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I've changed the D-tier name from "decent" to "ok", mainly because as it turns out it can have a really positive connotation in some parts of the english-speaking world. But it's the D-tier, just between E (mediocre) and C (good), so I settled for "ok". I've also improved (I hope) the tier descriptions, please have a look! If you see something that does not agree with you at all, please let me know. | |
| anonymous user | |
mediocre and okay are essentially synonymous in American English | |
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^ yes, I'm still looking for a better word for the D-tier. I considered "average", but that one sucks because it lacks a point of reference. | |
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This might be useful: https://swipefile.com/how-negative-or-positive-different-english-words-are-perceived Believe it's based on English rather than American English (presence of the word 'Rubbish' being a clue!). Shows that clear gap between OK and Decent that I've flagged up (but note there is a bit of a spread in how Decent is valued). There's a less pronounced gap between OK and Mediocre, with the median being pretty much the same but also a high proportion of people seeing Mediocre as a more negative word, but not really in the truly negative area. In the current descriptors, the F Tier is 'Bad' but the descriptor for the E tier immediately begins with the word 'Bad' so this could be a bit confusing maybe? Perhaps those two bottom tiers both use the word bad in the description to be clear they are wholly negative, but the words are changed to something like Poor (E) and Awful (F), particularly so there is a much stronger distinction between E and D | |
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I would be comfortable with changing it like this:
How about that? | |
| bartyMJ joined | |
Think that looks pretty good, even where there's a bit of regional interpretation with the relative strength of Decent and Mediocre I don't think its enough to make it feel like they overlap with each other or the tiers either side. Probably the closest overlap in tiers word-wise is actually now from A to S, but I don't think it matters as much as its a lot more obvious what the aim is at the far ends of the scale separating the elite from the brilliant or the dreadful from the bad (to use some synonyms). Only reason I don't like it is it probably means I need to retroactively adjust many of my 1000 ratings which might take a while ;-) | |
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How would you feel about this change? I'm trying to really make the top two tiers stand out more. Great/good are synonyms, so I want to stress that B-tier releases are really on a lower level than A-tier releases (more contrast between "awesome" and "good"). Then below that we have a range (50-69) for releases which are sort of ok/good"ish". Ok/mediocre is in my opinion a good label to cover this middle-ground between bad (<50) and great (>70). Then labelling everything below 50 with poor/awful underscores that those release are really not good.
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| bartyMJ joined | |
That probably lines up best with how I now tend to reflect things in my ratings (B tier being a high 3* or low 4* in Prog Archives terms) | |
| rushfan4 joined | |
Will you be making an automatic change for this? I have rated a lot of albums decent and only a handful as mediocre. I won't be overly thrilled if I have to go back and change hundreds of ratings from D to C. | |
| Mike joined | |
^ Sure, I could do that! But let's not rush things. Do you think the change makes sense? This is how I would map the tiers to PA stars, by the way:
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The way I map it is pretty much that but with two differences, because I start by marking an album out of 20 and then translate that linearly to PA (17 to 20 is 5 star, 13 to 16 is 4 star etc.). But that doesn't work quite as well here (which I think is a good thing) so... For me the B tier (previously being Great) has covered everything I rate as 12 or 13 / 20 as generally this is where most stuff seems to converge to. So it straddles the 'almost/only just 4 stars' area. Maybe with the change, this is the area I need to look at and adjust. I've recognised my use of 1 star is often usually based on highly subjective things (reaffirmed by previous discussion on the topic!), and so I've at least tried to differentiate that here by reserving F tier (more recently) for things I think are genuinely objectively bad, and the lower half of E tier for things I rate as 1 star but to at least try and account for the fact its more a matter of personal taste. | |
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....I guess a second thing to consider is that the rating system on ProgArchives is supposed to be used at least partly in the context of "does this album belong in a progressive music collection" - although many don't use it that way of course. Whereas here, I believe, the context is a lot broader. Its a bit extreme but I'm sure you can find examples of albums that could be rated as 2 stars on ProgArchives e.g. a generally progressive artist releasing something definitively non-prog as an anomaly, but it's actually a fantastic piece of music and therefore gets a much higher tier rating on this site. | |
| Mike joined | |
Yes, the PA descriptions are strange. Here’s how I define the stars as a five tier system:
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| rushfan4 joined | |
It will take some getting used to. I'm not really sure the difference between supreme and awesome; for that matter I guess I really never knew the difference between awesome and great either. I consider decent to be on the good side of the spectrum. Less than good, but not bad. Mediocre, on the other hand is on the bad side of the spectrum, so the idea of taking items that I consider to be on the good side of the spectrum and putting them on the bad side of the spectrum doesn't make sense to me. I kind of think along the lines of school grades with A through F, so the idea of D meaning Decent was kind of strange to me, so changing it to mediocre makes sense to me. I just don't want items that I considered to be decent to be changed to mediocre. |