The two are:
- Have the mission system randomized, where you choose a category (such as basic), and a mission is assigned to you. Once a mission is assigned to you, you can't move on in the category until you finish it. In order to detour horrible assignments -- like a new user being assigned Realistic 16 before Realistic 2 -- it is planned to sort by difficulty. E.g, you would only be assigned easy missions, and once you've finished those, you're only assigned moderate difficulty missions... and once you've finished all of the missions in the category, it's completely random.
- Leave the mission system exactly the way it is now.
There are lots of good arguments for either, but we're more interested in yours.
The second issue we're debating on is whether or not to have a point system in the recode. With user management being handed over to the forums more in the recode, actually changing the code of the forums would result in us being unable update the forums, which may include necessary security patches (exactly of how it is now, basically). Although, Thetan made some compelling points today about how important a point system is to the contribution to a website.
Thetan wrote:<bren2010> There is no more point system.
<Thetan> .......
<Thetan> even worse implementation of game theory then
<Thetan> points == engaged users
<Thetan> thats how stackoverflow won the QA market
<bren2010> points == noobs looking up answers to feel 1337.
<Thetan> stackoverflow.com understands the value of gamification
<Thetan> bren2010, removing points doesn't solve the problem
<Thetan> removing points masks the problem
<Thetan> what you have with noobs looking up answers is a failure of engineering
<Thetan> meaning, missions need to be reaxamined, some possibly thrown away even
<Thetan> and their needs to be my dynamic solutions
<bren2010> Then they can just look up the method to get the answer.
<Thetan> so?
<Thetan> isn't that 1/4 of what most hacking is
<Thetan> hey, this shit uses SQL
<Thetan> lets look up how SQL works
<Thetan> ok, lets check out SQL injection
<Thetan> ok, now lets apply this
<Thetan> besides, a good point system wouldnt be strictly missions anyways
<bren2010> In that case they're learning SQL to exploit it. In the case I'm talking about, they're looking up "go to dontlook.php", base64 decode the string it gives you...(several steps later) and then put that into the answer box.
<Thetan> content, posts, etc would be more valuable
<Thetan> bren2010, and that would go along with the missions that should be thrown away
<Thetan> missions should be minor points anyways
<Thetan> so that way you want to look 1337 you actually have to be 1337
<Thetan> and that will be determined by your peers
<Thetan> and even more so by mods etc
<Thetan> this is why point systems like HackerNews' Karma, Reddits points and StackOverflows points are fueling practically all of their quality content for free
<Thetan> points == free work -> the most basic law of gamification
<Thetan> free is good
<bren2010> ._.
<Thetan> awards == free sprints for milestones -> second basic law of gamification
<Thetan> "give a man a colored ribbon and he'd gladly die in combat for you" - Napolean
<Thetan> ^^ that nigger knew game theory
It's not just me and Thetan sparring in a staff channel, though -- a lot of people I've talked to on IRC (in #hackthissite and #comDev mostly) have a strong opinion on either matter. Unfortunately, this isn't a very accurate measure of how the community as a whole feels. One partition of the community doesn't have the continuous computer time to stay on IRC all day, and another partition has the computer time to keep IRC up in the background, but doesn't have the time to browse the forums. Hopefully, though, you can help me get an accurate measure of how the community feels about controversial issues we're trying to fix in the recode.