(Jun. 02, 2017 3:41 PM)Kai-V Wrote: (Jun. 02, 2017 2:15 PM)1234beyblade Wrote: people now a days usually keep results to themselves though (or it could be just me).
Why is that though? I can somewhat understand when there are big competitions like Beyblade North 2017 coming up, but throughout the rest of the year, nobody really benefits from the community being totally clueless about how new parts perform... In fact, we just risk losing a lot of players because they have less idea what to buy and, consequently, would stop buying anything because of this apparent globalized disinterest.
But throughout the year winning combinations are always posted for each event, so any 'results' that actually matter (my criteria for "actually matter" being that a particular combo or part placed in a Winning Combination posted here) are inevitably made public, so there isn't any real way to keep things to yourself for longer than is fair to protect your own new discoveries briefly before going into tournaments anyways. This is part of the reason we instituted the rules for posting winning combinations years ago; so that we could track the development of the metagame throughout each series and force any notable discoveries to be made public and not be lost to time.
That said, I understand that in general the level of formal testing has gone down over the years. I don't have a full explanation for this myself (although private chats are definitely a contributing factor), but for me personally it comes down to a couple simple things that have nothing to do with private chats:
1. The time investment required to make a formal testing thread is quite high, and I think we've perhaps fostered expectation in the community that has gone a bit too high. We want the results to be legitimate, but I don't think it's healthy that people like ThaKingTai feel everything needs to be totally "perfect" for their results to be valid.
2. As much as I enjoy putting together incredibly comprehensive threads
like this one, over the past few years I've noticed myself caring more about my
impressions of a part through a more fluid testing process than I do about testing certain match-ups extremely formally. And given my track record in tournaments lately, I'd say this approach is certainly valid. I think we should be fostering a community where it is encouraged more to post your impressions of parts and match-ups that you have tried. This lowers the barrier of entry and will inevitably bring more insight to the community.
Of course, we have to worry about impressions that are uninformed and not very valuable competitively speaking because of the diverse range of players who join our site, but that's an issue we'd have to spend more time thinking about because while we want valuable content to be posted, we also don't want to discourage people from posting their impressions, even new members who don't have a lot of experience with the game yet. The answer that jumps out to me is the Advanced/Veterans Forum so that more informed opinions could be congregated in one area for everybody's benefit, but we know how that ended up over time before.
My preference for posting impressions is also embodied in certain ways by all of the tournament reports I have been writing lately:
https://worldbeyblade.org/Thread-Toronto...C-GAMES-II
https://worldbeyblade.org/Thread-Toronto...-GAMES-III
https://worldbeyblade.org/Thread-Toronto...C-GAMES-IV
https://worldbeyblade.org/Thread-Toronto...-JAILBREAK
https://worldbeyblade.org/Thread-Toronto...ION-REBOOT
https://worldbeyblade.org/Thread-Toronto...-the-Scene
https://worldbeyblade.org/Thread-Toronto...T-LONGINUS
I've tried to encourage people to post their own tournament reports, but not many people seem to have made an effort yet despite me encouraging people to make them even if they are just a paragraph or two. I think mine are particularly long and in-depth, but what makes them so great to me is that there is no pressure to do things perfectly; you're just reporting what happened in an event based on what you can remember, which I find more valuable–in some ways–to the community and development of the metagame than a formal testing thread.
I've been a little frustrated lately that not many people–whether they've played in the event in my report or not–have taken the time to reply with their impressions or any questions; it's not hard to write a quick summary of how you did in an event or ask the participants "Was X combo or part used a lot in the event? How did it do?". I don't know if this has to do with the tournament forum being a little bit buried at the moment as a sub-forum (something you know we plan to fix in the future), but it does make me wonder what the solution really is if players don't even want to take the time to post their impressions or simple questions about things that happen in our events.
That being said, I do think what we did with the
Beyblade Hobby Q&A forum recently is really good. There's little to no pressure involved with posting a thread there, and it's way easier to navigate than the old massive Ask a Question, Get an Answer thread.