Design Hints, Tips, and Tutorials Review Guidelines

There is only one option for rating Design Hints, Tips, and Tutorials, but this rating contains more things than you might think.

When you go about rating a file under this category, you should take the following things into account and bring them all together for one average rating of the file.

Usefulness – Is this a guide about something you really want to know? If the person has written about a very advanced item (eg. Quest Vars or cinematics) , then they should score high in this subsection. If it’s a guide about placing walls in the editor, everyone knows about it, and if you didn’t it could be answered by a quick punt in the question thread. Guides are supposed to be long, in-depth answers to a complex question.

Understandability – How easy is the guide to understand? If you don’t know about something, it is most likely you will need step by step instructions with annotated screenshots. If you can read the guide and understand what to do then it should score high here. A low scoring guide would be very short with gaps and would not help your understanding.

Grammar – Everyone loves and needs grammar. To score top points here, the guide should have been spell checked and proof read so there are no errors, and it is easy for everyone to understand. However, a guide using T3H L33T SP4K ND SHRTND WRDS would be extremely hard to understand and would not help you. A guide with consistent spelling errors would eventually put people off.

Screenshots – Screenshots really help, as they illustrate what an unsure player should do. Annotated and colour coded screenshots leave no questions asked, with a much higher understanding of the reader. A big block of text will put people off and be quite a hard read once you get into it.

Now average out your scores and you have an overall rating. Remember, you can use half marks in this category.

Here is the final rating breakdown:

1 – Very Poor: The guide is about something that most people already know how to do, with no pictures or real instructions. It’s just a block of text with many spelling and grammar errors. This guide looks like it has been done in 5 minutes.
2 – Poor: The guide is quite useful, but still pretty basic. You will have some spelling errors. But no pictures and maybe large steps missing.
3 – Average: An average guide will be something interesting. It will have a picture or two, perhaps with some bullet points. It doesn’t really go into much depth though.
4 – Good: A good guide will be on an interesting topic. It will have step by step instructions assisted by screenshots and will be quite lengthy. It will go into detail in some parts, and may contain the seldom spelling error.
5 – Excellent: This denotes a guide that has taken a long time to make. The guide will be a few pages long, rich with annotated and colour coded screenshots for extra clarity. Everything will be explained in crystal clear detail and there may even be an email for any other questions. This guide has been well put together and is about a broad or interesting subject that will benefit all who read about it.


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