1-star ratings on IFDB - what do you think?

[Denk (Kenneth Pedersen)]

This is turning into a very interesting thread - thanks!

[Denk (Kenneth Pedersen)]

@A_Wthrmnstr

Well, we already know that a score of 1 or 10 is ignored in IFComp.

Is that a new rule? I never heard that before.

@A_Wthrmnstr

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.

I guess the majority of 1-star ratings are not given by trolls on IFDB. It’s hard to know exactly why they gave only 1 star.

[Denk (Kenneth Pedersen)]

@kamineko

We had a related thread about low scores for IF Comp games not too too long ago.

Interesting. Could you provide a link?

[Denk (Kenneth Pedersen)]

I loved Leadlight! (played Eamon version)

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?

@severedhand

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.

Good point

[Denk (Kenneth Pedersen)]

@The_Xenographer

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.

Many people think the IFDB Top 100 is meaningful and that wouldn’t be possible without ratings without reviews.

@The_Xenographer

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.

I agree. Sometimes such games do not have quality but probably took a lot of time for the author to write.

[severedhand]

@Denk

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.

-Wade

[Piergiorgio_d_errico]

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 )

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

[Dannii]

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?)

[J_J_Guest]

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.

[JoshGrams]

Outlier votes

I don’t recall whether I’ve brought up this topic often or only occasionally, but it keeps bugging me how the IF Comp rankings are skewed by people who give out what are obviously bad faith votes. The Absence of Miriam Lane, average score 8.17, received no ratings below a 4… except for one person who gave it a 1. A Long Way to the Nearest Star received no ratings below a 6… except for one person who gave it a 1. Does it matter for the final rankings? It does. Without that single voter giving th…

[rovarsson]

@Dannii

I think what IFDB really needs is just a lot more people adding scores.

@J_J_Guest

I don’t like to give a rating without leaving a review, but I don’t have time to write a lot of reviews.

These comments put together pretty nicely describe my attitude towards rating and reviewing.
Rating goes first. I leave a star rating for every game I play (except when there is a good reason not to). This in the hope that my stars get alchemistically amalgamated with all other stars into something resembling a communally well-considered representative consensus.
I write a review for the majority of games I play (in comp-season this often winds up being a bunch of impressions here on the forum rather than an official IFDB review). I want to share my experience with the author, and especially with future players.
Sometimes life gets in the way though. I do keep an eye on the IFDB feature that tells me how many rated-but-unreviewed games I have (92/192 at the moment), telling myself I’ll get to those games sometime…

[gfaregan]

I have similar feelings about leaving ratings of the ratings without comments.

[EJoyce]

@Denk

Many people think the IFDB Top 100 is meaningful and that wouldn’t be possible without ratings without reviews.

Sorry, I meant individually, in the sense that it’s not useful to try to read the tea leaves and determine what this one reviewless rating says about the game. Whether they’re meaningful in aggregate is a different question. (I would say the aggregate ratings do reflect a sort of community consensus, but that the community consensus doesn’t necessarily reflect quality—but that’s a different discussion.)

[zarf (Andrew Plotkin)]

@Denk

@A_Wthrmnstr

Well, we already know that a score of 1 or 10 is ignored in IFComp.

Is that a new rule?

No.

[ChristopherMerriner (Christopher)]

@J_J_Guest

I don’t like to give a rating without leaving a review, but I don’t have time to write a lot of reviews.

I have the same problem. In fact, I only rate games if I do manage to review them, as a bald star rating without any context seems to me less use than no rating at all. What I do often do, though, if people are on here, is message them to say I enjoyed the game (and often promise a review, which I then fail to deliver - at least, immediately).

[bg]

@Denk

Should we never give a 1-star rating on IFDB without a review? (And what about 2-star ratings?)
[according to IFDB: The star scale is inherently subjective, so it’s up to you to determine what the different levels mean.]

As player, I think ratings can be helpful even without reviews, especially if there are enough of them to reflect some kind of consensus (rather than just one rating from an account whose ratings I never understand anyway). So from that perspective, I think it’s better to have ratings than not have them, regardless of whether there’s a review along with them. But the more different a rating is from the rest, the more helpful it probably is to know a reason for it.

I usually do not have a reason to give a game one star, because if there’s a game I strongly dislike, I probably won’t finish it, and if it looks ahead of time like something I will strongly dislike, I likely won’t play it at all.

I do run into a conundrum sometimes when the technical quality of a game is at odds without how much I liked it. I have never figured out how to resolve that, so if anyone has, please let me know! Supposedly IFDB recommends games based on the ratings of other people who have similar rating patterns to yours. And if you found someone else who had tastes similar to yours, their recommendations might be more meaningful to you. If everybody rates purely on “quality,” then it’s harder for me, as a player, to figure out which games I will actually enjoy. But if you didn’t like a game or would not recommend it, and rate it purely on that basis, then there’s always the possibility of people questioning your motives, drama, etc.

[jnelson (Jim Nelson)]

@bg

As player, I think ratings can be helpful even without reviews, especially if there are enough of them to reflect some kind of consensus

I was just about to write this. I say a rating without a review is more valuable than no rating at all. Even a “I played this game” without a rating or review is valuable, in a way. Most feedback is helpful in some form.

@Encorm

until we’re no better than Goodreads and it’s five stars or nothing. (I kid!.. mostly.)

Maybe you hang out in a different corner of Goodreads, but my experience has been that Goodreads reviewers tend to be harsher or more critical than other places, especially Amazon. (I’ve heard other authors say as much as well.)

[Encorm (N. Cormier)]

Interesting! The vast majority of books I’ve looked at on Goodreads have an aggregate rating between 3.5 to 4.2, with anything lower usually being from an author getting piled on via Twitter. I’d totally believe the contents of said reviews are harsher than average, but as far as I can tell most ratings given out are 3 or above.

Then again, I’ve never been the recipient of reviews anywhere except here and IFDB so I don’t have an author’s perspective on that.

@jnelson

I say a rating without a review is more valuable than no rating at all.

That said, I really agree with this. Part of it is because I’m happy when my work is noticed at all, I think?

[Scrooge200 (Lance Cirone)]

I’m also wondering, how do people feel about having their reviews voted as unhelpful? I’ve noticed that my shorter reviews tend to get this more often, even if I just didn’t have much to say about a game, or it’s been so long since I played it that I can’t go into detail on specific scenes. Even a no-star review that’s just a comment on something potentially controversial a game has was voted unhelpful. You can’t see who voted against your reviews and why, and most of the time they don’t leave comments explaining it, so it’s a bit annoying.

[mathbrush (Brian Rushton)]

If it’s less than 3 people it’s basically random. I had one person on IFDB who downvoted every review I wrote for about a year. I had one review I wrote for the game 9:05 saying it creeped me out get so many downvotes (I think like 5?) that I deleted it and still haven’t rewriten it.

For your specific review, I think a lot of people tend to dislike reviews that are used as ‘comments’. In that review, you’re just discussing the controversial issue without providing a wider view of the game as a whole. I didn’t downvote it, but I can understand it.

It would be nice to be able to add comments to games that aren’t reviews. I think that’s part of the longterm plans.