Except that in that situation they wouldn’t get a score for audio, because the single highest and single lowest ratings are deleted before the average is taken.

D = 50 + R – min(C,100)/2

is adequate – when this is in a system, it will naturally bring up games with few ratings. Whenever someone rates a game in this system, their own D rating decreases by 1/2, but someone else’s D rating increases by 1. So, there is a net increase of 1/2 in the system. This means that, as time goes on, the total of everyone’s D ratings will increase, and thus, the minimum D rating should increase as well.

Say the average number of games that each person rates is 10. This would mean that the average D rating would be 55, and since the disparity in D ratings should be relatively small, the minimum D rating might be close to 55 as well. Then, all games would get a minimum of around 5 ratings.

More generally, we just need something of the form:

D = R – B(C)

Where R is the number of ratings, B is the “bonus function”, taking coolness and yielding the number of extra ratings a user gets. The expression C – B(C) is the number of votes that a user generated (C) minus the number of votes they consumed (B(C)) – it’s the net change in the system affected by each user. It should be positive so that people who rated nothing get to use the extra votes generated by the system.

Those who do rate games get rewarded, and like any good leveling system you get rewards quickly at first so you get a taste for it and then have to work a bit harder for the next ones.

I have no problems with people who don’t rate *at all* not getting much feedback. As you said even a few ratings will get you a fair number of ratings back. But not doing it at all means they are not interested in that aspect of ludum dare. It should be however made clear why they don’t get much feedback.

I think there is a minimum number of votes to be in a category, so they would be ‘unrated’. But that might not even happen since people can also look at the list sorted by absolute number of ratings received.

We can’t expect everyone to have the time to rate many games, but anyone should be able to test 10 games if they really want to.

You must realise that ALL games still need to be fairly rated in order to build a credible ladder. The system I’ve outlined should achieve this better than the current system, while fairly rewarding those who are rating games.

Maybe the “Save” button could be relabeled to “Save Vote” so that it would be obvious, that your vote will only be saved once you click that button and it’s a button to save a comment.

I understand how the current system aims to encourage more voting by rewarding those who do. It’s just that the reward is so big, that it is amplifying the problems it is intending to solve.

To address this, and building upon my previous formula, we could increase the priority of games with R less than 20:

D = 50 + R – C’/2

where
if R is less than 20, then P = (20-R) else P=0
Then let C’ = C + P, capped at 100.