What do you think about the current state of Screenshots and the material getting top downloads in the File Browser?
Discuss dis…
This is a lengthy read.
What’s wrong with the File Browser?
Regardless of Bungie’s intentions, “Most Downloaded” and “Most Recommended” are successors to Halo 3’s “Bungie Favourites”. As a result of this, many people, myself included, expect Most D/R to contain high-quality, unique artwork. To a number of people, however, this is not the case; the files in Most D/R are often considered to be in poor taste.
In my experience, the types of screenshots that are most often criticized are:
Pseudo--Yoink!-
Screenshots that feature Spartans forced into “dry-humping” or similar poses.
Pseudo-softcore
Screenshots of genitalia constructed in Forge, close-ups of Spartans’ rear ends, and so on.
Ecchi and -Yoink!-
Screenshots in which weapons have been placed on the ground in order to “draw” sexually suggestive or explicit images in an anime/manga style.
Scams
Download and recommend this thread to get a million credits and a promotion to Monitor! Put it on your File Share to unlock Cobb Armor early in Halo 4!
Discriminatory content
Screenshots containing sexist or racist messages, such as “GO BACK TO THE KITCHEN” written in spawn points (actual example), or a picture of a black civilian in “Exodus” with KFC-related captions (actual example), or… Well, I could go on.
Clan advertisements
It seems almost unfair to lump clan advertisements in with the other forms of media listed above, but they are often criticized. Why? Because they’re not what people are looking for. Most Downloaded and Most Recommended are successors to Halo 3’s “Bungie Favourites”: people expect to find art, not ads.
Random irrelevant content
These often include expressions of personal grudges (commonly through assassination screenshots) as well as images that just show ordinary gameplay, with nothing special.
In my and others’ opinions, these kinds of files simply do not deserve the popularity that they have earned. In fact, many of these files seem to be deserving of moderation. This post focuses on measures that can be taken to ensure that quality artwork is seen artwork.
How can we clean up Most D/R?
Because Most D/R are little more than predefined saved searches – automatically-generated collections of content – there are only two ways to clean them up: bugfixes and moderation. Let’s start with the more easily-solved of the two:
Fixing Bugs in Most Downloaded
There is a critical bug that cripples the utility of the Most Downloaded search: the File Browser doesn’t know what a “download” is. Merely viewing a file in-game counts as a Download, even if you never selected “Download”. Meanwhile, clicking “Download Hi-Res” on the website doesn’t contribute to a file’s download count. Furthermore, the stat does not track unique downloads: if one person downloads a file fifty times, the download count goes up by fifty.
Thanks to this bug, “Most Downloaded” isn’t a measure of a file’s aptitude as determined by the community, but merely of its attention, and attention can be positive or negative. In many cases, the only way to even tell whether or not a file is good is to full-view it, which adds to its download count. Furthermore, many people, when confronted with a shifty thumbnail, will be tempted to view it just to see how much they’ll dislike it, which adds to its download count.
This bug is the reason why Most Downloaded is often regarded as a cross-section of the best and worst that the community has to offer. Fixing it will make Most Downloaded a better measure of a file’s popularity, because few people are going to save a disliked file to their hard drive.
Moderating files in Halo: Reach
Moderation is a tricky issue for a number of reasons. Let’s address the mechanical ones first.
Though the website allows one to report files for having questionable content, there is no in-game report functionality. Most Reach players use the in-game File Browser, and very, very few people will, when confronted with a bad file in-game, go to the trouble of: writing down the name and author; going to the website; doing a search for the file; locating the file; and then reporting the file. This means that while files are moderated, whether or not a particular file gets the attention of any official staff seems to be a crapshoot.
Furthermore, the (unidentified) file moderators’ capabilities seem to be limited. I remember when a certain Forge -Yoink!- pic made it onto Most Downloaded and Most Recommended, and was quickly deleted. Two months later, I did a tag search for “anime”, and found more than twenty different copies of that picture that still existed. What happened? People downloaded the file, made changes to the description (most of these in an attempt to steal credit), and re-uploaded it. It appears as though the file moderators cannot even see altered variants of a given file.
But those problems pale in comparison to the “spirit of the law” issues: who defines appropriate? There is a common adage: “I cannot define -Yoink!-, but I know it when I see it.” The problem is, would these mysterious file moderators really know it when they see it? It seems clear that Microsoft is doing too little, but if we ask them to crack down, they’ll probably do too much. Take note of Microsoft’s track record with censorship: remember the Gaywood ban, and remember also that to this day, the words “basement”, “basic”, “epic”, “mystery”, and “puzzle” are blocked as obscenities in any piece of text that you enter into any multiplayer mode in any Xbox LIVE game.
Moderation seems to be effective only for the most extreme cases, so how else can the File Browser be cleaned up?
Introducing: Galleries
…By removing Most Downloaded and Most Recommended in their entirety, and replacing them with human-monitored galleries. We already have Community Cartographers; why not create a group of “Community Curators”, who can work together to construct weekly collections of outstanding imagery and files?
If that idea sounds familiar, that’s because it is familiar. In the later stages of Halo 3’s life, Bungie stopped managing Bungie Favourites; the name stayed, but it was the leaders of different community groups (on BNet, I think) that actually picked out the content. I propose that we bring that system back.
To streamline things, some basic quality standards could be set in place:
No sexually-explicit content.
No discriminatory content.
No scams or scam-like content.
No advertisements of any kind.
Content must have some humorous or artistic intention.
These standards would ensure that community-curated galleries would be free of the cruft that fills Most Downloaded and Most Recommended in Reach. The web-based File Browser (and possibly Halo 4’s) could then be configured to show these galleries by default, with no Most D/R options provided. (You’d have to manually construct a search for those.)
To keep things fresh, there could be multiple galleries, each of which is updated on a different day of the week. Maybe ones like “Effects”, “Candids”, “Comedy”, and so on.
Thoughts?
> This is a lengthy read.
>
>
>
>
> What’s wrong with the File Browser?
> Regardless of Bungie’s intentions, “Most Downloaded” and “Most Recommended” are successors to Halo 3’s “Bungie Favourites”. As a result of this, many people, myself included, expect Most D/R to contain high-quality, unique artwork. To a number of people, however, this is not the case; the files in Most D/R are often considered to be in poor taste.
>
> In my experience, the types of screenshots that are most often criticized are:
>
> Pseudo--Yoink!-
> Screenshots that feature Spartans forced into “dry-humping” or similar poses.
>
> Pseudo-softcore
> Screenshots of genitalia constructed in Forge, close-ups of Spartans’ rear ends, and so on.
>
> Ecchi and -Yoink!-
> Screenshots in which weapons have been placed on the ground in order to “draw” sexually suggestive or explicit images in an anime/manga style.
>
Got to love the page after page after page after page of spartan chick butts… and pseudo--Yoink!- made out of spawn points!
Back in bungie’s day’s I could spend a week reporting every single screen shot that was related those those… My god people, stop with that crap, Halo isn’t for that kind of crap. =.=
> > This is a lengthy read.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > What’s wrong with the File Browser?
> > Regardless of Bungie’s intentions, “Most Downloaded” and “Most Recommended” are successors to Halo 3’s “Bungie Favourites”. As a result of this, many people, myself included, expect Most D/R to contain high-quality, unique artwork. To a number of people, however, this is not the case; the files in Most D/R are often considered to be in poor taste.
> >
> > In my experience, the types of screenshots that are most often criticized are:
> >
> > Pseudo--Yoink!-
> > Screenshots that feature Spartans forced into “dry-humping” or similar poses.
> >
> > Pseudo-softcore
> > Screenshots of genitalia constructed in Forge, close-ups of Spartans’ rear ends, and so on.
> >
> > Ecchi and -Yoink!-
> > Screenshots in which weapons have been placed on the ground in order to “draw” sexually suggestive or explicit images in an anime/manga style.
> >
>
> Got to love the page after page after page after page of spartan chick butts… and pseudo--Yoink!- made out of spawn points!
> Back in bungie’s day’s I could spend a week reporting every single screen shot that was related those those… My god people, stop with that crap, Halo isn’t for that kind of crap. =.=
LOL same here, good times.