Topic, Admins and Levels

  What AK said, however, i'll admit that when you look back at one of your own levels you would be a bit milder on the evaluations.

  I'll be the non-admin voice...

I think that admins were appointed for a reason: That they were seen by game creators to be creative, friendly, knowledgable about the game, and knowing what levels are good and which are bad. If an admin didn't have one of these traits, they would not have been an admin. I have not yet seen an admin (in this site, anyhow) that could not tell the difference between a good level and a bad level. Because they are admins, they know how to make a good level. Therefore, peer reviews of their own levels should not be needed.

  I was more referring to the more popular games, due to the fact, as you said, the ones with one active admin will be going nowhere.

  Usually admins that are active are also active on the chat and will show the levels to people.
But your reasoning...
"However, no one is perfect, and to prevent a possible mistake in accepting a level, I suggest this."
If an admin makes a mistake and doesn't notice it, that means that usually he wouldn't have noticed it either if someone else made it.
Most of the time the peer preview IS done, but I don't think it's needed. It's always a good thing tho.

  I think this is a good idea, although it may not work for all games. Ringmania's levels, for example, are mainly made up of mine and a few from treazer or supermario. With a game community of about 5 or 6 people who regularly play the game, something like this would take far too long to actually be any help. I also trust that I make any levels that aren't good enough to be accepted or there is something wrong with one of them, someone would say so anyway. I always try to make levels to keep games active, and unfortunately, ringmania isn't far from having the same fate of games like cobacoli or captain dan, so I like to keep making levels and keep them coming so this doesn't happen. So I end up needing to accept my own levels.

I do think it's good to have more than one admin on more popular games with levels coming in all the time, especially if those levels are coming in from admins aswell. But in smaller games it's not quite as important. You also need to think that admins are chosen because they know what a good level should look like.

Although I'd like to hear a non admin's opinion too.

  I agree with DY, but I don't do that always, sometimes I just accept my level, as I know what a good level should be in my own game. And as DY said, if I would have made a mistake, people would just comment on it. And making a mistake can also happen when an admin oversees something when evaluating a level of some one else, so I don't see a point to make a special peer review thing.

  I agree to everything DY said. However, I don't use the chat for getting reviews. The few times I have created levels after becoming an admin (In JG2) I have either asked another admin to evaluate it, or asked repuatble designers/admins to play through it and check that it is up to the expected standards.

  Nice idea,

but the only problem with this is that sometimes there's only one active admin.

I think an admin knows what an acceptable level is, so anything they make will be acceptable. If there's an accidental problem with it (such as the goal in the wrong place) then anyone can comment on the level and alert the creator and they will fix it.

I usually go on the chat and ask people's opinions on my levels before I post them, so in that way I do practice "peer review".

But it would be interesting to get an non-admin's opinion on this, lets see if we are doing our job right. =P

  I think it should be a rule of thumb that one should not evaluate a level created by the same person, but rather peer review. I'm not saying that the admins are not great level designers, for the most part they are. However, no one is perfect, and to prevent a possible mistake in accepting a level, I suggest this. This post is not meant to offend anyone, and does not have anything to do with a recent level posted. (Actually, it came up in a class of mine, for those who are curious on where I got this idea.)

To further this point, let's use sources for documents or articles. The word scholarly can be applied here, a scholarly source is one that is written or created by a qualified person (for the most part, the admins are qualified), but it also should include peer review, as well as well created sentence structure, and multiple sources, and data (but the last three do not really apply here). Peer review is vital part of being a scholarly source, so why shouldn't it be applied here? This is my two cents in the subject.