First, a rundown on what got me thinking of this idea….

I have no real complaints about how I scored in LD22, it was overall around where I expected, but one thing kinda stuck with me.   My actual scores were VERY inconsistant with all the feedback I received.  For instance I was pretty universally praised by all that commented (a fairly good number of people) on my community effort in doing a build for multiple platforms, a timelapse video, and even commenting my source, In the end I got a 3.2 score in that category which does not seem to reflect that (especially compared to the fact that many games that had no such things, and single platform were averaging a score of 3.5)  Quite a few people both in the comments and on IRC said the game was really fun!… I actually got no negative feedback at all on that….I scored a 2.66.  As you can see here I found it bizarre that the actual ratings were pretty much completely opposite of comments I had received.

My main point to this being, It would have been nice to know why those rating at a 1 out of 5 hated it so much, nobody seemed to want to leave any negative feedback (And I’m not just speaking for myself, a lot of other people had expressed the same confusion as to why their scores were opposite of what they would have expected from their comments), so perhaps it would be nice for 23 when we rate something it could have an anonymous comments box attached to each rating category where you have to quickly fill in the main “problem” or main “draw” as to why you’re rating a 1 or a 5?  In doing this it could actually help improve future games instead of pretty much just leaving everyone confused as to how the scoring worked after the compo is over.

Another thing I would like to see is more detailed instructions on each rating category, and a N/A rating for games that don’t use it at all (for stuff like humor…many people were rating games down overall due to humor scoring a 1 on games that were not supposed to be funny)

Also, add a “Does not run” button that removes a entry from your list of ones to rate but doesnt set a rating on it, I fear too many people were scoring games low that they simply couldn’t run and it was throwing off the statistics

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 1st, 2012 at 11:18 pm and is filed under LD #23. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.