Odyssey Adventure Comparison System 3.0.1

Grab your AIO albums, and find a table! What makes your favorite episode the best? Have an episode you really dislike? This is the place to review and discuss AIO episodes and albums.
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Bob
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Odyssey Adventure Comparison System 3.0.1

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Some years ago I made a proposal for a better way to make an AIO rating system, based on matching up individual episodes against each other. After some work, I'm pleased to announce the first version of this page is ready for use.

This preliminary version lacks some desirable features, including a complete list of episode summaries and a more convenient refresh button, and the appearance of the page is not complete, but it is functionally ready for action, and given the scope of this project, I thought it would be best to get it up as soon as possible so that users can get started rating episodes.

Thanks for your time and interest. I'd love to hear comments or suggestions.
Last edited by Bob on Fri Jul 03, 2020 9:22 am, edited 8 times in total.
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what is this rating system?
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Wonderful work, Bob! I am anxious to read the ToO thread in full to see the full intent of this system. But just for clarification, does this mean that my "Out-of-5" rating is not one you like? I won't be offended; I know I can be a generous rater sometimes, and I just want to know your thoughts.
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Agent.MontyWhittaker wrote:what is this rating system?
Many of the details are outlined in my draft about it (I added the link I included in the ToO version of this thread to my first post here). The main innovation since then was the inclusion of an Elo system to take into consideration the relative strengths of episodes matched against each other.
Scientific Guy wrote:Wonderful work, Bob! I am anxious to read the ToO thread in full to see the full intent of this system. But just for clarification, does this mean that my "Out-of-5" rating is not one you like? I won't be offended; I know I can be a generous rater sometimes, and I just want to know your thoughts.
I haven't seen many of your reviews yet, so I don't claim to be able to state whether they in general are good or bad. I did read and liked the feel of the recent cover you did showing the pros and cons of "Your Honest Opinion".

That said, a set of star system ratings has to win me over. I was and am somewhat wary of them on principle, no matter who made them (in the proposal I made you can see me commenting that I was a bit less than pleased with the solution I'd been using up to that point ;) ). I think it's very hard for anyone to accurately and consistently judge how *all* Odyssey episodes rate. There's over 800 of them, and I think it's fair to state that's too much information for anyone to consider at a single time.

That's the big part of what motivated this system; the idea is to turn it from being a big, abstract proposition of considering all of the episodes ever made and trying to bring some order to that soup, and bring it down to a level that someone can understand, "is this particular episode better than that particular episode". That's a question everyone finds much easier to comment on, and with a greater degree of accuracy than when forced to consider 800+ different variables. They have a lot more experience at it too, as you're quite likely to ask some variant of this question (like "Which episode would I rather listen to") most every time you pick one out.

-- Fri Jan 05, 2018 1:00 pm --

Introduced a few desirable new features and cosmetic/formatting changes, bringing the version number up to 1.1, and then 1.1.1.

The highlights:
* There's now a results box that pops up after a finished rating showing the gain and damage.
* New "Skip" button for users who haven't heard an episode, or can't possibly bring themselves to choose in a tough matchup.
* New link in the name that pulls up a new tab going to the AIOWiki page -- among other things, this should help mitigate the problem with the lack of episode summaries until they're up.
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I'm a little confused; when I click on "Episode Statistics" it shows "It Takes Integrity" at the top... not sure how that one is better than "The Time Has Come"...
I see now that it's alphabetical. Could you add a list by rating that would put "The Time Has Come" in its proper place?
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As it is, if you click on the titles of the categories, it'll sort them, but it's true that they don't look like links. I guess the fact that it can be sorted seemed so obvious to me (after all the trouble I went to setting up an extension to provide that functionality ;) ) that it never occurred to me that it's not easy for the end user to see. I'm pretty busy but I'll try to find a way to get this improvement in the GUI in soon.
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Bob wrote:As it is, if you click on the titles of the categories, it'll sort them, but it's true that they don't look like links. I guess the fact that it can be sorted seemed so obvious to me (after all the trouble I went to setting up an extension to provide that functionality ;) ) that it never occurred to me that it's not easy for the end user to see. I'm pretty busy but I'll try to find a way to get this improvement in the GUI in soon.
Perhaps you can make a legend that explains what "Matches", "Wins", "Win Rate", and "Elo" mean? Because I honestly have no idea what they mean, nor the difference between them.
EDIT: Or convert... something... into a 0% - 100% column?
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The legend/FAQ is a good idea and I'll try to find time to do this and the GUI change today.

I was hoping to put in some kind of graded system (perhaps with letter grades), or so on, to allow for a more convenient comparison. That hasn't happened yet, though, and it would take some time to set up. We probably won't see this at least until spring break next week, and maybe not until the semester is over in May.

Update: Tweaks to the site done. I'll probably tinker with it later to make it more efficient, but it should be good enough for now. The new About page covers some of these questions, although it isn't laid out as well as I'd like yet. Maybe later.
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Neat site!
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The Mortal Coil, Part 1 is the first episode to reach 2200!
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I'm not sure if that's actually the case; it seems like I saw one at that height before, but it got bumped back down. I can't say with 100% certainty if that's true or not, though. A milestone tracker would be a nice feature to add.

Some goals for the next big update for AIOR, which will likely be a major update, maybe all the way up to AIOR 2.0, since it's a pretty significant change. Change importance is listed in order of number of pluses.

+++ New matching system to give priority to episodes with fewer matches, and also to limit matches to episodes within a similar Elo range -- so no more matches between the best episode and the worst.
+++ More episode descriptions. I'd like to have a complete list, but it's a big job and takes some inspiration for me, so we probably won't get all of them in at once. Every bit helps, though.
++ Improvements to statistics page, like listing episodes by Elo ratings instead of by name.
++ As a byproduct of the new matching system, there's the possibility of some extra grades to help users figure out which episodes belong in which tiers.
+ Minor fixes to album rating system.
+ Maybe a new name for the site.

Future changes that possibly won't be in 2.0, but that I'd like to see sometime:
+++ Multi-category matchups. When I made my original proposal (linked to in the original post on this thread), my intent was not that episodes would be ranked against each other only in one category (presumably "Which episode is better"). I was instead hoping that they'd be sorted based on different criteria. Someone looking for a list of fun episodes to listen to isn't going to have the same priorities as someone looking for the most exciting or the ones that are the best at teaching a lesson, for example. I'd really appreciate y'all's input on the categories that episodes should be ranked by -- hopefully no more than three, in addition to the current generic "Which episode is better" system, so that people don't get confused or overwhelmed with too many choices.
+ New CSS themes for different episode matchups.
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I love watching this project as it goes forward! Can't wait to see the final product!
Bob wrote:+++ More episode descriptions. I'd like to have a complete list, but it's a big job and takes some inspiration for me, so we probably won't get all of them in at once. Every bit helps, though.
Here's a quick page on the wiki I cooked up for that:
http://www.aiowiki.com/wiki/User:Scient ... /Summaries
Just tell me if you want it modified, or edit it yourself.
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I got Waylaid in the Windy City Part 1 versus Waylaid in the Windy City Part 2. It was very weird.
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Agent.MontyWhittaker wrote:I got Waylaid in the Windy City Part 1 versus Waylaid in the Windy City Part 2. It was very weird.
Obviously part two's better!
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It seems to be coming along, albeit slowly. The Elo range matchups will most likely not be in this version after all -- just implementing the weighted appearances proved to be a real challenge, and the site code has gotten bloated enough that I'd rather streamline things and solve problems before I add even more complications like that. Also, I'm not sure how much of a problem it really is to the site's functionality and if it's even a bad thing to have some 'gimme' matches here and there.

That said, I can tentatively say that I think the weighted matchmaking is working. I'll try to implement a number of the others and release 2.0 soon, hopefully before or not long after my fall college term is scheduled to start.

Curious what y'all think would be the best categories to have to rate episodes in. There's three general things that I think people might like to consider, the entertainment value of the episodes, how exciting/intense they are, and the depth/quality moral teaching, as in serious life episodes, but I'm not sure how to turn those into categories. The rating page should ask a question, something like "Which episode is more x than the other". Sorry if this is a jumbled mess, but that's kind of what my thoughts on this are right now. Hopefully some of you can help me to untangle it.

-- Mon Aug 27, 2018 4:01 am --

To help speed up the process of getting 2.0 out the door, I'm going to take the step of borrowing some of Scientific's episode summaries, to fill in the gaps. I still mean to write my own at some point, but I think this'll be a good placeholder for the meantime, allow me to move forward with the work in other respects, and provide some extra motivation over just seeing a bunch of blank spaces where the blurbs should be.

-- Mon Aug 27, 2018 6:56 am --

The 2.0 update is at the stage where I'm willing to call it good for a release. I thought about labeling it a 'public beta', but decided we'd go with the standard scheme, and work any needed bug fixes into the usual number scheme of minor version updates. There are also a number of glitches in the new episode summaries, an artifact of my adventures with text-encoding problems; this should be smoothed out with time as I have the chance to go through them, but any reports you have on such flaws are welcome. If you see an obviously glitchy episode summary, please do drop me a PM telling me about it.

Goals kept:
+ New matching system gives priority to episodes with fewer matches. Details on those tiers are available on request, if this is something y'all are interested in hearing about.
+ All episodes have some kind of description. Ones in regular text are written by me, those in italics are borrowed from Scientific Guy. I hope to write more descriptions over time until they're all mine, but this seems the best way to get this much-needed functionality up fast.
+ Episodes now ranked by Elo and not name on stats page.
+ New "points" grading system to help split the episodes up into tiers.
+ New name for the site, "OACS", standing for "Odyssey Adventure Comparison System".

Goals delayed, put off, or altered:
- Elo-range matchmaking didn't come to fruition this time. I'm not sure whether this is actually a necessary feature, and would like to get some feedback about what y'all think on the subject.
- Album rating page not significantly fixed or adjusted. At some point I hope to fix the bug, but it is a minor enough one that it shouldn't have a sizable impact on the ratings.

Finally, in the spoiler below, a preview of some of the possibilities for the future themes, which I drafted playing around the other day. As with the current one, they are based on Odyssey album covers. I would like to have a distinctive theme for every album.
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Link to all of this can be reached by going to the old page and getting redirected, or by going straight to its new destination at soopergrape.com/OACS/ .
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Lots of updates. That's pretty cool. It's growing like a tree... an oak tree. Ohhh.
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Augh, I leave for a while and you make all these awesome changes! I can't wait to get acquainted with this website!!
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I've been working on 2.5 for a while. Although it isn't complete yet, I thought I'd talk about it to keep interest in the project alive.

The two marquee features planned for 2.5 are Elo-based matchmaking and multiple themes. The first, which I already have basically functional, restricts matches to a range of 25 below or above. This is more strict than I initially envisioned, but at this time I think it is the best thing going forward. It occurred to me that there's a possible tendency for people to skip any matches that are truly close, meaning that most of the points come from low-ranked episodes getting trounced. That's well enough when it comes to separating the worst from the best, but it leaves a lot of middle ground, and doesn't delineate well between episodes on similar tiers. In the long run I think this change will pay off.

The theming is purely cosmetic, but should have a large impact on the feel of the site. The concept I have in mind right now is that each collection has its own theme, and when an episode is higher-ranked than another one in the matchup, that album's theme will be the 'look' of the page. Other pages (statistics, etc.) can be either random, neutral, or perhaps based on the highest-ranked episode or album. At this point in time I have the basic framework and look for close to 44 themes, although there are a lot of revisions left to go before I'm satisfied with them. I've put in a lot of work in this and when it's done I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by most of them. Here's a few more WIP previews I made; I can't guarantee that the finished themes will look exactly like this, but it should give you some idea. See if you can guess which albums they represent (the episodes shown in the picture have nothing to do with it).
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I also intend, as a process of getting the themes to work well, to make various changes for better mobile support and to try to simplify aspects of the page, which, to me, are getting hideously complicated (considering that my goal has always been that the site should be minimalist and easy to maintain).

I can't provide an exact timeline for this, but I hope to get it all done before my class starts around Oct. 22. If I don't make that 'deadline', I'll probably release 2.5 then with just the changes to the way the rating system works, and save the cosmetic changes for a 2.6 to be released at a later date.

-- Mon Oct 22, 2018 9:14 am --

Getting the appearance changes completed turned out to be an even bigger job than anticipated, and I've accepted at this point that there's no way that I'm going to get all of the theme work done today. There's still too much that isn't yet done, and too many rough edges that need to be smoothed. As promised, then, I'm releasing 2.5 with the structural changes; I hope to release the majority of the cosmetic changes in a later 2.6 release.

Included in this release:
* Elo-based match-making, as described above.
* Responsive theme should improve mobile support for the voting index page (the others are still terrible under mobile; maybe we'll get that fixed in 2.5.1).
* History merged into About page.
* Misc. minor changes not worth mentioning (or apparently remembering ;) ).

As usual, please feel free to leave feedback and let me know about anything that I've messed up!
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Oh that's a great offer. I love telling you things that you've messed up.

Has 2.5 come out yet?
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That is why I made the post right above. ;)
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