A proposal for a better rating system

[Tartalo]

EDITED and removed a lot of useless crap I wrote based on a plain wrong idea:

A better rating system

I remember an old message by CJ that said something like "Ratings are not working well because most users rate without having played many games so they are not comparable" Maybe he didn't say exactly that, but that's where I think the problem lies.

So what about making the number of games you rated count?

((rate by user A* ratings by user A) + (rate by user B* ratings by user B)+...) / total ratings

Tartalo

[Evil]

It's an interesting concept. The problem is, no one wants to rate a bunch of games. And won't the first few games people rate be poorly influenced? Like, what if there were a few short games that people rated for their first few ratings? Wouldn't they always have a low score?

Maybe if we're going to use an in depth math related system, we could take another approach. Perhaps we could sort by downloads and rating at the same time? I'm no good at math, but maybe something like this?

[Rating + 2 * [Number of Downloads / (Total Global Downloads)]] / 3

So a game with a rating of 7 out of 10 (70%) and 500 downloads might look like this, given that there are 10000 game downloads or something.

[0.7 + 5 * (500 / 10000)] / 3 = .3167

I mean, it's an arbitrary number, but it's something. I think it's important that the rating is related to number of downloads. It wouldn't be perfect, but maybe you could organize another way too, like sorting by rating and then number of downloads within the sorted rating?

I dunno, but I agree that this needs to be changed. It comes up so much, maybe it's time.

[Tartalo]

IAnd won't the first few games people rate be poorly influenced?

Yes, every game rated by  a user with little influence would move to the center no matter what they rated.

It's plain wrong, I don't know what I was thinking,  the idea of the influence is the right path, but it's much simpler than that, you learn this when you are 8 years old and I overlooked it and tried to reinvent the wheel:

((rate by user A* ratings by user A) + (rate by user B* ratings by user B)+...) / total ratings

I'll edit my original post to avoid other users the confusion.

About your idea: I'd like a combination of rating and downloads, but not instead of plain rating, but as another option.

[SSH]

A new rating system is in the works... be patient!

[ThreeOhFour]

I was thinking that - aren't they a fair way through it?

[Pumaman]

A new rating system is in the works, but it won't affect the way that the user ratings are done.

I'm not sure that people who have rated more games should necessarily be given a higher weighting. If SSH goes in and gives all 10 Princess Marian games top ratings, does that mean that his opinions are more valid than someone who's only played a couple of games?

[SSH]

No, that's not why my opinions are more valid. Besides, there's 11 PM games, not 10...

[cat]

So, how's the progress of the new rating? I think it is very hard to do that, considering the huge amount of games and the continously added new games.

[Misj']

A new rating system is in the works, but it won't affect the way that the user ratings are done.

I'm not sure that people who have rated more games should necessarily be given a higher weighting. If SSH goes in and gives all 10 Princess Marian games top ratings, does that mean that his opinions are more valid than someone who's only played a couple of games?

One might even go as far as to say, that if someone rates only a single game he must have a reason for rating it. So that would imply that the fewer games you've rated (relative to the time you're a member of the forum maybe), the stronger your vote should count.

Then again...I think the 'strength' of someone's rating should correspond to that person's nationality: everyone who's from a country containing the letter 'e' (either in it's native language or in English (whether written as an abbriviation or not)) should not be counted.

[Tartalo]

A new rating system is in the works, but it won't affect the way that the user ratings are done.

Yeah, I'm sorry. I saw a mention to that after writing my original super-long post. (I've been outside for almost a year and in my previous to writing search I didn't actually read everything).

But as the new rating system is not finished yet I'll try to convince you of the goodness of this idea:

- It makes creating new accounts for rating-spam useless
- It rewards and encourages rating many games.

I'm not sure that people who have rated more games should necessarily be given a higher weighting. If SSH goes in and gives all 10 Princess Marian games top ratings, does that mean that his opinions are more valid than someone who's only played a couple of games?

Hmmm, Yes? It's not more "valid" per-se, but it's more trustworthy, if someone played hundreds of games she has probably a better built criteria. And for sure, it's not someone creating new accounts to overrate his own game.

If a veteran user acts childish and overrates some own not so good games (not talking about you SSH, I didn't play your games yet), there are other veteran users to counter the effect.

But just in case... some ideas:

If putting a too easy way for veterans to overrate their own games worries  you there's an straightforward solution: disallow rating own games. The need of a new account will kill most rule-the-world temptations.

An alternative is making votes public, most people does use common sense, specially when not anonymous.

Also someone trying to spam a rating system that takes in account the number of previous ratings would have quite a lot of work to do to achieve a significant influence. You can put a limit like "you can't rate more that 1 game a day" (or any other threshold you like) to make spamming efforts less tempting.

Tartalo
PS: Where can I read about what you are working on now?  Maybe I'm duplicating previously discussed ideas.
Nevermind, I just found it. An expert panel? How complicated, no? Well, the ratings will be trustworthy, that's sure. You might want to consider this idea for "user's rating"

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

The problem is, no one wants to rate a bunch of games.

This is a very true statement.  Even with the election of judges for the rating panel being by invitation there is a lull in activity because there are so many games and the task seems daunting.  Be assured, though, that over 2/3 of the games are now actually rated and categorized!  Yay!

[Radiant]

I don't really have an opinion on user ratings at the moment, but I believe that the section for user comments could be improved by showing the last X posts of the relevant Completed Games forum thread, rather than the loose comments there are now.