Hey man

Thanks for the nice feedback and suggestions. :)

A few of those ideas we also had in the beginning when introducing the XP system because we consider the track building community a vital part of Liftoff and wanted to reward them as well. However, we ran into some questions and problems along the way. We can try to keep track of the ratings separately on our servers, but we think a gap can quickly start to exist between what is put on the Steam Workshop versus what is stored on our end. Some things we came across:

- A player can easily flip his vote for a community item. Not only in-game, but also through the Steam Workshop's interface. So we can't rely on votes to only be cast through the in-game system and direct xp on that front.
- Steam's web API is not as expanded as the in-game tools to check up on votes. So on the server side we can't accurately track how many positive votes an item got.
- A player sharing his work is not necessarily tied to a Liftoff Pro account, so votes cast before he/she has an account could be mute, or there's a large pot of experience dumped on the time of the account creation that could make it feel weird. DerHonk comes to mind from that time.
- If we did have the possibility to check votes on the server-side , in order for us to track any progress on a community item and reward XP, we'd need to have some server-side routines running that periodically checks the rating of every item. I doubt Steam likes we skim their servers every so often for thousands of items...
- What do we do when a player deletes his content...? And later re-uploads it and starts in raking new ratings for it again?

With these questions in mind, there were too many quirks to deal with from a technical viewpoint that we decided to hold off on this and see if we could come up with alternatives in the future if the request ever came.

That aside, the ratings as they are done now is using Steam's built-in system, where it's only possible to give a like/dislike. From the moment it reaches a certain amount of ratings, the star-rating is displayed (at least, then Steam gives us a normalized value to display). It unfortunately doesn't allow us to add different metrics to it, though I do agree with the proposed metrics that they would add value if we would be able to display them. There were ideas of adding an in-game browser for these items but we considered that to be a nice-to-have and with a lot of other stuff on the table to still do, got pushed to the background (or, in the mean-time a bit off-radar already). Unless the community pushes it on the agenda of course. ;)

I'm basically saying, we'd love for this to be in there, but I guess when we get to that point, we'd have a mirror copy of the Workshop on our own server with custom functionality which takes some significant development time and effort.

That said an idea I was personally toying with though, was to have some curated set of community tracks and races (either by the dev-team, the community, or both) that would essentially mark these as 'official'-ish items that would grant experience for players flying on these like you'd get with the current official tracks. Let me know how that would sound as a first step. ;)

Thanks for the detailed answer 👍
As for a curatet set of tracks i think that sounds great as a first step, that is something that i think would give especially new players a great introduction to the community tracks. Also such a selection of additional tracks on wich you can gain xp could really make leveling up easier for players that like me tend to fly more custom tracks then official ones 😃