Currently, the system only disallows submissions with too much pure black or pure white. It's possible we'll add checks for other pure colors in the future, but this is an item you can still expect to be more of a human-driven review.

Because the consequences of failure -- that is, disallowing items from even getting into the system we'd approve if they made it in -- are so high, this is one are we're taking very carefully.

Interestingly, this is one area that the community seems to be really good at catching. At a glance, the majority of the items that get auto-rejected probably would have gotten rejected for this reason rather than any other.

By the power invested in me, I now close this thread.

Best,
Aether

Just shy of 42,000 items have been submitted since the UC system's inception. The submissions are split almost in identical thirds -- one third were withdrawn by the user prior to being reviewed by our reviewers, one third were approved by our reviewers, and one third were rejected.

Since going live, we've been getting a pretty consistent influx of 300-350 submissions per day, with little sign of abatement.

Keep it up! Between the new voting system and the new admin tools, the approval queue is currently lower than I've ever seen it (and we're still ramping up training the various reviewers, so they're not all in place yet, so it's going to get lower still), so keep posting!

Yes. Probably won't be out until 1.5, but I'm happy to do that.

Thank you. My initial investigation says that we've fixed this already. Is it still broken?

That is the case. Checking that it's "similar to" is beyond the means of the system.

Flying Lab Software CEO Russell Williams is featured on the latest Wife-Agro podcast!

You can give it a listen by visiting this link!

Enjoy, won't you?
Aether

It's unfortunate that you feel you've lost work due to the server transfers, however there is no reasonable way to compensate anyone for their perceived loss due to those transfers. There is no reasonable way for us to sort out who did what to flip what ports, who contributed to what port battles, etcetera. We could given everyone on the source servers some bonus, but that would be unfair to the people on the destination servers. We could give every character in the game some bonus, but at that point we're just handing out free stuff. While free stuff sounds like a good idea, people don't value things they didn't earn, and we believe that giving everyone loads of free stuff would be unhealthy to the success of the game in the long run.


Marks of Victory from the Unrest Bundle turn in put a hard cap on the price of Marks of Victory. We didn't like that. Additionally, it made Marks of Victory feel less special. You could get them for doing purely economic activities, not actually going out and fighting. Finally, it meant that there would never be a demand from economic players for Marks of Victory, as they could produce the marks themselves. Unrest bundles are meant to be used to create unrest, not to reward you for turning them in.

You can bring unrest bundles to a port before the unrest zone is created, and then turn them in. There's no risk in that.


We created a shop where you could sell personal items, Career Respecs are personal items, we didn't want you selling them in the personal shop for doubloons. I'll look into the possibility of creating a Career Respec that can be sold in a shop, but cannot be sold to a shop. I don't know, off the top of my head, if that's something we can do already, if it's not, it's not something we're likely to do a code change to fix soon.


Because both missions and bundles were exploited by a handful of players to put ports instantly into contention. Fixing those exploits is extremely non-trivial, but it is something we are working on.


I apologize, I'm not familiar with this issue, and a brief look at the Antigua forums did not enlighten me. Could you explain it to me, or point me at the thread where it is explained?

Although I'm responding to Sielock's post, I really want to address this general concern by the UC community.

Please do first understand that we are gathering feedback on the system, and will continue to improve the system as we've done over the past several days based on your feedback.

That said, I want to address some underlying points here to help you all understand why the system is the way it is, and why, when we look at the way the submissions are shaping up in the back-end, we're overall very pleased with how it's performing so far.

We understand that the UC community wants to be more involved in the approval process, but we have to balance that input with building a system that lets our expert staff have the final say in a significant majority of items reviewed.

While it may seem clear that giving the community tools to remove items from voting for the same reasons as the staff reviewers do would give the UC community more input, we would never be able to make such a system allow the community to cause "hard rejections" -- that is, for the community to remove items from the voting queue entirely.

We chose two of the most flagrant violations of submission -- copyright theft and offensive images -- to empower the community to "soft reject" items in most flagrant violation of our rules, which we then review and either reject for those specific problems or put back into the queue.

If we provided a similar mechanism for "soft rejection" of what the community considers "less good" items, it would cause a number of problems:

First and foremost, it would cause us to have to manually review more items which are ultimately rejected than we do in the current system, reverting the system back to the 100% staff review process we had previously. If, then, we have to individually review every item that passes through the system, we may as well simply remove the community review entirely, since neither the community nor the reviewers would be gaining any benefit from it.

Second, and perhaps worse for the overall health of the system: there would no longer be items that still need work for the good items to get voted against. The system would devolve to good item being voted against good item -- again, at that point, we would need to simply remove the voting process entirely, and return to FLS staff simply reviewing 100% of the items.

Finally, we consistently have always approved roughly one third of our submissions. At the same time, only about a fifth of the submissions are what our reviewers would consider exemplary -- the remaining chunk of items that are approved are of average quality. Empowering the users to reject based on personal subjectivity would cause those average items to never get approved; in fact, it's conceivable that not even the whole of that top fifth would get approved in a purely community-driven system. This would be significantly harmful to user content in general.

The reality is that the new system puts significantly more power into the hands of the community than the old did, though it does so in less direct methods. It allows peer review to quickly remove the bottom fifth of submissions with auto-rejection based on minimum threshold requirements, and at the same time, allowing that same review to push the top fifth into review (and generally, therefore, approval) quickly.

Actually, for what you're describing Anna, please PM me and/or ktatroe with the item # that's preventing your uploading a new submission. We should be able to take care of that behind the scenes (namely by deleting the submission that yours is a "copy" of).

I've changed the message displayed on items in review for potential copyright or offensiveness violation to make it more clear that it's a "soft rejection" only, and that items are restored to the voting pool if they're not found to be in violation.