Long Live the King? (dooyoo Crowns)

Member Name: rob_writer

Product:	dooyoo Crowns
Date:	22/03/02 (52 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: More money

Disadvantages: Not fair

Crowns. Everyone wants them. Everyone complains about them. So what's the answer?

My biggest gripe with the crown system is the inconsistency. It probably shouldn't happen now, with the new guides and users nomination system, but it does. I got a crown not so long ago and I don't think I should have, there was a much better uncrowned op in the same category. On the other hand I write some opinions which aren't crowned which I think should be. It's the nature of the beast, or something like that, but if crowns are ever to stop being such a talking point then something must be done.

To be honest I'm not even sure if the nominations idea is such a good thing. I mean, it's all to do with statistics isn't it. If one op gets read 100 time, and another 10, which is going to have nominations? It's a well known fact that a lot of people never nominate crowns. I know I rarely do (unless when I'm doing the computer guidey person thing), and it's also a fact that a lot of people who say they nominated you for a crown don't. If I were king of Dooyoo I would ban that 'Great Op, nominated for crown, please let me kiss you ass' comment that lots of people use. Don't see why you need to tell people you have, unless you want something in return.

On to the role of the Dooyoo guide. I'm a guide, don't always like being one, but it cna be good fun too. Basically what I'm meant to do is read every op in the computer section and let Dooyoo know when I think one should get a crown, be locked, or if an op is copied. It's just my opinion, I can't say an op gets a crown and it does automatically - the final decision lies with Dooyoo. Still, most of the ops I do nominate get crowns, so I'll happily accept any bribes you may want to offer me! Or maybe I shouldn't have made that joke, no doubt some fool will take it the wrong way and run around shouting about corruption amongst the
guides, complain that we only nominate our friends, or some other tosh like that. I don't think Dooyoo have enough people to be guides, they may well still want some more people, so rather than sit back and shout abuse why no try doing it yourself rather than moaning. And remember, guides do it because they want to, they get no reward, simply emails begging for crowns and idiots complaining that their (crap) op should be crowned now.

So far we have two ways of crown nominations, users and guides. The third way of getting a crown is by having your op read by a member of the Dooyoo staff. However, with no disrespect to the Dooyoo staff, I doubt they do this very often. They can't, they don't have the staff. JP and Simone (soon to become JP and Callum) can't possibly do it, not when Dooyoo once had about 10 people doing the same jobs. Doesn't quite work out to me. That's why us guides have come about, they needed someone to do what the old staff did. Granted the staff did a hell of a lot more stuff too, but reading ops was part of their job, and now guides do it for free. No wonder it makes a few of the guides a little annoyed.

Back in the old days all crowns were awarded by those staff, the Category Managers. They gave crowns to the ops they thought were worthy. In my opinion that system worked better than this one (but only cos I got most my crowns back then). You could write a great op you thought might get a crown, post it, and within an hour it might have gained a shiny hat. It wasn't all god back in those days either, people still complained that it wasn't fair. But people still complain now, so the new system isn't working either. And I like it less cos I get less crowns (and after all, what else matters!).

Should crowns stay? Should they go? Should they be replaced by something better? Or should all the extra rewards be scrapped?

First off I think crowns need to stay. They are extra moti
vation to write good ops, a chance to get more than the 3p per read. A while ago the standard on Dooyoo was very high, when you got paid 10p per op and 5p per read. It was probably too high for the payments, but no one minded. However, when the rates were cut the payment for an average op that got 20 reads were cut by almost half. Did the standard drop by half? Should it have? I know that a lot of my ops aren't as good as they used to be. It makes more sense, in the interest of money, to write one or two shortish but still VU ops per day than one or two longer ones a week. Combined with the drop in people using Dooyoo (therefore reads were down) a lot of people got a little sick of it all. Crown rates at the time of the payment cut were upped to £1.50.

No doubt a lot of people will say that they write for the joy of it. I do to an extent to, the monetary payment alone can't justify writing anymore. There are a few (well 2) other new sites, concentrating on students, whom I write for just for money. Dooyoo is the one I always come back to and I will continue to write until I either give up the whole online writing thing, or the site dies. Hopefully neither will happen.

But anyway, back to crowns. As I was meaning to say before I got sidetracked, crowns are a necessary incentive to people. I don't know how many ops get nominated now, at one point I think the number was cited as 1 in 50 (or it could have been 2 in 50). A small percentage, if I'm honest. That could well have risen now, but there are still a lot of good ops that just miss out on a crown that get paid the same as a crap op. A better idea would be some kind of scaled system, where the best ops got the most, and the payments slid down till you got paid very little for churning rubbish.

A Ciao like premium fund would be a good idea, but I doubt viable, due to the fact that to be fair someone (ie staff) would need to read all the ops to judge their quality. Whate
ver Ciao say I am convinced their system is based on reads and popularity of writers, but why bother if all you do is reward the most read ops with money, the ops that have already earned the most 3ps! I often struggle to get more than 20 ops per read, often because I write on the less popular items, and I am sure if a newbie arrived on the site they would find it difficult to break in to the limelight too. Any reward payment must be based on quality an quality alone.

How about restructuring the rating scale, with VU getting 5p, Useful getting 3p and SU 1p. Or something like that. Some reward is needed for people to write good ops, because not all of them can be crowned. You could also reduce the crown payment to 75p and award double the crowns. Or have silver and gold crowns, worth different amounts. As long as the rewards were scaled properly it wouldn't cost dooyoo anymore money.

Anyway, I doubt anything major will be done to the system, so at least the system at the moment could be improved. Adding a new rating 'VU and Nominate for a crown' has been mentioned before, and should be implemented, saving time when nominating. Also add a 'number of times nominated' stat to ops, to let people know whether the sucking up commenters have really nominated the op for a crown. I'd also try to get two guides in every category so that there are two opinions - everyone has different criteria for nominating for a crown.

Crowns, a necessary evil, perhaps not evil, more a good thing not quite as good as it could be. I'm sure this won't be the last op on this topic, and I'm sure lotsa people will have better ideas than me. Please Dooyoo, listen to some of them.

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