Community RPG Codex People's Awards: Best RPGs

[Rake]

No point in making such list now, even less so in a year or two.

The only interesting approach would be banning votes on any of Bioware/Black Isle/Troika/Obsidian games and seeing what comes up then, but such list would still be polluted by KKK-fishing and people voting for 2000+ action games.

And what exactly would be proven from that poll? The Codex Top RPGs, only the Codex cannot vote for his favorite games?
Just make a poll for the best RPGs released before 1995 and tell it for what it is.

 

[felipepepe]

Just stop focusing on the Top 10. This is the RPG Codex, obviously Interplay & Black Isle will dominate the first positions, and that's a solid portrayal of what people here think; but if you're into something more, the real meat is whatever comes after that.

The current list does that in a way, showing more than 50 RPGs that people think are good. The problem is that they are really ranked by popularity, so you have hidden gems lost next to mediocre but popular games.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

And what exactly would be proven from that poll? The Codex Top RPGs, only the Codex cannot vote for his favorite games?

It would prove that you're good at asking pointless questions... Ok, I'll give you a pass this time.

It would just be smth new for a change, instead of the same thing yet again, only progressively more monotonous and/or retarded as the time flies. Bg1/2, F1/2, Arcanum, Torment, Bloodlines. New Vegas slowly dislodging some of the above as the most overrated game on the Codex. Remaining 1997+ games coming just after those. Games below having relatively few votes and their order not saying anything about the actual quality/impact on the genre. Yada, yada. yada.

Just stop focusing on the Top 10. This is the RPG Codex, obviously Interplay & Black Isle will dominate the first positions, and that's a solid portrayal of what people here think; but if you're into something more, the real meat is whatever comes after that.

The current list does that in a way, showing more than 50 RPGs that people think are good. The problem is that they are really ranked by popularity, so you have hidden gems lost next to mediocre but popular games.

Just stop making top 10, it was already done and the point was made. Whether it's a good or bad point is up to you.

Lower places tell you squat, it's just randomized namedropping and you can bet some of these games get there just because people think it's cool to mention them.

 

[Rake]

As i said, just ban everything 1995+. If you can somehow stop the trolls and those fishing for KKK, that list will be indeed more interesting than a general "best of" list.

 

[Themadcow]

Half the work is done here. All that is required to produce a 'best' RPG list is to update the current popularity contest with 2013 titles and use it as a short-list for a more definitive ranking of the titles. This would be best served by a 2 stage on-line questionnaire in which the first section simply asks you to choose all the RPG's you have played enough of to provide a fair (not necessarily objective) rating and the second section dynamically references the titles you have selected and then asks you to rate them.

That way the results weight themselves appropriately and only require a minimum sample size in order to be included in the final rankings. I'd still expect the obvious Codex favourites to appear near the top, but it would be a fair better measure of quality than the system used last year.

 

[felipepepe]

If you really want a different listing, a "The OTHER Best RPGs ever", then only allow voting for stuff NOT on our current Top 10 list.

But it's not like we're beating the dead horse so much, only the Codex cares so much about those games. NeoGAF's list had F2 in #46 and Arcanum in #54, ffs.

 

[tuluse]

3 different votes, 1995 and earlier, 96-05, and 06 and later. This would give us the 3 big "eras" of RPGs. The time when Wizardry,M&M,Gold Box, and Ultima ruled the world, then the Black Isle, Troika, Bioware, Bethesda era, and then finally the release of the xbox 360 and decline era.

In each one voters are given 25 points, and able to spend a maximum of 5 points on each game. This would let voters decide how much they liked each game. So we wouldn't get IWD in the top 10 just because a lot of people played it and felt it was deserving of a top 25 vote. More than 5 points given to a game seems like too much, and could really screw things up.

 

[felipepepe]

I like that idea of splitting it into ages, but I don't think that asking people to vote for 5 pre-95 games is a good thing... many won't have even played that that much.

Lower the points per-era to something like 10, and allow people to spend them as they like or to abstain from voting if they didn't play anything.

 

[tuluse]

I was assuming people could abstain from each era or only use a portion of their points as they wished.

 

[felipepepe]

Your thrust in your fellow codexers will be your downfall.

 

[V_K]

I like that idea of splitting it into ages, but I don't think that asking people to vote for 5 pre-95 games is a good thing... many won't have even played that that much.

Personally, I'd have a lot more trouble with naming 5 post-95 games.

 

[felipepepe]

That too.That's why I'm against limiting the points you can spend.

One should be 100% free to say that Dark Souls is the fucking best RPG/game/whatever to come out in the last 10 years or so. :3

 

[Themadcow]

Or, just go with what I suggest - considering it works very well on other forums (Penny Arcade's last one being a decent example) and seeing as I head up a department that designs on-line surveys, it's a reasonable endorsement.

Alternatively, I could well be someone who milks turkey semen for a living, it is the internet after all.

 

[Black]

HAHA
TIME TO RETARDO THIS THREAD

 

[felipepepe]

Themadcow , I see no advantages in using such a method. It's just a human error free way of doing a ranked vote, that in no way help us solve our current issues.

Point-assignment is more effective for this. Is hard to rank your favorite games, i.e. going #1 F1, #2BG2, #3 Dark Souls... If you have 10 points to distribute and think they are on par, just give each 3 points. Or give 2 points to each of your 5 favorite games. That's much more accurate to the voter's intentions than just asking them to rank it.

If you look at Penny Arcade's 2012 list, you'll see the issues your system has. Xenoblade Chronicles is at #14, with 28 people choosing it the best of the year, while FTL is at #3, with only 16 people voting it as their favorite, because a lot of people voted it as their 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th or even 10th best game. In short, is a game that a lot of people played and found fun, but few found it great, and it's the fucking #3 at the list. Is the same problem we had last time.

 

[Themadcow]

the second section dynamically references the titles you have selected and then asks you to rate them.

I'm not suggesting the ranking system Penny Arcade uses, I'm suggesting they have the correct 2 stage methodology but instead of ranking, you rate (on a 0-10 scale for example) and then use an average of the ratings for each game.

Ranking system's like Penny Arcade's can still work very effectively as they give a 3rd perspective on the data and can, if analysed properly, also provide a way of producing a 'rating' system if you recode the data into a '10 point max' where each game gets a score based on it's position in the ranking of the individual and how many games that person has rated. It's a technique I use for a dining sector survey and it works pretty well - but only when each individual rates a minimum number of options (any less then 4 items ranked and it's just not workable).

Either option (and I'd strongly advise rating in this instance) provides a far more solid basis for any 'best' list over the current popularity based list.

 

[Delterius]

Your thrust in your fellow codexers will be your downfall.

?

 

[felipepepe]

Shitty english language Oh yeah baby... we know, we know...

 

[tuluse]

That too.That's why I'm against limiting the points you can spend.

One should be 100% free to say that Dark Souls is the fucking best RPG/game/whatever to come out in the last 10 years or so. :3

I would say his post is reason *for* limiting points per game.

If he only likes 3 games or something, giving 2 of them 10 points is huge. While someone else who likes 10 games might give each game 2 points. It doesn't mean he liked the games he voted for less, he just had more games he wanted to vote for.

 

[Delterius]

If you look at Penny Arcade's 2012 list, you'll see the issues your system has. Xenoblade Chronicles is at #14, with 28 people choosing it the best of the year, while FTL is at #3, with only 16 people voting it as their favorite, because a lot of people voted it as their 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th or even 10th best game. In short, is a game that a lot of people played and found fun, but few found it great, and it's the fucking #3 at the list. Is the same problem we had last time.

But would this be such a bad thing in a small community like the Codex? True, FTL's elevation might look like mindless mass appeal (and pandering to a most common denominator) in something like PA; but the Codex is small enough and [yet] with such contrasting opinions that having a game which appeal to most here should be an accomplishment in itself. Even if that might degenerate into memetics (''Arcanum is a rough gem!11!'').

 

[Duraframe300]

If you look at Penny Arcade's 2012 list, you'll see the issues your system has. Xenoblade Chronicles is at #14, with 28 people choosing it the best of the year, while FTL is at #3, with only 16 people voting it as their favorite, because a lot of people voted it as their 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th or even 10th best game. In short, is a game that a lot of people played and found fun, but few found it great, and it's the fucking #3 at the list. Is the same problem we had last time

Thats why the results get analyzed in multiple ways afterwards (Including first place and so on. There's a cult game award as well for games that get protentually highly voted). Its actually pretty cool and informative to watch each year.

The poll also goes over multiple forums not just penny arcade. I'm a fan of the system.

 

[Coyote]

I think that there's some merit in Themadcow's suggestion of requiring people to list the RPGs that they've actually played first, though I don't know if it will help much if you insist upon presenting the results in the form of a top 10 list. TBH, I find top 10 lists in general rather silly, even those of the prestigious RPGCodex magazine. Even putting aside the whole apples vs. oranges issue that comes up when you're looking at a genre with as broad a scope as RPGs...

• If a list is of the "editor's choice" variety, you're basically looking at one guy's opinion of what's good without any context (what other games has he played, what genres does he prefer, etc.). This can be nice for stoking interest in games you haven't played if the writer in question has similar tastes to your own, but otherwise it's pretty useless.
  
• If, on the other hand, it's a list voted upon by a community as in this case, decent-but-popular games will always rise above great-but-obscure ones unless you rig the game from the start by coming up with some system designed to weed out the "undesirables", in which case you're building in the biases of whoever made the system from the start. (There are also going to be issues of self-selection in any online community poll, but there's not much you can do about that.) Assigning points based on ranking doesn't really address the popular vs. obscure issue; at most I'd expect it to shuffle things around a little, and it can lead to results like the FTL example felipepepe mentioned. Allotting people a certain number of points to assign to games however they'd like might help elevate obscure gems, but it's still likely to be a poor representation of people's tastes since you'd get a lot of people gaming the system, trying to ensure their absolute favorite games get a place on the list to the detriment of other games they like quite a bit.

A better system IMO would be one that presents you with the raw data and allows you to look at trends like "75% of voting Codexers who played Baldur's Gate 2 (N=300) placed it within their top 20 RPGs, but of those who also played Knights of the Chalice (N=50) 65% preferred the latter" without necessarily putting the results into the context of an overarching top 10 list. (You'd probably have to use surveymonkey or some similar site for this; checking off the RPGs you've played on some comprehensive list is much less cumbersome than writing them out, and it's less prone to omissions of memory as well.)

 

[felipepepe]

But would this be such a bad thing in a small community like the Codex? True, FTL's elevation might look like mindless mass appeal (and pandering to a most common denominator) in something like PA; but the Codex is small enough and [yet] with such contrasting opinions that having a game which appeal to most here should be an accomplishment in itself. Even if that might degenerate into memetics (''Arcanum is a rough gem!11!'').

The current list was made that way. Everyone listed up to 25 games, and what it really resulted in was that games like Icewind Dale 2 and Fallout New Vegas got into the Top 10 just because everyone played & listed it.

If he only likes 3 games or something, giving 2 of them 10 points is huge. While someone else who likes 10 games might give each game 2 points. It doesn't mean he liked the games he voted for less, he just had more games he wanted to vote for.

But I honestly don't want people to list fucking 10 RPGs, but like 1-4 that they REALLY liked.

 

[tuluse]

The current list was made that way. Everyone listed up to 25 games, and what it really resulted in was that games like Icewind Dale 2 and Fallout New Vegas got into the Top 10 just because everyone played & listed it.


But I honestly don't want people to list fucking 10 RPGs, but like 1-4 that they REALLY liked.

I'd like to see 1-4 that they really liked and then a few they feel deserves a single vote so we get nice long list, where the actual best RPGs rise to the top.

 

[Rake]

The current list was made that way. Everyone listed up to 25 games, and what it really resulted in was that games like Icewind Dale 2 and Fallout New Vegas got into the Top 10 just because everyone played & listed it.

But the votes were not weighted at all. If we were allowed to vote our Top 10 instead of 25 and there was some kind of point system counting the positions inside the Top 10, the vote would be different.

But I honestly don't want people to list fucking 10 RPGs, but like 1-4 that they REALLY liked.

Then put a point cup at 5 points. If someone wants to spent his 20 points in 4 games it's ok. But giving all 20 to 1 game because he only likes one it's too much.
(inb4 Roguey gives 20 points to PoE because Sawyer)