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Quality Assurance shouldn't contribute to a BN's activity score

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Hivie
On May 2nd 2020, QAH started awarding 1/4th of the activity of a nomination. This was mainly done in order to encourage people to do QAH since it was pretty dead at the time.

Fast forward to current times, it's been very apparent that the state of QAH hasn't changed at all, with forum threads like this one recently appearing in order to address the whole problem with QAH.

QAH activity was implemented to incentivize people to do QAH but currently there's a concerningly low amount of BNs who actually do it, with most maps going entirely unchecked.

This activity change proved that it has barely any benefit to QAH, and you could even argue that it does more harm than good:

To elaborate on this point, it basically only benefits people who constantly fail to reach minimum activity requirements, so they use QAH as a way to bypass the activity warning/kick. And with how easy it is to "cheat" QAH by just adding yourself as a checker a few hours before the map ranks and "hoping for the best", you can possibly fill out your requirements by clicking some buttons only. This possibility alone should be enough of a concern by itself, and it shouldn't matter where you can't confirm that someone has done it or not.
Also I'd like to add that most people who care about QAH wouldn't need the extra activity score because they tend to be regularly active BNs.

All of these encouraged some BNs to constantly stay under 5 nominations per last 3 months, for around 1.5 years and counting for example. (this is currently happening by the way)

I strongly think that QAH shouldn't contribute to activity because of its abusable nature, it only benefits people who barely contribute to the ranked section and stay for selfish reasons, while at the same time it doesn't give any benefit to the few people who genuinely care about quality assurance. And the activity points barely made any impact on the state of QAH in general so it's clearly doing more harm than good.

What do you think? please voice your opinions down below.
Mordred
I completely agree
HEAVENLY MOON
1000% agree on this one, sticking to the *absolute minimum* activity while using QA as a booster for activity just isnt right
Usaha
upvote
ikin5050
The problem with the current implementation is that people don’t even leave comments in thread or on the bn site but get given activity for their QAH checks anyway.

Whilst some QAH cases take effort and time like vetoes id be happier getting no tangible credit for cases like this in order to ensure people don’t cruise by with only empty checks to give their activity
GIGACHAD
main focus as a bn should be on nominating maps, agree on removing activity so bns have to do the n part. cant believe that ppl are allowed to stay without doing their intended job.
enneya
+1
Ideal
QAH shouldn't make up for diminished nomination activity, completely agree with this

and as ikin said, a good amount of them don't drop anything on the threads anyways so no point on having it contribute to activity imo
Nifty
I agree. There are many BNs who seem to become very interested in QAH a week before their evaluations with little to no prior QA, and then never touch it after. This is the 330-day nomination history of one BN whose first non-probation evaluation landed on February 14th.

Most people aren't as blatant as this, but it is completely valid to say that BNs have and will abuse QAH activity to pass an evaluation. To elaborate on why this is happening, I will perform a small exercise in arithmetic. This specific user actually joined last October and has 25 nominations, which conventionally would make them consistently under the minimum activity (approx. 2.27 nom/month), but since they spammed 16 QAH within 2 days one time in the past 11 months, their activity is raised to the equivalent of 29 nominations (approx. 2.63 nom/month). This is still under the minimum required activity, but throw in a couple of months of absence notices (which is reasonable) and anybody can stretch QAH abuse to cover for their lack of nominations (if you discount 2 months, the activity levels out to 3.22 nom/month, which is a passing activity).

As you can tell, QAH activity can be and is used to purposefully manipulate nomination activity without actually encouraging BNs to consistently contribute to QAH. This can be seen by this user not having done a single QAH before and having only done 2 QAH within the 6 months after the bulk of the work. A new incentive should be created to encourage consistent QAH activity that doesn't allow for such easy abuse. (I'd also like to encourage people to not attack the behavior, but the system that allows for it; lots of people would do the same thing in the same position)
Aakki
Yeah agree 100%, if you're barely getting minimum activity and using QA to boost it further just doesn't seem right
RandomeLoL
In all honesty, despite this not being an issue in Mania as the QA is quite commendable, I can see how this can be an issue. Specially if we take into account that the main drive behind this addition has laid little to no results on what was expected to help.

Personally, the issue with the lack of QA shouldn't fall upon BNs and BNs alone. I firmly believe that one of the biggest issues with QA is the stigma that the community has against it, specially when it involves Qualified maps and certain mappers or even Nominators being very reluctant to not have their maps DQd. Hence, sometimes this helped can be frowned upon, which has discouraged a bunch of people that have told me their experiences themselves.

But back to the main point, QA'ing as is only adds more loopholes to the BN system than not. The main task that a BN should have is to Nominate maps and QAing shouldn't be reserved to meet the activity criteria. However, this also means that absences should be very important to mention in order to notify our respective NATs.
NeKroMan4ik
agree
Nevo
Big agree on this
UberFazz
yes qah is broken
Mir
so true oomfie
Yasuho
I agree on this. While I still think QAH is important, BN people shouldn't be able to abuse it like that for their BN membership being upheld, despite little to no actual ranked section participation whatsoever. Good post<3
meiqth
huuuge agree, qah is usually used for people who dont need the activity and its usually used to reach a bare minimum

its usually and rushed at the end of an eval period (like the noms as well), and they might not even do the qah check as hivie said: "by just adding yourself as a checker a few hours before the map ranks and `hoping for the best`"


we are bns not qat :<
Annabel
+1
Noffy
Tbh yeah, we've had issues in the case where some people warned for activity would then make up for it with QA,,, then also stop doing QA and be pikachu faced when they're kicked for being inactive later on

People that like to do it, do it anyways, and people that don't, do it for free internet points. On top of that there's the issue that a lot of people that look at qualified don't even use the BN website QA system to start with so it doesn't track most genuine efforts anyways.

I don't think it can be replaced with DQs having a set ratio since those are often done on request or a 2nd bn checking if a report is valid, would sooner just remove the QAH part.

that's just my opinions though and not a final say or something :p
Cheri
Just to give a brief of what I said on server

Just make it like this

You mod the map, and u care about activity in some form:

1. Go to site, add yourself and note u modded the map

2. regardless of who dqs, you only get the activity if the map was dq
(and since dq reasons already got to be stated, we would know the dq is done more than likely due to the person who qa mods)

This would solve complicated stuff on who dq the map or not (and stuff like dq ratio) while still limiting activity to people who actually try to mod the map vs trying to get free activity.
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