I don't know. I mean, when I was hosting this section with Vargr, we had a blast, had increased activity, hosted fun events, got people engaged and posting, and we really didn't think about ranks. We thought about fostering an environment where people both felt good about building, felt good about creating, AND made freaking good builds if I have to say so. The events we hosted were testimony to that. 

IMO, that was a result of engagement and support within the community. And people can call it all "hugs and happy", but I don't care, I like talking and getting to know builders. I like sharing my crap with them and letting everybody see all the struggles I go through when I build. 

For me personally, I do not build to achieve a rank. It was the climate a few years ago, yeah, sure, and I fell for it like anybody else does, but I came really late in the game when almost every (not every, goldie and I have seen to that) glitch and exploit's been done, so I had to focus on other things. And, remember, crappy button masher, I can't do all the fancy combos you all can do. That being said, though I'm taking a long hiatus because of a story I'm working on with the Lorc and to play FO and bloody move to Texas, it doesn't mean by any stretch that I no longer have Skyrim build ideas. I have about 10 off the top of my head and I want to be a part of this wonderful group again more regularly because you guys are great. I just have real life shit right now. 

Likes are not especially important, but feedback and comments, engagement, foster a sense of community.  Hugs and happiness, syrup and pancakes. Happy people are creative people. People who are intimidated or scared do not comment and do not create. 

If ranks want to be changed because that's what the community wants, then do it. I think polls are an excellent idea to determine interest, Vargr. 

And one day, peeps, I will get my builds out of the workshop... one. day.

Greetings adventurers from your local CB Rogue.

As I am kinda new to the CB group (3 posted builds so far and one in the makings) I will say what I think from my experience in the group up until now. Sorry if things I mention were said in the previous comments but due to lack of time I 'm not able to carefuly read all the comments and just went through them in a rush.

Regarding the current ranking system: Likes. Likes are a small thing that I think it's possitive to exist in the builds since it shows that someone appreciates your work. The ranking system based on the number of likes though I think is outdated for the current state of the group. Back then when it was implemented there were many people that played Skyrim and were interested into the skyrim builds coming out. At the moment though not as many people play Skyrim so it's natural for the community to be smaller which is not necessarily a bad thing, it's just a natural thing in the gaming community in general. So my opinion is that the ranking system should be revised since I think it does not cover the needs of the group anymore. An idea would be to reduce the number required for the ranks or someone might have some other idea regarding the ranking of the builds or remove the ranking entirely who knows :P .

Edit: Something I forgot to mention is that to me comments and interaction with other people is more important than the likes, for example in my Skeleton Archer build while the build was in the workshop it had I think over 40 comments which was a great thing to me. I will come back and might put a few more thoughts towards this direction of interactivity between people at the CB grop at a "later comment" too tired to go into that right now >_< . 

On another note I would like to suggest an idea. I think it would be nice to have a character build spotlight to showcase new builds and builders every week or every 2 weeks or something like that (just a thought) . Or even make a poll and give people a few days to choose from "newer" builds which one they would like to see showcased; you get the general idea.. 

(I might come back with a few more things to comment or suggest but just finished with work and my head is in a difficult position at the moment :P).

I'm not a very prominent face around here but, despite it being on another account I lost the login info for, I've been here since the glory days of 2012 and 2013. I frequented this site, giving feedback and throwing a few likes here and there. I even tried to make quite a few builds before (though they all failed either due to not following rules exactly or just sucking) and the likes were something to strive for. I always wanted to have a build as successful as say Ponty's or Mason's. I feel the ranks are something that helps to designate the total likes a build has earned and to categorize each build for the purpose of ease of access.

However, I feel that due to a much smaller Skyrim playerbase, and so a much smaller membership for this group, the specific number of likes needed to aquire a specific rank has become outdated. This doesn't mean I feel the ranks are obsolete. I'm with Dragonborn 1921 on this one, we should lower the like requirements for ranks. Though I also agree with Relycs that 50 likes isn't really legendary. So maybe rename the ranks and lower the number of likes needed. 

The part I am unsure about, however, is the Bloodworks. I feel we need a way to weed out the bad builds but I'm not sure if having a vote and, if a build doesn't win, its gone forever is the right way to go about it. Here's my idea. Maybe have the Elder Council vote each month on which builds are to compete. The owners of the builds' chosen are notified and have one week to improve it. The group owners would keep an eye on these builds. If they believe the build improved significantly in that week or rank up, it is safe; or at least until the next vote. If any builds remain, the populace will vote on which one survives. If not, the process repeats until a popular vote is calculated and a build(s) are deleted. This could definitely give builds a much larger chance at both improving and surviving; increasing motivation to create new builds and also weeding out bad builds through either deletion or improvement. 

One quick last thing before I finish this long post. I feel we should encourage modded builds to be made. We should not, however, make builds exclusively modded, as that would discourage builder's like me and Soly who enjoy the (mostly) vanilla experience, and I'm sure many others, from contributing. I agree with the suggestions that we should have maybe a #Ordinator or #Reqiuem tags to help promote modded builds. 

Hmm, I was going to say a few things but I re-read it. The point your making is more against the idea of deleting builds rather than being against the polling, correct?

I definitely agree with that. Honestly, I think that the better option is just to leave the lowest rank as a kind of storage section for builds that are either going up or just aren't great... I wouldn't complain about maybe saying if they lose two polls then maybe they could be deleted, or give them a month after the poll or something like that. I don't know, but yeah instant deletion just seems a bit pointless in my opinion. I mean theoretically if I missed a week I could have a build deleted which seems like a shame.

[blockquote][b][url=/profile/Dragonborn1721]Dragonborn1921[/url] said:[/b]

Hmm, I was going to say a few things but I re-read it. The point your making is more against the idea of deleting builds rather than being against the polling, correct?

I definitely agree with that. Honestly, I think that the better option is just to leave the lowest rank as a kind of storage section for builds that are either going up or just aren't great... I wouldn't complain about maybe saying if they lose two polls then maybe they could be deleted, or give them a month after the poll or something like that. I don't know, but yeah instant deletion just seems a bit pointless in my opinion. I mean theoretically if I missed a week I could have a build deleted which seems like a shame.

[/blockquote]

Well, yes. Sort of. I wanted to make it against the polls and it just morphed into being against build deletion. If a build is high quality, I hate to see someone's build be deleted, and their hard work with it, just because it didn't quite meet an arbitrary number of likes.

But I like your idea of having the lowest rank be storage for the bad builds. Have a Rank 0 for this storage rank but also rename the Bloodworks to something more friendly and positive as just a rank for categorization. This Rank 0 would provide an easy way to show which builds need improvement so they can more easily get it and give our more altruistic members a platform to easily find builds so they can help others. We could even turn into a quasi-bloodworks where each week we vote on which builds have improved enough to be promoted out of Rank 0. The winner gets to start ranking while the losers get more time and an inspiration to improve. A possibility is if it gets enough likes to reach the second rank, it already is promoted out of Rank 0. I don't like this, though, because I worry it would encourage people to like builds just to do their good deed for the day by helping the build get out of Rank 0; rather than if the build actually improved. Builds are watched the group hosts and if they decide a build needs a lot of improvement, they put in this rank so it can more easily get help. 

I dunno. I'm kinda just spitballing. What do you think? It could be a way to remake the Bloodworks as a positive thing; rather than about build deletion. Deleting builds doesn't help motivation as I learned from experience. That's why I pretty much left this site until recently when I got my new account. I view this site for the builds; to see someone's creativity and make my own through being inspired by their creativity. But after having so many builds deleted, I lost all inspiration until my Chevalier build (shameful advertising). Thus, I stopped viewing the site.So, having Rank 0 (or whatever you wanna call it) could be a way to get more builds too because not only is it not deleting someone's hard work but also helping to give them advice on their build. That could inspire a lot more newbies to come on by. 

I've been waiting to comment until I came up with an elegant solution, but I got nothing xD

Pretty much what many have already voiced: (a) ranks are a great way to categorize builds based on their quality/popularity, and (b) the system is broken now (since the move to SE, I've made 3 or so builds, and I don't think any of them are out of Bloodworks--that would have bothered me two or three years ago, but now... not so much). Don't really know what to do to fix that.

Perhaps keep the ning rankings for the ning builds, and something different for the SE builds. This might (a) keep categorization of builds, which I still think is pretty important, and (b) will let folks know which builds are newer (which I think might be kind of a cool thing to know. I don't really think rescaling likes for SE builds makes much sense--there are just SO few likes to work with--but how to categorize builds in a way that is objective and unbiased... well, that's a tough nut to crack. Polls might offer an intriguing solution, but I still can't wrap my head around how to make that work. 

I know I don't get on the site much now but I would like to share some feedback on the matter.

Ranks are dependent on the activity on the articles and there are several hindrances with the current design that work against that activity.

One thing I noticed is that in the old Ning, like button was under the build which made it easier to like the build after reading it. Nowadays you need to scroll all the way to the top to like the build. I think if it is possible to move the button under the build body, it would give some increase to the numbers of likes. 

The other is that the group pages take ages to load. I have recorded how long it takes me to get to the group page: http://recordit.co/3KALEKDcoS 

Notice that my connection is not at fault since other pages load quite fast. It is hard to keep track of new builds if you have to wait around a minute to just to get to the group.

Overall my impression of SE is that it is slower than Ning. That is a big problem since nobody wants to battle the slow performance when sharing their creativity. That's one of the gold rules for platforms with creative content :)

All right people, as promised the Poll is up.  I believe it covers the basic ideas that were proposed here.  Please understand that these are still preliminary ideas nothing is set in stone just yet and if a change is made it will still take some time to implement. 

Bummer, so I want to vote for 1, 2 and 3 so yeah. I've got my vote down for creating a new set of ranks but I think that can/should involve the other two options as well.