Take a look at a great illustration showing precisely what I mean by that…

Having said that, i think the rating system does work to an extent. I decided to focus my game and try to win the audio award and I did. People notice a game’s strengths I think if it really stands out in some way. The strengths of my game stood out from it’s weaknesses that it was able to rate highly in those strengths.

That’s why I think if you want to stand out and not get voted in the middle of the pack you need to really focus those few available hours on a specific category rather than sprinkle them across all the categories. If you are an artist, focus 90% of your efforts on art. If you have a knack for gameplay focus everything you got on that. In this time of competition, where everyone is so so good it is he only way to stand out in som way.

My suggestion to improve the voting would be to bring in some forward looking company like google to sponsor the competition. Imagine if that allowed people on google apps to play and vote on the ludumdare submissions. That would make for an honest unbiased voting and everyone would get tons of feedback.

Keep trying, practice leads to perfection.

That being said, I also agree the rating system could have some upgrades though.

Anyways, please don’t hate us!

You had a really nice polished showing for your first LD especially considering you learned GameMaker on the fly(!). Based on your complaints I assumed you’d have way fewer reviews than you did. You had some really encouraging and positive comments on your game, that definitely recognized the tremendous effort you put into it.

Try not to fixate too much on the ratings, or number of ratings you received. 22 is actually a pretty solid number for a non web-based game. When you consider 211 of the participants have rated under 5% of the games. I mean if you break it down the average user votes on 20ish games (someone more mathematically inclined than I may dispute this).

Going over your Post-Mortem it seems that these should be your take aways:
Finished a project!
Learned enough Game Maker to make a complete game in 48 hours. (!)
Created a game with a nice subtle allegory running through it.

You worked hard, you kicked some butt, and honestly from my point of view you got a good amount of recognition for it. What kind of critique were you expecting?

I disagree with their being any sort of of vote getting meta game, games with exceptional features get shared. Check out Nyaa, MorganQuick, Cambrian_Man, and Jesse Chand for some first timers that garnered a decent ratings and votes, it’s not an old boys club here, quality rises to the top. It doesn’t hurt to pop into the IRC channel and ask for a few folks to give you some direct feed back but at the most you might only get a 10 vote bump from that (as Legacy mentioned, the majority of them will be too busy Minecrafting it up ).

But that entirely misses the point, it’s really not about the ratings at all. I’m just echoing earlier sentiment at this point but maybe this guy can get through to you:

“My god I’ve actually finished it. This was my first Ludum Dare and I honestly never thought I would ever come CLOSE to cranking out a entry, I have very very very FEW finished projects, so to have one that I made within 48 hours is thrilling and will definitely give me a Confidence Boost to future projects. I was intimidated the whole way through and I am just glad I stuck with it.”

Don’t let the sour grapes of ratings ruin this for you

P.S. Down voters should be named and shamed though.

As to the complaints – scores you disagree with are not the same as ‘random’ scores. You got a SINGLE n/a score, in audio, which is probably due to the rater being unable to hear audio. N/A doesn’t mean “doesn’t have.” It means the rater doesn’t feel qualified to judge that score, and it has no impact on your end score.

As to the amount of ratings you got – well done, you got more than I did! Which is fine with me. I had useful feedback, and so did you for that matter. You have a windows game using gamemaker, which narrows the selection of people who can play it. You’ll notice most games with 100 ratings are web-based games, and for good reason. They’re more accessible to raters. These are not professional game critics, or people paid by Ludum Dare to rate your game. These are people just like you, taking time out of their lives to give you a rating.

Keeping that is mind, isn’t it more remarkable that a whopping 22 people took the time to try your game out and give you feedback?

What you think are random scores are real scores, from people who feel differently than you do. I got a huge mass of scores for Theme, 1-5 all over the place (mainly because of how stupid the theme was). I got a spread from 2 to 5 in every category (1-5 in most categories). There are a lot of reasons for that and people choosing randomly isn’t one of them. This ‘broken system’ you are seeing is actually called people. They have different opinions. I got null votes in Innovation, Audio, and Humor. That’s okay. People couldn’t come up with an opinion there, maybe they accidently skipped that box, whatever. I got a legitimate score by my peers averaged out.

Other than the all-5 troll and the all-1 troll, your scores are completely legit. Real people who put in time to check out your game and give you impressions and comments. Appreciate it and stop whining. People who didn’t rate audio either didn’t have sound on or it didn’t work. Get over it.

Just don’t get so angry, we could try harder next time , I promise I will try your game.