Well, the battles system is now a few months old and relatively bug free, so its time to look at it with critical eyes and think of where we can take it next, consider what improvements we can make, etc. Many suggestions have been made, but here are the best ones:
- Axing the 'joining phase' - The most complaints at the moment relate to the way that the battles system insists that everyone actually join a battle before submission can take place. My suggestion is that this system can be altered by merging the joining and submission phases into one - effectively letting you join and submit in one step. To prevent popular battles being taken up before you can create your masterpiece, I propose allowing each person ONE 48-hour battle reservation. i.e. if you want to join a battle you can reserve a place in it (but only for one battle in the entire battles system). If you don't submit in 48 hours, your reservation expires and the battle submission slot becomes available once more.
- Allowing people to create battles they do not join - The initial fear was that spammers would create dozens of battles and flood the system. This problem never materialized and now stops the work of enthusiastic users trying to generate more interest in the battles system. My proposal is to allow each user to create up to 12 active battles in which they have the option to not join automatically. This will allow flexibility yet keep a handle on troublemakers.
- Axing battle awards - At the moment there are gold/silver/bronze awards for expert/intermediate/beginner battles. This is confusing and needlessly complex, especially to new users. My proposal is to keep the difficulty statements (for user preference), but merge all awards into one single 'wins' field. This will also allow more meaningful league tables.
- Portal-style 'what's going on' table on main page - At the moment the battles are hidden in their own section, which means that they don't get the exposure they deserve. With this simple addition we would list active battles on the front page, both to invite participants and to entice new visitors to register. As the 'news' section has never been the most useful area of the site, this will be reduced into abstracts only - in much the same way that large tech sites operate.
- User configurable voting times - Quite a number of people have stated that 2 weeks to do a battle and 2 weeks to vote is just too long. To a certain extend the former problem is removed with instant submission (it'll mean that battles will go right to voting as soon as everybody enters - which will be much quicker), but voting time is still a thorny issue. We can either solve this with a user-configurable voting selector at battle creation (i.e. 1/2/3 weeks), or a public vote to decide the best length of time for all battles prior to revising the system. What do you guys think?
Of course, these are just a few of the best (and most workable) suggestions. Let me know if you have more ideas and it'll definately be considered!