Weekly Poll Discussion

First things first...I’ve finished King’s Quest IV! I’ll save any feelings and thoughts I have about the game for my Won! and Final Rating posts, which I’ll get to shortly enough. In the meantime, let’s look at what rating the readers are predicting I’ll give the game.

Above 60                     8 Votes (19%)
Between 55 and 59      20 Votes (47%)
Between 50 and 54      13 Votes (30%)
Below 50                     1 Vote (2%)

So nearly half of the voters expect the game to finish up somewhere around the mark Leisure Suit Larry hit, the current Sierra leader. Only one expects the rating to be below 50, so there’s obviously a fair amount of respect out there for this addition to the King’s Quest series. More interestingly, I gave the readers the chance to make their own specific predictions, with whoever gets it right gaining themselves 10 Companion Assist points. Given the response, I’m going to make this a regular feature, but in future people will be able to choose the same rating as other voters. The first person to choose the correct rating (or closest to it) will get 10 points, the second gets 9, and so on. Here are the voters’ predictions for King’s Quest IV.

Chumazik – 52
Larry P. – 53
Lars-Erik – 54
Nicolaj – 55
Killias2 – 56
JosephCurwen – 57
Ilmari – 58
Klaoth – 59
Canageek – 60
16k – 61
Andy_Panthro – 62
Fenrus – 63

Rosella realised how valuable Companion Assist points could become!

This week I’d like to discuss Companion Assist points on The Adventure Gamer. I’ve had numerous ideas about how to put them to use and how readers can earn them, but I wanted to run an idea past you to see what you think. I will also be releasing an official Companion Assist page in the coming days which will describe all the ways points can be earned and used. Currently readers can earn points by assisting me when I get stuck in one of the games on the list, by helping me with some of the technological aspects of playing retro games, and by making suggestions for how to make the blog better. Some other ways to earn points have naturally arisen, and given what I’m about to suggest below, I think it’s pertinent that I make it clear how points can be earned.

Right, onto my suggestion! One of the things I’m aiming to do in future is make it harder for games to be added to the list. It’s not that I don’t want you guys to have any say in the matter (I do). It’s just that the way it is now, whenever any game goes to a vote, it always ends up with a positive result. I highly doubt the readership will ever vote for a game not to be played (it seems you actually enjoy torturing me anyway, so the worse a game is, the more you want me to play it), which will result in the list growing exponentially as the years go on. I can see myself getting bogged down in little known and little cared about games and possibly burn out if I don’t tighten the criteria. To avoid this, I intend to make the readers sacrifice Companion Assist points to make me play games that I otherwise wouldn’t.

For anyone unsure as to how I currently decide on which games to play, this is the criteria I’ve been using (you can see it in action here):

Automatically Added: For a game to automatically go on the play list, it must clearly be a graphic adventure game, it must have over 20 votes on Moby Games, and it must be on the Wikipedia List of Notable Graphic Adventure Games list.
Borderline: If a game has at least one positive result using the above criteria, but not all three, it will go to a vote.
Automatically Disregarded: If a game has no positives, it will be skipped.

Taking the above into consideration, what do you think of the following suggestions for how to handle games that are not automatically added?

Suggestion 1: For borderline games, individual readers can sacrifice 50 of their Companion Assist points to get it added to the list.
Suggestion 2: For borderline games, readers can pool 100 Companion Assist points to get it added to the list.
Suggestion 3: For disregarded games, readers can pool 200 Companion Assist points to get it added to the list.

I’m not going to put it to a poll because there are a hundred different ways someone could see it. You might like the suggestions in general, but not the amount of points I’ve specified for each. You might like the idea of sacrificing points for borderline games, but not for disregarded ones. You might not like any of the suggestions and prefer to go to a vote for each individual borderline game.

At some point in the next week or so we’ll discuss what games I’m going to play from the year 1989, so the results of this discussion could come into play pretty quickly. As usual, I’d love to hear any thoughts or suggestions any of you might have to make this blog more interesting and interactive for you guys. I pass the microphone to the floor...