Proposal on How The Rating System on the Rig Exchange and the Forum's Rig Exchange Area Should Work Together

    Like many others who I've read comments from on this topic, I am not a fan of the star-based rating system for various reasons - too vague, can't tell if someone doesn't like something because its not a good amp for their style, or maybe not a great amp for their type of guitar, or if they play at low volumes at home or on a stage, what they use to play through, etc. You also can't tell if they gave it 5 stars because they modified it or if they gave it 1 star because they didn't like it although they use it all of the time after they modified it.


    For me the ideal situation would be:


    • For every rig uploaded to the exchange an immediate thread would automatically be created in the Rig Exchange part of this Forum with the title of the rig used as the title of the thread and all tag information listed in the text field of that initial post.
    • In the Rig Exchange you can click a "Reviews and Discussion" link directly to that thread in the forum.
    • Do not allow for manually creating of new threads in this area or else do something to differentiate the auto-created ones - maybe right vs left justified thread titles, thus making it easy to spot something being discussed that is not in the exchange.


    Hopefully authors who wish to comment/provide info as they do now can simply upload their rig, click the link to the new thread over on the forum and post their own info on the second post to the thread. I think reading someone's remarks on how they tried the rig and then used a different cabinet, increased the presence, decreased the drive playing through their Les Paul sounded great, however just using the stock settings and just changing the cab made their strat sing with a great edgy lead tone is far more telling than slapping a rig with 2 stars on it only to then make their tweaks, re-save it on the KPA and jam away to it regularly. Meanwhile the person who created the profile with a P-90 Gretch slung around them can't understand why his favorite rig has 1 review for 2 stars.


    I just think the community would benefit more from having the exchange and forum linked together this way and we would all probably learn more from each other on how to make rigs work better for us after downloading them.

    "Tone is in the fingers" is not a necessary response to anything that I might type on any internet forum threads. Thank you.

    I would like the browsing to be better - Think of how Native instruments does it's preset browsing on plugins like Massive, etc. it's very easy to sort through mess and get to what you want.
    categories like Amp; make/model Gain: clean, crunch, distorted, heavy Style: blues, classic rock, metal, jazz, funk.


    So like if I'm looking for a mid distortion rock tone, voila. or a death metal shredfest.



    something like that, and then you could see ratings within in those categories.
    because if there are 50 profiles of a JCM800 I wanna see which ones people think are good or not.


    It would also be helpful if there is a way to see rigs you've already downloaded, especially if rig names are similar for example, have I already tried that JCM800 profile?....

    Ok, since this started in a another thread, i repeat my statements...


    " Imo, the real problem is the design of the rig exchange as it is at the
    moment. When we dicussed the features of the rig exchange a few months
    ago before the rating system was available, i already said it and now i
    still feel the same way:




    A "flat" rating system does not get us anywhere. Why? Because you simply
    cannot judge tastes in guitar tones. It may work with drum sounds,
    where a certain tonal quality may reflect the abilities of a producer.
    But guitar tones? This is so damn subjective that it will be impossible
    to satisfy all kinds of guitar players with a certain rig. Not only that
    their musical taste may be highly different but also just a different
    guitar might let a "pro" rig sound like shit. From my own perspective i
    was highly disappointed by the KPA´s factory rigs. Many rock and blues
    guys love those tones, but for me a a metal guy, i simply have no use
    for them. If i had to vote for them on the rig exchange they wouldnt
    have got a nice scoring from me, though they were done by some top
    "pros". Now as as the KPA team decided to integrate some my early rigs
    into the firmware, many players who have no use for such tones will not
    like them. If i was to get bad ratings for this this, might this stop me
    from posting new stuff? Of course it would, since nobody really loves
    to get criticised.




    Even worse many rigs that may be tonal heaven for some users get
    "buried" just because they get bad or no ratings by other users who just
    have no use for a certain type of sound. This really is a shame and
    something should be done about it.




    I still suggest to change the rig exchange in the following way:



    - remove flat ratings by stars or grades, instead just add something like a "thank you" button for a each rig.


    - add music style categories, that the uploader might choose from a drop
    down menu. Like "blues, rock, jazz, shred, heavy metal, thrash metal"
    ...


    - allow the addition of comments, to give some hints or something, there
    you could also like some soundcloud samples to get an idea of what it
    sounds like.


    - implement sorting by amounts of "thank yous", music style, uploader, Amp and cabinet brand...




    What do you think???"

    i personally don't think it's a good idea to overcomplicate the rating system. someone looking for a metal tone will rarely download a vox profile and rate it bad because it doesn't sound brutal ;)


    in the end, "good tone is good tone" and the average given rating of all users will be a clear indication of the quality of the profile, imo. in my experience with the profile's i've downloaded, the rating mostly reflects the quality of the profile. the main problem is that there are still very few people rating profiles, so there's basically just a lack of data for appropiate statistics in the 'star rating'.


    i agree with your concept of sorting profiles by genre. one could do this manually by writing it under the profile descriptions, but uniformity would be nice


    the 'like' system would simply reflect the popularity of a profile, and i does not give information about how many people tried it and disliked it. therefore, unknown/unpopular profiles could be mistaken for bad quality ones


    now what i am missing is being able to search profiles by genre, amount of distortion (hi-gain, crunch, clean) and to sort them by rating.



    just my 0.02€

    Quote from tylerhb

    Ok, since this started in a another thread, i repeat my statements...

    Yeah, we've already been there. And I had already made some proposals in the style of BuckeyeBrown.
    The problem seems that Kemper don't own the code, and they don't seem willing to start a new implementation. Matter of priorities, you know... ;)


    A solution might be to look for a different platform with more services. But even so, not sure they would do it now, or in the next future...