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LD-games get frontpage-treatment on Kongregate
Posted by matthias_zarzecki (twitter: @IcarusTyler)
September 5th, 2012 5:49 pm
Hey guys,
So I just noticed this
It links to an own sub-section of LD-games on Kongregate, which is currently arranged by “highest rating”. This might explain how my play-numbers doubled in one day 
It is also interesting because these rankings will most likely determine who will win the Kong-Contest. It’s a bit sad though that most of the traffic will be funneled through the top-entries.
(Note: I just wanted to share this. I present this neutrally without opinion on the validity/integrity of the “controversial” contest)
Tags: contest, Kongregate
*Pffft*
This is Kongregate for you.
Host their contest on our website, then apologize by doing the same on their website where their community can do the same.
I never liked Kongregate >:(
Kongregate AKA colngate.
This will have the side-effect of penalizing interactive fiction (like my entry). WHOOHOO
In short your a 4chan Pervert who watches Erotic stuff and crap and has wet-dreams.
WHO-HOO That makes 2 of us!
Remove this comment as soon as you can.
i don’t think i’m racist enough to like 4chan
Who said who was racist?
I just read your posts.
Oh wait, Your female…
0_0
Whatever, I’ve only been on 4chan once.
Not my kinda style.
Click on this persons name before taking this as an insult.
This is a neutral comment.
Yeah, it sucks “non-mainstream” and experimental stuff gets shafted.
I miss the experimental stuff, Main because most of it is my work
The only thing I don’t like about Kongregate is how the scores are visible for the Ludum Dare games. There’s a reason that scores are invisible on LD itself.
Kongregate just copies itself from NewGrounds and the Ludum itself.
I can bet you the people on Kongregate are already ranting about this just like when that Kongregate contest got put up here. I hope Kongregate gets censored!
Too Harsh?
Bro, chill a little. This comment area is 11/13 your comments.
0__0
Hi guys – I’m the cofounder and CEO of Kongregate.
I definitely see the issue with sorting by top rating in this case. It’s what our users are used to, since they are generally just looking for the best game to play.
We could sort by newest first in this case. Users would still be able to override that through the drop down.
The idea of not showing the rating is interesting. Our standard rule is not to show the average rating until the game has a certain number of ratings. We typically don’t see that displaying the average makes a big difference in the range of ratings people give: in other words the distribution of ratings before we show the average is similar to afterwards. I could do a little analysis on the Ludum Dare games to confirm that this is still true here.
I changed the link from the homepage to point to http://www.kongregate.com/ludum-dare-games?sort=newest. This means that people who have bookmarked the page will still see it ordered by rating, but most people will probably use the homepage link.
I’m now realizing that sorting by newest isn’t ideal either, since there are no new entries coming in. Any suggestions? You can see the possibilities in the dropdown on that page:
Newest
Oldest
Most Played
Highest Rated
We could also change the sort during the contest to highlight different games.
Can someone explain how the ordering works on the official Ludum site? I don’t quite get it.
Schonstal suggested we order by ‘least rated’, which does seem pretty equitable. We don’t have that option currently but I could hack it in.
If you can, please change it to “least ratings”. No wonder my game is getting so many plays, it was the last game submitted, so it’s the “newest” game. That’s not fair, and I think “highest rating” would still be better…
Also, I was checking the contest rules and to enter I should have submitted my game until August 29, but I didn’t know this and actually submitted it August 31. Am I still participating or will I be disqualified?
Some more questions, do we really need to integrate the Kongregate Statistics API? What if my game has no type of score? And is it okay to send a post-compo version with new features, or a version with small fixes?
Hi Jim, are you planning on supporting any other types of web games other than Flash and Unity? Mine and a fair number of other web games are written in HTML5 and Java Script. I realise that there are difficulties in supporting more languages but it is the spirit of Ludum Dare, and if you are going to host games from the competition at the very least you should be able to support most types of webgames.
Cheers
Hi Dark Shadow -
You can definitely do HTML5 games on Kongregate. The way it works is that you set your game to be an iframe game – basically like a canvas URL on Facebook. Here’s the link to do that:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/new?iframe=true
You can see other HTML5 games here btw: http://www.kongregate.com/html5-games
We would like to support direct upload of HTML5 games, but we don’t currently.
Thanks for the reply!
“Newest” already is a better solution, as it stops funneling users towards the same 4-5 games. A “least rated” would of course be wonderful, as it would automatically even out the entries. It might also be used in the future for similar “closed” contests, where a set number of games within a set timeframe enter.
Games on the LD-site are arragned by 3 methods. The first orders them by “least ratings received”. “Most coolness” ranks the game highest whose creators have voted on the most games themselves (“Coolness” being a number that counts how many times you have voted). “Default” is a mixture of the 2, which shows both games with only few ratings and games by people who are active in the voting-process.
I love the idea of a “highlight”, that would cycle through all entries (again, feasible in “closed” contests), if that is possible/feasible for you.
Under this link is a table with all entries, how many ratings each one received, and how many ratings each creator has given.
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-24/?action=misc_links&utm_source=buffer&buffer_share=2984f
I’m not involved in the Kongregate contest, so I’m speaking as an impartial outside observer here…
Prioritizing Least Played games might be best initially, so that all games have a chance to be seen, and get fair number of plays and ratings.
But what matters in the latter stages of the contest is for attention to be focussed on the Top Rated games, to fine tune the ratings there, ensuring that the winners are actually winning on merit and not from randomness.
The idea of not showing the rating is probably wise, to eliminate “halo effects”. eg, if you see a game is rated highly by the community, it will bias your opinion of what you are seeing. Seeing your opinion differ from group opinion will often lead to self doubt, such that you’d be far less likely to rate the game low, even if you hate it.
And then it turned out that sorting by “newest games” is in the long run exactly as bad as “highest rating”, as the funneling continues. Only towards a few other games
I’ve just changed it so it’s sorting by gameplays but shows the last page, so it should now be showing the 15 games with the fewest number of gameplays.
I think closest to best sorting type could be “oldest plays”. This way games will recive fairly even amount of players bacause if game goes down with plays the more it’s visible. So in perfect situation all games has same amount of plays apart of ratings, post time, overall rating, …
It’s now using “fewest plays”, which should hopefully even things out a bit.