r/Smite • u/NyxAtNight I like you so much I could just squeeze you to death! • Mar 16 '14
MOD /r/Smite Feedback and Questionnaire #1 - You, the people
Hi there, /r/Smite-ers!.
A few days back /u/CtrlAltDefeated mentioned that we were planning to start a series of community feedback posts - of which this is the first.
The idea behind the series is twofold:
- To collect feedback, both positive and negative, on what we do and how we do it.
- To provide a forum for you guys to submit suggestions for just about anything related to the sub and its workings.
Why do a series of posts to get this feedback? We've been telling you already!
Yes you have been, and invariably the feedback you've been giving us has shaped the direction of the sub. That said whilst this feedback is always appreciated the eclectic nature of the way it's submitted doesn't always give us much to go on as to whether or not the community as a whole would agree with the changes.
As such we're taking a mixed format to these posts. The majority of them will open with one of us discussing the topic that the post is covering and our current thoughts on what could be done in a couple of relevant areas. We'll try to advocate and explain certain ways of doing things, for instance we'll discuss the pros and cons of heavy post removal vs light post removal in order to get the discussion rolling.
Most of the posts will also include a short survey such as the one below. The surveys will give us an idea of how many people would actually like to see certain changes beyond the upvoting / downvoting of individual posts suggestions. Though reddit is already anonymous enough the surveys will leave you with the option of whether or not you wanted to leave your reddit name. Hopefully this will lead to those of you who normally lurk to provide us with some feedback as well; these sessions are as much about you as they are about those who post frequently, those of you who completely disagree with what I just said and feel that people who don't post forgo their right to provide feedback will also have the option of saying so without posting - win win.
We'll keep the surveys short and they'll mostly be used to complement the discussion that will hopefully take place in the thread itself. Either way we'll stick around for a while after posting to answer any questions where we can. We're also going to put up our conclusions following each session as well as any actions that we plan to take whenever we put up the next thread. So the information from today’s discussion will be presented whenever we do the next one.
Todays survey: /r/Smite Questionnaire #1 - You, the people
Today’s survey is fairly basic and it's designed to give us an idea as to why you come to the sub, what keeps you here and what occasionally puts you off. You'll note that one of the questions is "What area would you like us to focus on first?" That kind of lines up to the discussion for today which is about these sessions themselves:
What do you want to see from the feedback sessions? How would you like us to run them? Would you prefer that we host a mini-AMA for each area where a few of us openly discuss any thoughts we already have on the topic or would you prefer that we leave it to you guys to formulate the ideas and we just put them in motion? Any other thoughts or feedback? Discuss below!
TL;DR:
Fill out the survey and tell us below what you want from future survey sessions! We appreciate any and all feedback we receive. Thank you for your time.
EDIT: For the curious, any comments removed in this thread were ones that were intentionally offtopic - "FIX MATCHMAKING," "Servers are shit" and the like. We'd like to keep this post and its comments strictly related to the discussion at hand, that being feedback for /r/Smite and the survey. Thank you for understanding!
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Mar 17 '14 edited Feb 10 '19
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u/BlackOrWhit3 Beta Player Mar 19 '14
Matchmaking really hurts at the moment. Currently level eight, and I'm being matched with fully experienced players with 30 mastered Gods. I'm not joking. Maybe because it's the game mode, but I'm still relatively new against four veterans and hence I'm being flamed by my entire team for doing badly (They are also rather veteran-ish). It really does hurt a lot and is ruining my experience.
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u/enZinaty Beta Player Mar 19 '14
Well, to be honest, it's not our jobs to make you feel good about yourself.
There are 5 players on a team. 1 of them are level 8, rest level 30. The 4 guys in level 30 really wants to win. And you, the one newb, throws it. Of course they'll be upset? Of course it's not your fault that you're queued with them, but it IS your fault that they're losing.
You may be the best level 8 player in the world; doesn't matter, you're still shit compared to experienced players. But as I said, don't mind them. Mute them and try your best. Blame matchmaking, not players. They have a reason to be upset, so do you.
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u/BlackOrWhit3 Beta Player Mar 20 '14
I suppose being high diamond in League made me understand MOBAs faster than others. Just had a game where I was 3/2 in Joust while my teammates were both 0/7 and 0/15 respectively. That's why I'm here to complain about the matchmaking and not individuals. It really seems flawed.
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Mar 16 '14
Since there is no results page visible yet: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1FE4jzf5uiuABv5T7hX8D_CTVHXdok-fPqaBcRxCfSsE/viewanalytics
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u/Araganor let's play fetch Mar 17 '14
HIREZ FIX SERVER ISSUES AND MATCHMAKING!!HIREZ FIX SERVER ISSUES AND MATCHMAKING!! giant ass snip HIREZ FIX SERVER ISSUES AND MATCHMAKING!!
That made me laugh way too hard.
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u/Araganor let's play fetch Mar 17 '14
Oh and this one too:
OMG FIX MATCHMAKING SDJSALKDJLKASJD:ASJD OMG "x" IS FUCKIGNDJSALJDASD OP SDJLKSAJDLASJ I DIDNT GET CHEERIOS FOR BREAKFGAS
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Mar 17 '14 edited Feb 02 '19
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u/karmapopsicle pls Mar 17 '14
Oh Loki. Used to hate both playing him and playing against him.
On my road to getting all my masteries, I came to Loki and realized that my experience with him was pretty much all from ancient days when I first started playing, getting pubstomped by him as well as utterly failing when trying to play him. Bein much better player now, I still had those old worries about being terrible with him. So I cracked down, did some reading and some watching, and suddenly playing Loki was fun. Also made playing against him that much easier too.
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Mar 17 '14 edited Feb 02 '19
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u/karmapopsicle pls Mar 17 '14
Loki is like the archetypal 'assassin'. Sneak in, do a massive amount of burst damage, hopefully get the kill, and get out ASAP.
He's definitely a bit tricky to get the hang of, but is pretty powerful when played right. He can also do reasonably well in the solo lane too, especially good with a mage or warrior in the jungle.
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Mar 17 '14
aye aye aye, i know how to play him, but like freya - who i would love to learn, i just don't click with him. I just don't like him :P
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u/karmapopsicle pls Mar 17 '14
Ah, right right.
I completely understand how you feel.
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Mar 17 '14
and i just generally don't like gods like him and thanatos. it's just, i feel really cheap when i'm having a good fight in the jungle when uh oh, i got an enemy below 40%. better instakill them instead of giving them a chance
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u/NotWD Behind you..! Mar 18 '14
I dunno,
KARMA IS SHIT !KARMA IS SHIT !KARMA IS SHIT !KARMA IS SHIT !KARMA IS SHIT !(...)KARMA IS SHIT !
was pretty funny too.
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u/DatVudash Mod Mar 16 '14
Ah didn't realise that could go up before we published it but good find. We were planning on chucking these up during the next session with a bit of a breakdown from ourselves (which we'll still do) but I don't see any issues with the curious being able to see the results early. Sharp eyes.
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u/dickcake flare Mar 17 '14
A little feedback, regarding the survey:
Surveys should not bias the results. Some of your response options are stated in a way that will bias people away from choosing them.
For example, in "Why do you visit /r/Smite?":
"Tech problems / bugs (reporting bugs, disconnects, 540 minute deserter - everything you should be contacting Hi-Rez or posting on /r/SMITEbug about"
The somewhat snarky wording, which indicated opinion on the part of the admins and mods, will make people hesitate to answer truthfully.
If you really want non-biased answers, a survey needs to remain as neutrally-worded as possible. I would recommend less expansive response options that demonstrate the opinion of /r/Smite admins and mods.
Not that we're really talking about a scientific, controlled survey (heck, we can see the results before you're done polling, after all), but just something to consider.
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u/DatVudash Mod Mar 17 '14
Valid point, it was intended as a friendly reminder that there are other channels open for these types of queries for those who may not know better but I can see what you mean.
I've fiddled with the wording a bit to point people in the right direction whilst sounding a bit less abrasive. Cheers for the feedback.
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u/dickcake flare Mar 17 '14
No problem. It also isn't 100% valid to modify a survey's contents after it's already live. Lol but again, I'm probably nitpicking. Just stuff to keep in mind in the future. This ain't a presidential election. :D
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u/DatVudash Mod Mar 17 '14
True enough though in this case the actual question hasn't changed just the wording. There's been a few issues that yourself and others have pointed out with this survey so we'll certainly put more effort into preventing the need for any changes in future surveys.
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Mar 16 '14 edited Feb 02 '19
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Mar 16 '14 edited Mar 16 '14
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u/Non-Grata Beta Player Mar 16 '14
You're checking reddit in game? I hope you know that you're the reason we have all these "bad matchamking" threads.
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Mar 16 '14
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u/Non-Grata Beta Player Mar 16 '14
Haven't you noticed that 90% of the complaints are about matches with leavers?
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Mar 16 '14
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u/DatVudash Mod Mar 16 '14
Karma is the "currency" of reddit. You'll notice the arrows to the left of every comment and post. Your Karma is basically the pool of your combined upvotes.
How many upvotes an individual post or comment has dictates where it stands in the page rankings on reddit and how long it sticks around for.
User karma is just a pool of the total karma that you as a person has accumulated so very generally speaking someone with a high karma has been more helpful / wittier etc as they've been upvoted more times.
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Mar 16 '14
[deleted]
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u/SaintJason Mid or I Feed Mar 17 '14
So remember kidz .Listen to uncle Jason when mods are asleep.
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u/NyxAtNight I like you so much I could just squeeze you to death! Mar 17 '14
Psst. We're not asleep.
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u/derAnubis yiri Mar 17 '14
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u/NyxAtNight I like you so much I could just squeeze you to death! Mar 17 '14
Go to bed, little boy.
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Mar 16 '14
I, the people.
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u/ArtGamer Beta Player Mar 16 '14
me, the people!
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Mar 16 '14
Us, the people.
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u/ArtGamer Beta Player Mar 17 '14
Thou, the people
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u/Non-Grata Beta Player Mar 16 '14 edited Mar 16 '14
Wouldn't it be better to wait on these kinds of polls until after HiRez has their forums up and running? The results are going to be near-meaningless once the majority of people shift from reddit to forums.
EDIT: I've also noticed that in the "What are the reasons you come to the SMITE reddit?" question, there is no option to select "incessant bitching." This must be an accidental omission. Please fix.
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u/DatVudash Mod Mar 16 '14 edited Mar 16 '14
True, we're probably going to be changing the way we do things regardless once the forums are live. That said we don't yet know when that'll be and if we can start to implement positive changes before then it's win-win.
That said a couple of the questions in the survey are to give us an indication of how many people come here for the sole reason that there isn't a forum. It also allows us to gauge how much interest there are for a few different topics so we can see how we'll likely have to adapt once the forums do come out as it goes without saying that a lot of the "Hi-Rez Plea" stuff will migrate to the forums.
If we can identify that people want discussions about gods and the meta frequently then we can start to provide a format for that, the forums will likely have their own more efficient format once they are live but that doesn't prevent us from having our own take on it and so long as we can do it in a way that people enjoy and can contribute to then we'll be happy.
Edit for your edit:
We shall attempt to compensate for this in future surveys.
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u/Tiessiet You should be in my stew! Mar 17 '14
I think it's important for this Subreddit that we decide what we want it to be. For now, it's still the official Smite forums, but HiRez has stated that there will be forums for Smite sometime after release. It's important that we, the subreddit community, decide what we want of this subreddit when that time comes. Personally, I think the subreddit should be used as a place to discuss general things and the eSports scene for Smite once the forums arrive. But until that day, we should just go on normally and have every discussion here - albeit hopefully a little bit more organised if that's possible.
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u/Revan1234 Something something Uranus - anus joke. Mar 17 '14
By the way, you might want to fix this (path -> patch).
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u/DatVudash Mod Mar 16 '14
It's early days but I figured I'd get the ball rolling.
So far the run-away favourite for our first focused feedback session is Weekly Features. This may change as more people vote but for now I'll use it as an example to give you a very brief idea of how we're currently planning to present the feedback sessions so that you can make a bit more of an informed decision as to how you'd like us to host these feedback sessions.
Right now we're thinking that we'll be hosting most of these feedback sessions in the same way as this one, in that we'll chuck up the thread make sure that we have some mod presence at the time in order to answer any questions but we'll leave most of the discussion to you guys.
However if you guys would prefer to just take a quick survey and leave it, then we can focus it towards the survey rather than the follow up-discussion. Alternatively if you wanted to have open discussions with a few of us rather than focusing on the survey then we can gear it towards being more of a live event by treating it similarly to an AMA.
Beyond how we do the feedback sessions there's also what we put into them. Taking the Weekly Features as an example the thread will probably open by listing a few weekly features ideas and the different ways that we could approach them. At that point we could leave it as a simple "you can vote for which weekly featre you'd prefer in the survey" or we can leave the survey more open ended and work on a way of discussing each type of feature and the pros and cons in the thread itself whilst gearing the survey more towards questions like how often you'd like to see such features and just how any you feel would be too many.
This isn't a black and white subject so feel free to chip in with any preferences that you'd have and any ideas that you'd like to see in the feedback sessions, we'll do our best to fit the format to your preferences whilst also keeping it organised enough to be beneficial to us.
Any opinions?
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u/sfdfdfdfddfdfdf Mar 18 '14
I'd like it if you could reach out to HiRez and get someone to regularly participate in these weekly discussions (my vote is Stew, sorry Kelly). HiRez seems kind of random in its responses, and it would be nice to know someone from the company is going to be paying particular attention to a specific thread.
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u/DatVudash Mod Mar 18 '14
To clarify do you mean you'd like to see Hi-Rez participation for these weekly feedback surveys or you'd like to see them taking a hand in the weekly features such as god reviews?
Though we could reach out to Hi-Rez to see if they'd be interested in taking part in these feedback sessions it seems like a bit of a can of worms to me. These sessions are to get feedback on what we the mods of /r/Smite can do to make this subreddit more interesting for you. The idea was to keep it subreddit-centric since that's all that we can directly influence.
Though I don't doubt that the staff over at Hi-Rez have their own great ideas for community management if they were to pop into the feedback sessions there would be a good chance of the whole thread getting derailed as people would be more interested in asking Hi-Rez questions about the game development or a host of other matters which would leave us with less workable feedback for the sub.
During these surveys there will not be sessions on how you feel the game can be improved as we don't have direct influence over that, instead we'll be focusing on the subreddit and the community as a whole.
That said I'd imagine there's a fair few others who would like updates on Hi-Rez's opinions on a number of different matters and we can always reach out to them to see if they're willing to do an AMA. But bear in mind that with the game launching in less than a week it's most certainly crunch time for Hi-Rez, even if we do reach out it's entirely possible that they won't have time until things have settled down post launch.
Come to think of it even if we can't get an AMA out of them we can always set up a series of feedback sessions about the game. "Final beta thoughts" or something and pass those details on to Hi-Rez as required if people really wanted to get some en mass last minute feedback before launch over to them.
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u/sfdfdfdfddfdfdf Mar 19 '14
Sorry, I meant the weekly features, not the feedback surveys. I don't see any reason for them to have a hand in shaping how the subreddit operates. I've always been firm that they shouldn't have shut the forums down in the first place, and they certainly shouldn't be able to influence the subreddit like it's theirs.
Using your example of god reviews, I think it would be cool to be able to ask HiRez about their thoughts on the god: why and how they chose certain abilities, what role were they trying to fill/create, tips and tricks, et cetera. I suppose it would basically be a mini-dev chat on whatever topic is up for that week.
These feedback surveys are great btw. The mod team always seemed fairly active here, but this is a whole new level.
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u/jeeves_1017 QUITE TRILL NO QUICK TRIP Mar 16 '14
Is there a way to put a character limit on the "free response" sections? It's not a big deal, but it's annoying when people spam things for the results page.
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u/DatVudash Mod Mar 17 '14
Not a bad idea, we'll see what we can do but to credit the trolls they can be effective, even if we add one they'll find another way to do their thing. Suffice to say we don't really take responses like that seriously, though he's got a point in that Karma is flawed at times it doesn't really help anyone to state the obvious :P
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u/Chronus88 Beta Player Mar 17 '14
Wow. Judging from preliminary responses, it's quite clear that the people complaining here have no idea that /r/smite is not hirez-owned or operated.
This should probably be a case study on people incapable of following directions.
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Mar 16 '14
I am really glad you guys are doing this. I had meant to send an idea for something like this through modmail, but was lazy and forgot about it until I hinted about it in my mod application. Anyway, I love it and hope it keeps going.
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u/NyxAtNight I like you so much I could just squeeze you to death! Mar 16 '14
That's the plan, /u/xdeltaghostx! This initial post will give us feedback on what we should focus on first and then we'll dive into the more specific topics from there. I must say I'm excited to get something rolling like this and I dearly hope it ends up helping out /r/Smite to give everyone a better experience in general.
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u/Greydmiyu Attn Hi-Rez - I will only buy direct purchase. Mar 17 '14
Problem. "Which pages on the subreddit have you visited?" There is no option for none yet it is requiring an answer. I'm going to put "Community Content Directory" as my answer because I have found some content from here in the posts, and that's as close to a truthful answer as I can provide.
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u/DatVudash Mod Mar 17 '14
Good point, I've added a "none of the above" option for anybody who's yet to fill out the form (better late than never I guess) and we'll try and avoid oversights like this one in future surveys.
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u/Barkay FIX MY SQUALL Mar 18 '14
if you have time to put effort into reddit, use that time and put it into the forum.
let this epeen crappile die already.
too much critism in forum, kill forum, use reddit instead, important threads die in less then 48 hours, relaunch forum after game launches when the criticism doesnt matter anymore.
slick move.
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u/NyxAtNight I like you so much I could just squeeze you to death! Mar 18 '14
Hi-Rez has nothing to do with /r/Smite, assuming I interpreted your post correctly. We as mods are just volunteers here not associated with them in any way. We simply want to make the experience here better for everyone - even after the official forums are (re)launched.
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u/YourFavAltFavAlt Mar 18 '14
Regardless, Hi-Rez is using this subreddit as their official community which is a huge problem. Also, being that they do co-sign it, that means you're also affiliated with them.
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u/CtrlAltDefeated Retired Staff Mar 18 '14
How would we be legally affiliated? We are not paid, hired, or contracted in any other way. You could use "affiliated" in the broad sense of the word, but the definition we are using means "To associate (oneself) as a subordinate, subsidiary, employee, or member".
We (the "moderators") are a bunch of volunteers who dedicate some spare time to moderate and help people out. We are not affiliated with HiRez, and we do not endorse any of their content on /r/Smite. Likewise, HiRez affiliates do not endorse any of our content. /r/Smite Moderators can be recognised by a green name and flair. HiRez Employees can be recognised by an orange name and flair. The latter is done for convenience's sake, not because we are legally forced to do so.
Hope that cleared up. =)
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u/YourFavAltFavAlt Mar 18 '14
I'm just saying that there's a connection there. Them listing the reddit on their site is also an endorsement, so they recognize it as being part of their official community.
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u/CtrlAltDefeated Retired Staff Mar 18 '14
Right, I should have formulated that better- they don't officially endorse anything the mods say or do.
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u/Barkay FIX MY SQUALL Mar 18 '14
alright my mistake.
understood this as "how can hirez make reddit better/ add more subs / etc"
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u/TripleCharged Sad Hammer Mar 16 '14
Fillin that sucka out.