Well, we already know that a score of 1 or 10 is ignored in IFComp. I hope IFDB doesn’t follow suit with such short-sightedness.
Without a review, we don’t know what causes someone to rate a game a 1, but you can rest assured they were offended greatly by something in the game. It’s not always a troll vote if it’s a rating of 1.
With a review, it’s self-explanatory. Sadly, it’s true many don’t understand a simple 1-to-5 rating system. I’ve received a 1-star rating that was accompanied by a review saying the game was “pretty good”.
One 1-star review I gave was to a speed-IF by Andrew Schultz:
I like Andrew Schultz’s games, and have give 4-5 stars for many of them; if I see one of his games in a comp, I look forward to it, and generally see a high level of polish.
I’m the only reviewer for this game, while 2 others rated it.
Is this among the lowest-effort games on the site? Not at all. It’s coded pretty strongly, has a clever puzzle concept, and is playable with only a few bugs.
So the question is, is it fair to put a good chunk of work out to a game and have it just linger for 6 years with a single 1-star review?
I feel a bit guilty about it, but the game is a Speed-IF, which typically has weaker games. So I don’t know.
Hmm, interesting data, wonder how it looks for me? Out of 362 reviews (you know, that number usually seems impressive – I don’t know how do you do it!), I’ve done 18 one-star ones, so that’s just about 5%, not too far off yours even though I, uh, do not have a well worked-out rubric on ratings.
I also tend to reserve a single star for terminally buggy, incomplete games; there are one or two exceptions in there like The Vaults, which was a CCG entered into 2021’s IFComp despite having very few narrative elements (it also felt pretty buggy and incomplete), and Stand Up/Stay Silent, whose politics deeply irritated me (I agreed with the overall position being taken, but the points were being made in a very heavy-handed, judgmental way that I thought trivialized the issues). Anyway I don’t ever rate games without reviews, so hopefully even if I’ve been somewhat unfair to an author it’s at least clear where I’m coming from and if some other player might have a better experience!
We had a related thread about low scores for IF Comp games not too too long ago.
I don’t presently rate games (besides Infocom ones), but I would write a review if I gave a one star rating. I don’t think I’d give a one for bugs. I’d leave it unrated and call it “unplayable”. I’d personally give a one star for miserable/tedious gameplay, or other bothersome content.
But if I felt that way, I probably wouldn’t play it long enough to review it. I rarely complete games I don’t like. There’s too much fun stuff out there
I think the Jehovah-style vowel-deletions in your forum name might just be making it hard to find! Here’s the link:
I read the review; I sorta get where they’re coming from (they say it’s “competently designed” which in context is I think meant to primarily apply to the puzzles, rather than “pretty good” overall) but yeah this feels like it should go with a 2 star rating to me. Better than nothing I guess!
I would like bad faith rating accounts that spray ones to be destroyed or weighted out.
The problem is that to avoid destroying the innocent, we need to set a super high bar for knowing something’s bad faith.
Look at this page:
I’ve no doubt this person is just fiddling ratings for whatever reasons. They came to my attention because their 1-star no-text rating on Leadlight Gamma has kept it at 2.5 stars for… years. Even with two high score editorial reviews and and a high score non-editorial. Most of the people who’ve played or bought the game aren’t IFDB users. So that one annoys me.
This topic has made me look at games I’ve rated 1 star. Sometimes there are one or more other reviews already explaining at length why it might be one star. In those cases I don’t rise to write anything. e.g. The Lighthouse - Details
We’ve commented in this topic that we should at least write something (when rating one). For whatever reason, there are people who automatically vote that any 1-3 line review is Unhelpful. I’d like to discourage that, but I’ve got no control over it, and it doesn’t help anyone people who see it to act more helpfully.
@mathbrush: no problem on Civil Mimic! It was probably my least well-planned game. For SpeedIF I usually did stuff in chunks but that one, it was done over a short period. So that was motivation/reminder for me to start early and chip away often.
It would be neat to allow for, say, half-rating at the review author’s or rater’s request, as if to acknowledge that they know there is some personal taste. But that is one more feature to add, and then there’d be an issue of, do I want it revealed that I weighted my review, etc. A lot of times I like to have the “Hey, I don’t get it but you might” qualifier but I don’t know how to do that. And opening several levels of ratings would probably discourage rating and reviewing in general.
Certainly when I look back at some games I’m surprised I rated them so low, and maybe that’s just that they didn’t leave any scars and I hope I can remember the better parts.
However, having someone give a game of mine 1 star and then later give one 5 stars (dunno if they wrote any–it may’ve been a case of one being up their alley and one not at all) felt nice in a way a random 5-star, as nice as it is, can’t.
I mostly use IFDB to keep track of what I’ve played and what I thought of it. I agree that, since people’s rating schemes are so variable, a reviewless rating isn’t meaningful, but I’m doing it more for personal reference than for the benefit of the author or prospective players. Maybe that means I should just have a private spreadsheet instead, but it’s slightly more effort, which means I’ve been terrible at keeping up with it when I’ve tried it.
I occasionally just mark things played and don’t rate them, which so far has either been because I have complicated/conflicting feelings that I have no idea how to translate into a rating, or because it’s one of those very personal, confessional types of games and giving it a low rating feels cruel.
Also, from an authorial perspective, I’m not sure I agree that it’s always kinder and/or more helpful to explain why you didn’t like a game. Not all criticism is constructive, and non-constructive criticism stings more (to me at least) than an unexplained one- or two-star rating. Leaving a sentence or two about why you didn’t like the game seems like the worst of both worlds for an author—harder to dismiss as meaningless than a reviewless rating, but not substantial enough to be helpful. Although it is possibly slightly more helpful to a prospective player.
Edit:
Based on that user’s other Ectocomp reviews, I think they rate speed IF on a scale of 1 to 3, which leaves each star rating covering an even larger amount of territory than usual. Most of their 2-star Petite Mort reviews are quite positive.
In theory there could be people on IFDB who are trying to fiddle ratings but I think people are innocent until otherwise proven. The administrators of IFDB should decide on that and if so, take action. I guess mentioning the name of a reviewer here you think is doing something wrong might not be the first thing to do. Also, does it benefit anything?
Well, I have to demonstrate what I’m talking about in this topic. There’s a lot of speculation about things in the topic, but I’m showing an account that has assigned a lot of ones without comment. The majority of their votes are ones. The few times they’ve commented, their comments have been judged unhelpful by almost all users. I hope what they’re doing is of use to them as I don’t think it’s of much use to others.
mha, albeit I can concur with “Denk” on troll-rating, I think that requiring comments on negative voting should discourage troll-rating, in the worst case (bots) ease the ID and removal of troll-rating, for obvious reasons (well, obvious for who code NPCs, anwyay )
I think that most of the internet has decided that requiring explanations for negative votes/scores doesn’t help.
Two common reasons I’ve seen is that it will discourage people from scoring at all because they’ll be concerned about getting push back from the author. And second is that people will just put nonsense in a text box in order to submit their scores.
I think what IFDB really needs is just a lot more people adding scores. But I don’t have a solution to that.
(Maybe one day Parchment could include a link to the IFDB page of each game to remind people they could write a score?)
I don’t like to give a rating without leaving a review, but I don’t have time to write a lot of reviews. Consequently I don’t leave a lot of ratings, and I feel bad about that, because as an author I know how nice it is to know people are playing my games. I don’t know what the solution is.
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