Hey everyone this is a ROADMAP post which means you can vote for ideas that you want to see sooner, this will help shape the future of the site!
Edit: I’ve altered this, it was originally just about Ratings and Favourites, but adding in Character Tracker too into one big thing!
OK so this is definitely going to happen, I’ve just got to prioritise it.
A feature so you can give a rating, and select favourites on characters, from the Character page.
It could be connected to the Character Tracker, which I’ll also update, so you can maybe get a notification when a new story involves on of your tracked characters?
Lots of potential for this, and I can’t wait to see what rating everyone gives all the characters!
Love the idea of favouriting characters. The idea of rating characters makes me worried, though! Everyone better be really nice to Nyssa and Benny, OR ELSE! /j
Oh I would love this! I think it would be really cool because sometimes there are characters that are amazing but the stories they’re in aren’t, so it would be really nice to have separate way to rate them
I’m the kind of person who thinks a character is only as good as the story in which they function. Of course there are characters who I like more than others (Clara🥰) but at that point I feel like it becomes a bit of a popularity contest, where you’ll have lots of people giving the Thirteenth Doctor 1 star or something because “fandom consensus”. It’s all just a bit too arbitrary for me.
Like I think to see how popular a character is, it’s nicer to see how many favorites it has. Because with rating you’ll be able to see a general dislike for some instead of a not-liked-as-much-score, and I feel like that’s not fun for fans of the lesser liked ones.
Yeah, especially if a character got the short end of the stick in their TV stories but their audio/prose content is more well written etc since less people will know of the latter
I’ve been working on this in the background, it’s all tied to the Character Tracker as well, this will probably be the next thing I launch because it’s relatively simple compared to some of the other ones.
When you complete a story that has a character in, you “encounter” them. Encountered characters are added to the Character Tracker. You can also manually track characters.
As well as this you can rate them and mark some as favourites.
Lots of plans for the future for favourite characters, like being alerted to stories you haven’t completed that feature your favourite characters.
Decisions about the Character Tracker are happening in “The Room Where it Happens” (Patrons-only forum). If you want to help decide how it works, you know what to do
But I have a more general question about Character Ratings which I’ll post here.
Do people need to see the average ratings characters get? What if your favourite character gets a bad rating? Will that just upset people?
Should I not show average ratings, just make this a feature for people to rate things on their own? But then what is the point?
I’m starting to wonder if rating characters is that useful…
Not sure whether if rating characters are useful, but I’d like to see my personal average rating of a character, and maybe even how it differs among different mediums. I certaily like 8 better in audios than comics
Yes that’s a different thing, you’re talking about the ratings of stories that the character is in.
(And it can be difficult to judge because there are stories that the character is barely in, like Narvin in the Last Day, which would skew that characters ratings)
I mentioned earlier in another thread that we should seperate “main cast/supporting caracters” and “cameos”, for precisely this. I think what most people want is to 100% a character in stories they actually play a part, not one-line cameos. But then it’s so very diffcult to draw the line. Seperating the one-line cameos wouldn’t cause too much of a controversy, I hope
I’d like to do that but I think it’s a huge task, I’m not sure exactly how to do it (would filtering by Narvin just not show The Last Day? Or would it show, but say “small cameo” on his picture?), and also as you say it is quite subjective what is a small part and what is not.
