Michat wrote in Wed May 28, 2014 8:02 am:Apart of the technical aspects of the controversial Rating System and FDM accuracy, etc..
Should be a Category that could represent the users experience - User's choice- Voted by users. From 0-5.
And what about to show a ranking orderer by aircraft flight time? Results can be used to choose aircraft of the month, year, decade, or all the times.
Aircraft Users feedbacks (likes), dynamic results, and some tracks of connected aircrafts - users, could be shown at the home page.
In my opinion web page should reflect what is happens in FG in real time , airspace, wiki, forum, position objects- web tools new contributions adds, general community users: pilots, developers, airlines, hangars, tracker....... should have that you call ¿modules in php? I mean those boxes with that dynamic info.
More click interactivity to the users, less exposing our best human resources to a troll-chat roulette.
Please accept my comments like laminar winds.
On the surface a good idea but there are a number of very real issues with it that need to be considered. We have a very wide range of aircraft types and to be really useful this type of system would need to rank each aircraft against it's peers and not against all aircraft of every type. If I want to find the very best jet fighter then I would like to see jet fighters ranked as a peer group. Same thing for jet airliners, flying boats, air ships, modern aerobatic aircraft, WWII fighters, single engine GA... Otherwise the user based ranking is not particularly meaningful and some TYPES of aircraft are likely to dominate the ranking list not because the TYPE has more very good examples but for other reasons. For example, we seem to have lots of people who are into jet air liners (nothing wrong with that but this is not my thing) and there is a possibility that some kind of metric like total flight hours could end up being dominated by airliners because these tend to be used for longer flights (hours in duration) where as something like a modern aerobatic aircraft might typically be flown for 15 to 20 minutes at a time. So an extremely nice aerobatic aircraft that has a following and should show up in any short list of great aircraft could actually rank much lower than a mediocre jetliner because of the differences in how these types are typically operated, In addition I have read posts here where airliner pilots will go on auto pilot and let the aircraft basically fly itself for hours well doing things like eating lunch or taking a shower - should those hours count toward a rank and if not how would this be accounted for?
Also many pilots never or seldom use the multiplayer system. How would we account for this usage?
User ratings also tend to be very subjective. Users may like the way an aircraft with an unrealistic FDM flys and give it a high ranking but then turn around and give a low ranking to a similar aircraft that actually has a very accurate FDM. There are other issues with user supplied rankings. I have seen posts here where users complained about certain aircraft with known good FDMs being "totally un-flyable" where it turned out they they had totally messed up controller setups that were causing the problems. After sorting out the controller setup they found the "totally un-flyable" aircraft to be a very nice flyer. Had these users not fixed their controller issues would they have ranked that aircraft with an undeserved very low score? How often do users have issues with their controller setups that are undiagnosed? Some very advanced FDMs are difficult to impossible to fly if the user does not have a nearly complete controller setup. How often will these aircraft be given low rankings by users because they lack the necessary controller setup to really enjoy the aircraft (IE. I can't fly this thing with a mouse so I will rank it as a 0).
Over all the current rating system seems to be working at least for those aircraft where the dev is being an honest actor which I think is the case far more often than not. Aircraft devs have for the most part tried to use the system in a more or less objective way. Some have been perhaps a little too generous but most are very conservative and tend to error toward giving lower ratings. For example, when I look at the ratings for my aircraft if something (like the external model) is in between say a 3 and a 4 I will rate is as a 3.
In addition, the published rating criteria for each of the four areas is very objective in nature with each having a list of very specific criteria needed for each rating level that aircraft devs are able to easily interpret. Aircraft devs can look at the criteria and do a good rating job in perhaps 15 minutes because of their knowledge of the aircraft. In addition, the aircraft devs are, for the most part, the most qualified person to do this rating because they are generally by far the most knowledgeable person about that particular aircraft who is part of the FG community and they are well aware (way more so than the vast majority of users) how close it is to the real thing and what work remains to be done. The better aircraft are done by devs that have spend hundreds if not thousands of hours researching their aircraft and these folks are very aware of every flaw, every missing feature, every detail that is not perfect in their aircraft and they are generally very upfront about these issues. Other users, on the other hand, would likely need dozens and perhaps even hundreds of hours effort to do a good job of using the rating system on a higher end aircraft model because it would take that long to get and understand the documentation for the real aircraft and then run tests to verify that the model was to specifications.
The Ogel is a very unusual case as it is related to the rating system. It along with other fantasy/imaginary aircraft don't fit the rating system since it was not designed for rating these aircraft. Since there are so few of these it is probably at most a minor issue.