there is a key formula to making a guide to a certain standard.

With that aside, if it's possible, I propose that the icon reward be chosen by the winner whether it be MapleRoyals related or not. (Hinting at Jolteon icon )

 

My guide numero Uno. http://royals.ms/forum/threads/advanced-guide-to-mr-pickalls-gambling-game.14227/

IN all seriousness, what else is there to make a guide about?

 

There's so many things you can write a guide about.. for example job guides.

@Plenty I know, but we have several guides on the forum, so we are most likely in a better position to make one than most others. And of course, we should use input from others, too.

 

• Class specific guides
• DPS charts
• Optimal equipment
• Quest guides
• 'Guide Guide'
• Bossing for certain classes (Positioning, optimal HP, HP/MP warning, etc.)
• Capping stats
• More training guides
• Job advancement guide

I could go on for a while, but you get the idea.

 

This pretty much sums up how I feel, too. It would be nice to acknowledge and say a little "thank you" to those who have written really helpful guides, but at the same time, I really wouldn't want to say anyone writing guides for a contest to get a reward.

Note to self: Implementing a number of subject tags for the Guide section might help when finding a specific guide: Eg "Magician" "Warrior" "Marketplace" "General". (Yes, I pulled an allnighter and have had no sleep, so bright ideas for tags are not forthcoming right now)

 

I've gotten a few people on board with the reward and they thought it was interesting enough to actually being a guide they had in mind to fruition.

I've seen this contest being implemented on another forum site that it's yielded some very good results. In fact, this contest is what got me writing guides and ever since then, I've been trying to strive for perfection on each and everyone one I made for the reason I posted on the ordinal post.

Perhaps not an in game reward is nessesary, but something like a custom icon for those who make outstanding guides is in order.

Also for the tag idea, I think if the title is blunt enough, people should gravitate to that guide that they are searching for anyway. No need for all those additional colors and titles.

 

Tags allow you to search the bottom by prefixes, making sorting easier.

 

I think moving out deleting thread from the guide section that either are outdated or don't belong there to condense space is a better solution.

 

Although i've never made a guide nor do I plan on it, I do think that the people who make guides deserve some recognition i.e. a special title or icon. There are two people on the Forums who actively do Guides (Plenty & Marty). With this being said, Guides are obviously meant to help others who aren't sure on how to do certain things. While Guides are usually made out of the kindness of one's heart, It would be nice for the people who make well-put together guides to get some sort of title or whatnot.

 

^ This. There's so many "guides" in the guides section that, to be honest, don't qualify as an actual guide.

As to the prefixes, what could also be added is the complexity, length, etc. of the guide, e.g. "in-depth", "comprehensive", etc.

Anyways, @Plenty, I'm working on some drafts of a possible 'Guide guide', how about we get that going?

Edit: What should also be taken out of the Guide section are links to guides on other websites (maybe those can be collected in a sticky thread if they're fitting for MapleRoyals? People can Google...) and people asking questions or asking if they know a guide; this doesn't fit the Guide section but the Help & Advice section. At least, in my opinion.

 

The tags make for a better long-term solution, though, as the number of guides gradually increases.

 

With tags you mean possible prefixes for guides, e.g. "Fresh", "In-Depth", "Outdated", etc.? That'd be a great thing to have... But I think there's more important matters right now than sorting the Guides section.

 

No, I mean labelling the guides by type, so it's easy to find, for example, a guide to making a DrK.

 

Would that even be necessary? This is normally something made clear in the title, and there's so many possible types of guides that this would lead to a long list of tags. Just my two cents on that.