[PS3] LittleBigPlanet 2

Yes, these appeal on an intellectual level, like the above vid. Cooll but pointless. It's wrong for people to think that's all LBP2 can do. Then again, perhaps it's right to think that's all we'll get?

That the bolded part will happen is my sneaking suspicion. Or at least that it will be all you'll be able to find when you dig through the interface because all the neat stuff gets buried somewhere underneath.
 
It'd be like YouTube. You'll see contents highlighted by friends in the fora or websites. I don't track LBP levels but still get to play a good 30-40 of them. Most are ok or so-so, a few are really really good.

Besides the built-in levels (LBP had 50 but I didn't complete them), Media Molecule will release DLCs and highlight user levels as usual. Prehistoric Move this month would be a good example. If you wait for the Greatest Hits edition, you may get more DLCs and select user levels too.

The feature I look forward most in LBP2 is improved netcode. My son and I loved to play LBP with strangers. They were very polite, helpful, and *colorful* The game has a lot of personality.
 
You would think after all that hearts 4 hearts nonsense LBP1 had to go through they wouldn't ever want to do anything like that again. Certainly not make it worse, which is what they have done.

You can now collect pins. And you'll get them for a variety of things you can do in LBP2. And some pins are linked to trophies. So dedicated pin collection levels will be a common sight, clogging up the frontpage much like the hearts 4 hearts levels did. And of course there is a pin for getting your levels hearted a 100 times.
 
It'd be like YouTube. You'll see contents highlighted by friends in the fora or websites. I don't track LBP levels but still get to play a good 30-40 of them. Most are ok or so-so, a few are really really good.
My shooter got 7 plays, 6 smiles (thumbs up). Seven. After listing in the LBPCentral "Play my level" thread and checking out lots of other people's levels because they asked...seven people actually looked at my level. I think four or five had looked before I posted there too. Although the sampling is very low, 6 thumbs up out of 7 plays is a high average rating, yet the Cool levels seem to need something like 20 plays to feature. At least that's about how many plays minimum I see on levels in that list.

You can get utterly lost and ignored and there ain't nothing you can do about it, unless you are a part of some social network like GAF, maybe. Basically if you want your work to be seen, creating is only half the effort, you then need marketing! :p
 
You can get utterly lost and ignored and there ain't nothing you can do about it, unless you are a part of some social network like GAF, maybe. Basically if you want your work to be seen, creating is only half the effort, you then need marketing! :p

There's a valuable life lesson in there somehwere ... :p
 
Definitely. It's a shame no-one's yet found a solution, ensuring every gets a fair representation and the best finds its way into the spotlight, rather than just the most popular. (Not saying mine is among the best, only it didn't get enough play time for people to determine whether it was good or not. Good or bad I can cope with, but being irrelevant is the most depressing outcome.)
 
Maybe they should create a search function for levels which got the most amount of smiles in relation to the amount of people who played the level.
 
There are various different weightings they could provide. At the moment the system provides a very LBP1-like list of levels; in fact it's even a step back as with LBP1 they added new levels onto the first page. LBP2 has a list of MM picks and a list of cool levels. Finding the latest levels or any other levels requires another click or two. When a person just wants to play, and has a list of 20 levels to explore on page one that are 'cool', they're not going to go digging.

MM's current solution is LBP.me, where you can network and explore, but the same as other social sites like Facebook, that's only going to push popular creators. That's not to say popular creators won't be good, as you'd hope there was something of merit to their creations to attract such attention, but it does mean you need popularity in the first place to get noticed.

Whatever alternative selection schemes MM could employ, they need to ahve it on page one, instant access, for it to have an impact. Maybe they should just put some more loosely selected, more frequently changed levels on the first page, and have the cool levels and MM Picks further away in submenus, shifting the immediate exploration into the unknown and unrecognised levels rather than the already established ones?
 
You can now collect pins. And you'll get them for a variety of things you can do in LBP2. And some pins are linked to trophies. So dedicated pin collection levels will be a common sight, clogging up the frontpage much like the hearts 4 hearts levels did. And of course there is a pin for getting your levels hearted a 100 times.

The front page of the official LBP2 community website or an in-game front page ?

Definitely. It's a shame no-one's yet found a solution, ensuring every gets a fair representation and the best finds its way into the spotlight, rather than just the most popular. (Not saying mine is among the best, only it didn't get enough play time for people to determine whether it was good or not. Good or bad I can cope with, but being irrelevant is the most depressing outcome.)

The SingStar community site seems to give a good balance of the user videos. LBP2 should do something like that. The problem with these sites though is they are too closed. Should have more referrer mechanism to pull new comers in, or to get embedded in larger communities.

Nonetheless, the problems you face as a LBP creator is similar to a website owner's. You'll need to market your destination proactively to gain visibility. Perhaps some sort of "Page Rank" for LBP levels can help. They'd also need a simple rule to filter out junk levels (Those Cornsnake mentioned above). With these mechanisms in place, the level creators will still need to game the system to optimize their ranking.

EDIT: In short, it'd be an improvement to weed out lousy levels, but not enough to make sure all good levels get promoted. The basic problem is once the platform takes off, there may be "too much" (and too similar) contents generated.
 
The front page of the official LBP2 community website or an in-game front page ?

The first page of the Cool Levels in-game.

The SingStar community site seems to give a good balance of the user videos. LBP2 should do something like that. The problem with these sites though is they are too closed. Should have more referrer mechanism to pull new comers in, or to get embedded in larger communities.

Nonetheless, the problems you face as a LBP creator is similar to a website owner's. You'll need to market your destination proactively to gain visibility. Perhaps some sort of "Page Rank" for LBP levels can help. They'd also need a simple rule to filter out junk levels (Those Cornsnake mentioned above). With these mechanisms in place, the level creators will still need to game the system to optimize their ranking.

EDIT: In short, it'd be an improvement to weed out lousy levels, but not enough to make sure all good levels get promoted. The basic problem is once the platform takes off, there may be "too much" (and too similar) contents generated.

I was surprised to find that even in the beta forums some people like those levels, and want them to stay since it's the community that keeps them on the first page.

I think the game should filter out any levels you've played from your first page. If I like them and may want to play them again, I'll heart them so I can find them on my hearted list. And even if didn't I can still find them on the recently played list. That way the first page keep updated, and I don't have to look at levels I'm not or no longer interested in. And an option to manually remove levels from my first page.
 
The front page of the official LBP2 community website or an in-game front page ?
When you visit the LBP2 community page, you are faced with five buttons :
At the top, "My Queue" - levels you have picked from LBP.Me
Cool levels
MM Picks
Search
Other

"Other" takes you to a page where you can select from previous searches and played levels, or choose from highest rated (this week, month, ever), most played (this week, month ever), newest, lucky dip, etc.

EDIT: In short, it'd be an improvement to weed out lousy levels, but not enough to make sure all good levels get promoted. The basic problem is once the platform takes off, there may be "too much" (and too similar) contents generated.
Yes, that'll always be the way. There's only so much content that can be consumed. If people are making more than can be consumed, some will be left. The only way that wouldn't happen is if content is deliberately marginalised, so some content is not shown to other users, who get to experience other content. That is, let's say there are 10 great levels proving very popular. 10 more great levels are made by other creators. They won't get a look in with a current system. You'd have to divert some attention from the current 10 popular levels to the new 10, meaning the new content would actually get an audience, but the old levels will get less visit. 2x the levels at half the number of plays each. Of course the more good levels, to be fair the more distributed the audiences would have to be, and suddenly your trying to influence things which is somewhat preventing the culture developing on its own. 1000 great levels would mean no thousands-and-thousands of plays as they all get a limited distribution.

What if instead, they abandoned the whole popularity or ratings system with LBP2? What if you have to search or lucky dip? Outside 'marketing' would still work, so a Gaffer could post of GAF and get thousands of plays, but that wouldn't then automatically place them in a popularity listing to get extra views. You'd also still have the friend's lists, so people could follow the levels played and rated by friends. In essence, that'd move popularity to word of mouth.

That way the first page keep updated, and I don't have to look at levels I'm not or no longer interested in. And an option to manually remove levels from my first page.
That's a fair idea, and they could vary how the list is updated for users to select more personal recommendations, maybe, like if you have been playing racing levels or RPGs, it'd offer a selection with more of these.
 
When you visit the LBP2 community page, you are faced with five buttons :
At the top, "My Queue" - levels you have picked from LBP.Me
Cool levels
MM Picks
Search
Other

"Other" takes you to a page where you can select from previous searches and played levels, or choose from highest rated (this week, month, ever), most played (this week, month ever), newest, lucky dip, etc.

Does it allow creators to categorize them better ? Like adventure game, side scrollers, puzzles, racing, etc. since LBP2 is a lot more flexible than LBP.

What if instead, they abandoned the whole popularity or ratings system with LBP2? What if you have to search or lucky dip? Outside 'marketing' would still work, so a Gaffer could post of GAF and get thousands of plays, but that wouldn't then automatically place them in a popularity listing to get extra views. You'd also still have the friend's lists, so people could follow the levels played and rated by friends. In essence, that'd move popularity to word of mouth.

That's a fair idea, and they could vary how the list is updated for users to select more personal recommendations, maybe, like if you have been playing racing levels or RPGs, it'd offer a selection with more of these.

Searching may be a little tricky since not everyone wants to use keyboard for free form searches. If it's tags (like flickr) or a directory (like Yahoo directory), then it may be easier. Following friends' favorites is ok too.

Rank by popularity should be supported. As long as they reset the list, it should be ok. Google rotate their page rank rather frequently. After a few times, if the same titles/links float up to the top, you know they're good. The search rank optimization people will redo their ranking whenever Google rotate the list.

Also, I'd :love: to have a field to indicate how much time the creator spent creating the level.

EDIT: Allow us to sort the levels by effort in descending order.
 
Does it allow creators to categorize them better ? Like adventure game, side scrollers, puzzles, racing, etc. since LBP2 is a lot more flexible than LBP.
Yes, you can choose your own tags for searching.

Searching may be a little tricky since not everyone wants to use keyboard for free form searches. If it's tags (like flickr) or a directory (like Yahoo directory), then it may be easier. Following friends' favorites is ok too.
I wouldn't have compulsory searching, but have it so you either have to lucky dip for immediacy, or search (uses tags), or follow a friend's recommendations. This would tie in with LBP.me where you can find levels through weblinks.

Rank by popularity should be supported.
Maybe for choosing levels from a search, you could ask for popular levels or highly rated levels. The problem though is when everyone goes with what is popular. Those popular levels shouldn't be 'pimped' to everyone, but available to find.
 

RPG with inventory and battle system in LBP2 beta. This is seems to be more important a buy than any other game on the planet. LBP2 is IT !!
 
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