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Feedback ยท Feature Suggestion: Story Trees (closed)

master of 3 children

One feature that I think would really set this apart is an interactive story tree like writing.com, cyoo, or the undending BE addventure, but with some nextgen features that would make it not only easier to read and navigate, but to encourage writers to contribute.

My idea is that an author can start a story, then give two or more options on what happens next.

From there, others can do several things.

  1. Comment on that part of the stories chapter.

  2. Vote for where the story should go next. Votes would be tied to each account.

  3. Add an entirely new option for where the story might go.

  4. Award the author with points.

  5. Write a new chapter in the story. Once a new chapter in the story is written, everyone who voted then gets an alert on their account showing that it's updated. After they've read a chapter, they then have a choice in whether to award the point from their vote to that chapter, or keep it in reserve in the hopes (and to encourage) a new chapter is written from that branch.

  6. Create rewards. A reader can choose to invest a number of points on a particular option, such as "At least1000 words, where X and Y happens to the character" for 50 points. After someone completes that, either a moderator or a random jury decide how well it fulfills the request, and they get that many points.

In essence, the idea is to create an economy of virtual currency that's primarily generated by users reading and participating in a story, with writers given the potential to quickly score lots of points if they're well received. I know I personally would find it really motivating, and to be honest, a lot of fun. Points are fun. If the site becomes truly successful, you could even have a way to convert points back and forth with actual money, which would lead to an incredible platform for people to commission and even crowdsource smut.

meta info

endorsement points: 150

created: 30 September 14 at 08:29 AM (build: 9/28/2014 9:29 PM alpha)

closed: 01 October 14 at 07:54 PM (build: 10/1/2014 2:41 PM alpha)

children

Link Separate Roleplay together

Request community feedback for roleplays

Upvote/vote/reward plays that personify good examples of a given interest

Wrecked Avent Site Administrator

What I like:

  • Ability to link a series of plays together as a "story" with each being "chapters" or "segments"

  • Asking community for feedback and possibly direction

  • Providing feedback and then getting updates as the story adds new chapters

What I'm not so sure about:

  • Rewards? This seems a bit vague and possibly confusing. How are rewards created? Who sets the reward conditions? Readers? What if they create a reward the author doesn't want to do? Is there some kind of quality control for rewards? Honestly it just seems like a bunch of overhead to me.

  • Voting/Points. I would be more interested in having points awarded for having a public play/story with a good example of a given interest, to encourage plays to be public and to make searching for plays more worthwhile.

  • What about multiple authors? Is it divvy'd up evenly?

What I don't like:

  • Converting any kind of points here into real-world currency. Doing this suddenly means I need to really start looking into point fraud and voting authenticity, which is not something I really want to do.

Wizard

"Rewards? This seems a bit vague and possibly confusing. How are rewards created? Who sets the reward conditions? Readers? What if they create a reward the author doesn't want to do? Is there some kind of quality control for rewards? Honestly it just seems like a bunch of overhead to me."

My idea was that rewards would mostly be a vanity thing. Like how on tumblr, you can see that one of your posts has 5000 likes and reblogs. That doesn't really do anything, but it does give an author a warm fuzzy.

The idea is that if someone creates a reward the author doesn't want to do, someone else branches away from the story and does it instead. For example, say there's a story about two wizards battling each other through a series of transformations. Someone could go to the middle of the story, then create a new option for a transformation they'd particularly like to see. Writers would see the reward, and if they like the idea, they could go for it. Meanwhile, the story keeps branching out naturally along.

As for quality control...not sure. There are probably a bunch of ways to handle that.

"Voting/Points. I would be more interested in having points awarded for having a public play/story with a good example of a given interest, to encourage plays to be public and to make searching for plays more worthwhile."

Me too! Encouraging and praising that kind of stuff is great.

"What about multiple authors? Is it divvy'd up evenly?"

I was thinking that things could go for one "chapter" at a time, with whoever wrote that chapter getting the reward. But there's no reason you couldn't have some feature that could divvy points up to all authors of an interactive story in some way.

"Converting any kind of points here into real-world currency. Doing this suddenly means I need to really start looking into point fraud and voting authenticity, which is not something I really want to do."

Yeah, that's more of a pipe dream than something at all practical.

Mark Grizzly

I like the idea of linking multiple 'sessions' together as one contiguous story for people to view.

Wrecked Avent Site Administrator

I have split this suggestion into several implementable things to get the best idea of which parts of this people like the most. Please endorse the parts you want to see most.

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