Reply To: Growing Dissatisfaction with CGCookie

[Paul Frank]

Some people want feedback on their exercises and some just want to get that thumbs-up and move on so I think feedback should be solicited by the users so the CGC team doesn’t spend their limited time doing deep-dive critiques on hundreds of modified primitives from the Mesh Modeling 101 exercise.

I agree that the majority of the feedback will need to come from the community since the CGC team is heavily outnumbered. Maybe extending the XP system a bit could help incentivize community members to be more involved? Stackoverflow’s system comes to mind; it more often than not results in very thorough, high quality answers to community questions with an increase to the answer author’s point-based reputation as the reward.  For CGC, maybe forum topics can get a question [Q] tag and answers that get “love” or marked as “accepted answer” get the author an increase in XP (or reputation, etc.) resulting in an increased self-worth as an awesome member of the CGC community. Lists of weekly, monthly, and yearly (instead of all-time), top contributing users could help encourage some healthy competition on a regular basis.  Maybe just keep XP as is and publish the user’s “love” counts as their reputation for simplicity’s sake?  

It might be a good idea for the CGC team to add a short addendum video to each of the existing exercises, after enough have been submitted and critiqued, showing common mistakes as submitted by users. This has the benefit of not having to code anything extra up for the website and reduces redundant questions and answers.

Otherwise, I think live stream critiques are pretty useful, maybe just have those consistently on the same day each month.