Ideally, all entries should be anonymous and the judges should be professional, highly-ethical reviewers.

Of course how that can be implemented I haven’t a clue!

I guess my point is that not everyone uses the number of votes.

Amazon.com doesn’t reward you for writing reviews – that would encourage spam. Instead, it rewards you for writing reviews that other users find helpful.

On Stackoverflow, you don’t get points for answering questions – because that would encourage spam – you only get points for writing answers that get upvoted.

Amy Jo Kim has some great talks about this kind of thing. But basically, the key is:

1) What makes a good Ludum Dare Judge?

2) How can you give points to good Judges, and not to bad Judges?

I’m guilty of using votes as a quick way to find the best games to play as well.

If anything, implement this.

I think that’s another thing that must be addressed. But this one is fairly easy to solve. They just need to hide the votes each game is getting, so that info is unknown until the very end of the process.

Another (but more complex mechanism) is to set a timer (stored in DB to avoid cookie hacks perhaps?) so, if a user wants to rate a game, he/she must first download it first (that’s where the counter starts). He/she will only be able to submit a vote for that game after at least 10 minutes (or something like that) since the download started. This will discourage trollvoting. The only disadvantage of this method is that if the game can be completed in less than the defined time, the user will have to wait to give his/her rating and may desist from voting (because we all hate to wait).

Another possible solution would be to demand a comment of at least a few chars if a rating of 1 star is given, so the user must provide an explanation of why the game deserved such a low score. Those cases would be then evaluated by LD staff to check if they are fair votes.

A last resort option is to make the voting process non-anonymous. We all know the power of trolls comes from Anonymity.

And now I’m out of ideas, i think I’ll keep thinking on the issue, but I REALLY think it must be addressed somehow. Maybe the LD staff could setup a little voting poll about the mechanism to use and if the issue should be addressed at all.

Many entrants (myself included sometimes) often rating very few games or none at all, for whatever reason. Including just not wanting to give low scores, or struggling to give a game a fair 1-5 rating in any/all categories. Or people downvoting because ‘didn’t work on my PC/didn’t support Linux/ran too slow on my ancient netbook’…

People play the games with the most ratings – assuming that they’re the good ones, detracting from all the others. I know I’ve done it, and it’s obvious that others do the same – ‘ooh, that’s got way more votes, it must be interesting!’

Worse still, people voting badly to get their ‘coolness’ score up… or the signs of tactical downvoting/trollvoting, which is sad to see at Ludum Dare

In future, I think I’ll just join the Jam. I’ve had some great results the earlier days of Ludum Dare, but my generally oldschool approach just can’t compete with some of the awesome stuff people are coming up with these days

I really think the solution is to have a table like this in each user’s public profile:


Inn Fun The Gra Aud Hum Ove Com
(1) 4 2 6 2 3 9 8 12
(2) 1 4 3 2 2 2 2 2
(3) 9 2 3 1 3 1 2 3
(4) 2 1 5 7 3 1 9 1
(5) 3 7 2 9 2 0 1 8


In this (completely random) example, you can see that this user gave a total of six 1s in the Theme category, a total of three 4s in the Graphics category, etc. The voting is still anonymous, because we don’t know which games she gave which numbers to (or even which games she voted on). But a trolling voter would show a high number of 1s in all categories and zero everything else. I think this would seriously cut down on, if not completely eliminate, troll voting.

- Ask for a remark of X characters to go along with the rating (or the rating for each category, even). Would ask some more efforts from the trolls. And may even yields way to discard their votes;
- Add a “reporting” period at the end of the voting process. If enough people reports lines of ’1′ or ’5′ or things like this, and say at least 10 or 15 belong to the same user, automatically remove this user’s vote from the db.

Those are two (probably bad) ideas that just came to me. The point is that now LD has become something quite big, and that increases the chances of trolling, unfortunately. As nice as it would be to have a self-regulated community, I’m afraid it’s not always possible…

That said, congrats everyone

What could be a good idea is a way to mark a game as “cannot play” with a field for entering the reason. It could be either posted anounymously (or not) as a comment, or disclosed together with the results, at least providing some insight after the fact. But the game would be at least counted as “rated” for the guy trying it out.

It seems a bit unfair that you HAVE to be on Windows to be able to go for a good Coolness rating, I must say…

I’d like to have some things fixed:
O Having links without http:// in front removed is nasty. Better to check for and automatically prepend it.
O Filename rules. Seriously. After batch downloading you have 20 files named LD20_This.zip. Great.

I think there has to be some voting change. The sheer amount is overwhelming. The randomizing helps but there’s still a unfair bias towards prettier games. Only allow voting on other entries (and see their screens) once you voted on your 20 list or something. On the other hand, forcing vote may be scaring people away as well.