The need to separate good cdlc from unfinished/bad one

[JayEm]

As it is right now, downloading cdlc is a complete shot in the dark. We have no idea if the customs we download will be accurate, have a good tone, well synced, etc. I havent downloaded any cdlc for this reason. I tried about 5 and were all pretty bad. I believe a way to distinguish good dlc is imperative. 

 

Idea:

 

1.- Assign a "tester" status to several trust worthy members. 

2.- Any member can report or signal cdlc, promting a tester to see if it is indeed a good custom

3.- Have 3 sections:

    a ) Submitted cdlc

    b )Awaiting testing section

    c )Approved section

 

The flow would go like this

User A submits a song

User B thinks the song is ready, so he signals the testers and the song gets moved to awaiting testing section

User C(a tester) sees if the song is official dlc worthy material

Song gets moved to approved, or the tester provides feedback

 

Testers can enter the awaiting testing section at any time and try any song on the list.

 

Thoughts?

[Aludog]

I always liked the idea of cooperative custom creation (that was the idea behind my CCCP thread on SA if anybody remembers that :D) but it's hard to get people working together; really hard actually. It works if interests align but that seldom happens or if there's someone that really likes helping out and is actually able to do it; something that's even rarer.

The same thing applies to fixing other peoples customs. And another problem with that: it's often more work than starting from scratch and therefore not worth the trouble. I did it only twice and in both cases the end results were acceptable but not up to my usual standard because I had to work with a setup that was already there. Without full control of the creation process, the whole thing can grumble because of a single mistake that was introduced before you even started working on the broken CDLC.

I'm not saying it's impossible to fix other peoples mistakes but only that I can understand the reluctance to invest valuable time to make them work as they were supposed to from the start. It's also not very feasible to have people go fixing other peoples mistakes. It would be wiser to try and educate those who release broken customs about how to fix the problems themselves (at least as far as they are capable of doing so) although I know that many of them are unresponsive, in which case they should just be ignored and their work deleted if it is broken to such a degree where it wouldn't pay off to fix the actual release.

 

So in short: Not fixing customs but educating about proper charting has to be the long term solution and that's why we should really focus on establishing a sort of "charting school" where pro's can give newcomers hands-on advice about the whole process. Tutorials are nice and all but specific questions arise all the time and the need to answer them appropriately and in due time is important for keeping someone starting out from losing interest or cutting corners. Let's make this the priority. Fixing customs should only be necessary if all else fails.

[Alex360]

I always liked the idea of cooperative custom creation (that was the idea behind my CCCP thread on SA if anybody remembers that :D) 

I still has that trello account :D

 

about eduaction, I tried to star that vvave, but I need apletform and more spare time for that, I already see there lots of good charters, unfortunately I'm not the one vvho'll organise pipeline...

[TomSawyer2112]

I'm an educator in sports, and to reach my youngsters, they must bring in the required qualities :

self - motivation 

self - respect.

 

If they come for Glory, or think they are better, I give them a hard time. 

About education : I like "Whiplash".

 

That's about the same for charters : 

"Look I made 100 cDLC, 2000 downloads", chances are they may not be that good,

when main errors from my list can be read unhealed on their pages.

Summersong made 500dl and never worked. Not a quality sign.

 

After a time of discussion, of patience and waiting,

comes the time of Action.

:D I'm the hunter : be afraid, be very afraid :D

:D Who you're gonna call : Bad_DLC_Busters :D

[TheWhiteMan]

Another thing is why re-upload something that has already over 500+ dlc its fucking pointless since someone else has already and probably already offered and fixed as much of the cdlc they could.

 

Unless a verified charter comes along and does it themselves. That would be the only reason I would re-download a song/cdlc

[Berneer]

While we await a solution for this issue this is what I do in order to decide if I download (obviously there are exceptions):

 

1. If known (to me) quality magna charter - I download

2. If not yet known (to me) charter and a magna charter has left positive comment - I download

3. If not yet known (to me) charter and then if there is no playthrough or no RR (if he/she cannot do the easy stuff ...) or only 1 arrangement (sign of someone who copied tab verbatim or non-completionist) or no vocals (vocals inclusion is an indication of completionist effort) - I do not download

4. If not yet known (to me) charter but the charter has written meaningful posts in the past (I will check), then I try to find time to coach them with whatever knowledge I have. Contrary to my suggestion in point 2 I tend to write my feedback in personal messages in case the person might be sensitive to having mistakes exposed. If the person doesn't answer within a week, I post the feedback on the posting topic.

 

So in the interim magna charters please leave as much feedback as possible since we trust your judgement. Since we can't coach everyone, how about coaching that person who made a song you love. If we are 200 magna charters then that is at least 200 new charters who'll get first hand instruction and who'll make more songs we love.

 

New charters, ask lots of questions. Show screenshots of your issues. We love to answer specific questions. It is easier than us sitting through frustrating playthroughs after the fact pointing out the 16 things you could do to make your CDLC perfect. Also why not ask a charter you trust to try out your song before you release it. Most will be flattered your trust them with your baby. Some like to release version 1.0 knowing it is very rough around the edges, I instead think you only have one or a handful of chances to make first impressions so please be patient and resist the temptation to release. I know it is hard but you'll get more appreciative comments and higher download counts if you prevent people feeling like you wasted their time, which being a giver of your effort, I am sure it is not the feeling you want to elicit.

 

I think this site has enough tutorials and helpful people in the EoF forum that anyone intent on doing a good job will do a good job. So sometimes I wonder if a bad CDLC is an effort problem.

 

 

All this said, thank-you to new charters and magna charters for all you efforts. It's certainly not easy to get started but luckily with a bit of a nudge and a bit of perfectionism, you are in for some serious adulation. Look at PC Plum, he's a rock star on this site. Who will be the next rock star?

[fripponomic]

Well said @@Berneer, but in one point I disagree: it's about the vocals. It is nice to have them in a custom, but not important or necessary. If they're missing it's not a sign for a bad work.

If you look at my custom you will only find one with vocals which are done by RSBass. My focus is always on the tings that are important for playing the music, and that is a good tab and good tones. The tabs of my customs almost are written by myself and very often transcribed by ear. Who does that themself know how hard and time consuming this can be. Compared with the rest it is the meanwork, but at the end there stays a almost nearly perfect tab what is the most important of all. So my custom has gone through all other steps I test and do necessary improvements like tone adjusting. I never occupied with vocals because there are still important things I'm not always sure about and I have to research.

[Aludog]

I agree. Vocals are not essential for a good custom but it shows that someone put in the extra effort to make the CLDC experience more complete and that could be interpreted in a positive way. The custom could be total shit nonetheless, so it's definitely not a failsafe way of approaching the selection process. :D

[Rocksmith Guy]

With my customs i want it to be like real dlc with the difficulty but my problem is i'm no good at tones.

[Billy_Bunter]

Before I start ranting and give the wrong impression, I just want to say that I absolutely love this website, the community that hangs out here and I appreciate all the (free) entertainment it's given me.

As things stand regarding the quality of submitted CDLC's, I personally think good quality tutorials and help files will go a long way towards reducing the number of poor quality CDLC's submitted.  For instance, the Custom Song Creator Help tab directs you to a link that appears to have no proper help files.  (If they are there then someone please point me in the right direction).  Attempts by the more cleverer members at producing tutorials have gone a long way towards improving the situation but some give wrong or misleading instructions and none seem to go into enough detail or cover all the bases.  I'm sure other novices like myself soon get bogged down unless instructions are made foolproof.

I'm a firm believer in it being worse having incorrect instructions than it is to have no instructions.
With this in mind, I think it is important that there be only one set of tutorials/help files and for these to be officially sanctioned (and revised over time to improve them).  The easier you make it to produce good quality CDLC's, the less chance poor quality ones will be submitted.

Having this knowledge should improve future submissions but what to do with existing poor quality CDLC's.           

I think suggestions of using volunteer testers and rating systems etc will be too difficult/too time consuming or not practical to implement given the number of CDLC's there are.  I'm in favour of a more drastic approach and email all Customforge members, giving them 4 week's notice to remove any CDLC's they may have submitted or they will be deemed public domain/open source.  The CDLC's that will be removed will have been submitted for the wrong reasons anyway and the ones that remain will be there for the benefit of the Rocksmith/Customforge community and able to be improved upon over time.  I'm sure this suggestion will upset some people but the community has been discussing this subject since day one and there seems no easy answer to improving things unless authors give up any intellectual rights they may have.

[TomSawyer2112]

We don't have intellectual rights on doing a cDLC.

Bad customs should be reported and if truely bad, get a thumbs down.

 

Bad customs are not the result of bad tutorials. There are more ways to build them, the variability of tutorials is a plus.

Bad customs are simply the result of not investing enough time.

 

I can put out a custom within one or two hours, or in 20 hours.

And I'm not sure if so many users will notice the differences.

 

Which means users should become more active in the five star rating.

They are not asked to rate the song, but to rate the playability of the cDLC.

 

So maybe the site managers should add "Playability : "  to the 5 stars,

because that's what we a looking for. Play!

[Billy_Bunter]

Well I did say my post would upset some people :)

[DevStereo]

I'm just gonna throw a method in this thread, maybe someone already did. If so i'm sorry about that.

How about the creator of the cdlc could choose if his creaton should be rated by the community. And he/she should be able to remove the ratings at any time or should be able to ask like a Mod or Admin. Because a flame war or something else that shouldn't interfere with the ratings started.

I won't tell you guys about my rating system simply because it sucks big time.

But there should be definitely a rule setup for rating wich doesn't apply for the song itself but for the work which the creator has done.

(sorry fo my english, i'll try my best for you guys to understand my weird logic).

Everyone registered should be able to rate the songs he/she likes and on the other hand they should be able to report if a creator of the cdlc is inactive, to report a troll or simply said idiots who are trolling around and manipulating the ratings themselve.

 

That was a little idea in my head. Which doesn't have to be that way, just a little push hopefully in the right direction from a cdlc user who's terribly at bendings [emoji28]

 

Edit:

If a user wants to rate a CDLC, he has to write down his opinion, if something is wrong and he can detailed tell others what should be changed. So a user like me wants to look into that and see if he's right or wrong. So that we the community could seperate the right ones from the ones that are simply wrong.

[firekorn]

You can comment on a cdlc, put a 5 star rating (not really used overall but it's there!), report a cdlc if the author doesn't respond or the cdlc isn't working.

 

Most of the card are in the hand of the users already :)

[papillon]

Which means users should become more active in the five star rating.

They are not asked to rate the song, but to rate the playability of the cDLC.

A rating sytem was implemented on the former forum - the criteria for the ratings were poorly chosen and if you add as suggested "playability" it leaves much room for interpretation what "playability" is.

Most users will not use it and the ratings will be inaccurate.

 

Using the topic rating would not solve the problem - some members rate the song, others the bass arrangement or whatever. If you want to add a quality management you've to define the criteria and then a small group has to review the custom. With the amount of customs this would be a time consuming work which has been done by a few people in the former forum (with support of only a few users reporting customs which apply to the defined standards).

[TomSawyer2112]

check up my definition back here of what a good cDLC is to result in good playability.

You may add your criteria.

 

For now, my best criteria for downloading are the following :

1. Magna Charter's, with whom I've had a constructive exchange.

2. Rate of releases : there is no way to release 10 cDLC every week, and certainly not for beginners

3. A version 1.01 to 3.0 which means the charter cares about updates

4. A version 1.00 with no comments 

No news = good news = at least a decent cDLC. :D

[papillon]

I've read the criteria - in my opinion it's not possible to translate these into a star rating by everyone and if you add categories and rate every category with stars where all users should participate you'll not get a list of good and "bad" customs. Some criteria are hard to judge - if it has not all arrangements but for example lead is perfect and you're playing guitar only it's not a bad custom at all. If you play bass only it would be a 1 star rating and a guitar player would rate it with 5 stars.

It would be nice to have one value (a star rating or whatever) to see which customs might be more polished and well made and meet your criteria - or just using a label, which would not discourage people from creating customs, but I would not expect this to work if you add a rating system which all users should use. If using your criteria you need some people with the experience to check all these values and adding a reporing system where all users could participate, but the label "well made custom" should be assigned to a custom only by a selcted group of people. Just my 2€ :)

 

For the amount of customs you would need more than 2 people - this was a mission impossible on anvil :D

[Guest]

I just found a bad version of "Fade To Black" (the second most downloaded one). The tuning is wrong and it's out of sync.

 

I just want to inform people. I don't care if it's a star rating or a one sentence review.

[fripponomic]

I just found a bad version of "Fade To Black" (the second most downloaded one). The tuning is wrong and it's out of sync.

 

I just want to inform people. I don't care if it's a star rating or a one sentence review.

the better place to inform poeple is on the record page and maybe the charter would fix it

[Guest]

 

I just found a bad version of "Fade To Black" (the second most downloaded one). The tuning is wrong and it's out of sync.

 

I just want to inform people. I don't care if it's a star rating or a one sentence review.

the better place to inform poeple is on the record page and maybe the charter would fix it

 

I'm assuming the "record page" is when you click on a song on the Ignition page and add a comment? I found it seconds after I posted that.

 

I'll probably just stick to making my own, but thank you.

[TheManInUrPC]

I always try to encourage feedback on all my CDLC. I mean, the best way to ensure good quality DLC is simply by giving feedback to the charter. 

 

I'm personally guilty of having 1 or 2 CDLC that aren't of very good quality (mainly due to the fact that I transcribed everything from scratch for those songs). While I will go back and revise them when I get the chance, it would be great if people could leave comments just making pointers on where I could improve the CDLC significantly. 

 

Also, I wouldn't mind a system like Songsterr where I can submit revisions to a post in order to improve the CDLC. (Obviously, Magna Charters should be the only ones besides moderators to utilize such a system, which will protect CDLC from trolls making malicious revisions and such.) This could easily fix the issues where there is a lack of participation from the original charter. 

[thejukebox]

I agree. I think this should be added on rather than replacing the old system. We should have a whole separate section for the tested cldlc. It would be a good addition and it would be ran by the community. People could go to the main ignition browser, download a cdlc, and make sure everything is good. I think it would work best if it took maybe 5 or so positive working reviews to get on the good list. This does bring up a problem though. What if someone created a very obscure cdlc song and not enough people downloaded it to test it. It sort of singles out a lot of songs that nobody cares enough about to test. Sorry to whoever is reading this, I know how poorly formatted this is, im just putting random idea on paper.

[Alex360]

@@thejukebox, all we need is a One golden star rating for tested custom, no separate databases or anything thar requires real separation, sadly that most downloaded customs isn't indicative for a good one, just for old one

[hellohello]

What about grading cdlc from one to ten and a brief review from users?

[KingCobra]

We use a process similar to the proposal below for submitting artwork on another forum I use. A two star rating system?

 

This is just for discussion

 

To get 'Silver Star' status:

The author requests 'Silver Star' status for a CDLC (automated submission page).
To achieve this status, they must confirm that the CDLC meets the following criteria:

. All appropriate arrangements complete 100% including vocals (some exceptions could be made)
. Arrangements to be complete, and of good quality
. Audio track is of good quality with silence included at start
. Good custom tones and tone changes (if needed) on all arrangements
. Verse, Chorus, etc. broke up into Sections. And also smaller sections for riff repeater use.
. Dynamic Difficulty included (can be a bonus arrangement)
. Artwork, Title, etc. correct (Capitalization and alphabetical sorting)
. Must have been online for > 1 week since 'final' update
. No un-rebutted feedback in comments indicating failure in any previous criteria 1-x

To then achieve 'Gold Star' Status, the author should confirm that:

The CDLC has received good feedback (confirmation of all criteria met) from 3 members (Admin,Mod,GoldStarMagnaCharter,Developer,Organizer,Others?) or good feedback from 6 members (Any group) since the Silver Star submission.

Note: A GoldStarMagnaCharter is MagnaCharter with at least 3 gold star

To loose 'Silver Star' status:

There is un-rebutted feedback in comments indicating failure of originally set criteria

To maintain 'Silver Star' status:

No feedback in comments indicating failure of originally set criteria

 

 

The process can be mostly automated, with only the final 'confimation' step by a mod to move from silver to gold.

[chapmak]

I started to "attempt" to create a CDLC and just about gave up on it.  1/2 the battle seems  to be trying to gather all the data files, such as the guitar pro charting, the lyrics, and tones.    It might be good to list sites that people think have the best tabs, lyrics, bpm counts, etc.      That way people start the creation with the best files possible and maybe have the hope of getting it right.    For example, I wouldn't have a real clue if the tab is absolutely correct or not.   About the only way I know it doesn't totally suck from the start is looking at the rating for the tabs and comments left by others on if its right and then it still seems to go into argument mode on who actually might be right.