Absolutely incredible. All of us are amazed at the sheer numbers we did this past weekend. When the smoke cleared, we were left with 599 entries! To compare, Ludum Dare 20, an event taking place just 4 months ago did 358 entries (288 Compo). Yowzers!
Of course, this weekend wasn’t without its share of problems. You can visit this link to read my postmortem of how things went Saturday and Sunday.
Even still! After getting the site usable, Phil had to come back several times to HEAVILY optimize the site code. We still can’t even turn the sidebar back on yet due to the extra load! Yikes!
But no matter. We are on top of this. Lets talk judging.
For the next 3 weeks, entry voting (judging) is on. Everyone that entered is strongly encouraged to play and rate games. The Rate Entries page will give you a custom random selection of games for you to play. The more games you play, the better the averages, and better the results. Still confused? Check out this guide by matthias zarzecki.
And remember! Only people that submitted a game can vote!
Still no matter the results, be proud of yourself! Whether you finished or not, you did something amazing this weekend! You did in 2-3 days what large companies take months, even years to do (well not exactly, but you get the point). Job well done!
That’s all for now. Thanks everyone for coming out and making this our biggest event yet!
As well as the random list, could you include an option to see another list showing the 20 games with the least number of ratings.
I’d prefer to rate those to help balance things out.
If you click on ‘See all entries’, you can see all those games which very less people have rated. So, you can search and rate them!
PS: I’m one of those less rated ones -_-
Aw, I have to wait over 20 days to see my own rating.
A great way to pass the time would be to play and rate other peoples games. 😀
Sounds like a plan.
It’s going to be hard to rate all the entries. If we spend 5min per game, it will take almost 50h… Next weeks are going to be loaded in testing ^^
30 games per day would be difficult to maintain for 20 days! I’m managing about 10 per day, but I expect that will have dropped to <5 per day by next week. So if I manage to rate 50 games in total, I'll be satisfied.
And if everyone rates 50 games, then all games will have 50 ratings, which would be a sufficient number for getting a stable average. This is partly why I think a list of games with "least number of ratings" would be helpful, to ensure all games get a similar number of ratings.
Yeah, it’s not realistic to expect everyone to play everything. But we do ask that you play what you can. Every one helps.
I’ll try to setup a “rate 600 games” competition in 48h for myself 😀
Oooh please add more medals for such an occasion
” The Rate Entries page will give you a custom random selection of games for you to play.”
-> From my point of view, I see the same list over and over, and so the 1st entries are taking most of the votes (like Pythong”). Random is good, but must be updated each time the page is displayed.
The list grows over time, and even though it’s the same each time for you, if we can get everyone to rate the games on their respected pages, it gives us a good herd average. We are investigating some additional display options.
rockford: everybody gets their own random 20 games to rate.
I think rockford means that he wants his list to be replaced with a fresh list once in a while, so that he doesn’t see the same games at the top each time, which he’s already played, rated, and finished with.
Hi – FYI, the /planet pages are down (couldn’t find an easier to contact you, sorry…)
Yes, we took it down because it wasn’t working right after we changed hosts. No worries, it will once we find the time.
Yeah, maybe you should add a ‘random entry’ button that will chose a random game with low amount of votes, because many people just choosing the most commented or first one and then the other entries lose their chances and never get viewed. And since nobody will really play all of they 600 games random button is the best option.
I’m going to attempt to play and rate them all. Monday through Friday I’ll spend an hour in thew morning and an hour at night. I’ll try to do more on the weekends.
Thanks for adding “sort by least ratings” in the rating page! This is really useful, I’m sure it’ll bring more attention to games with binary votes.
Agreed, this is a really smart feature, and I’m really happy it was added.
That makes 30 games per day to rate them all in 20 days
holy macaoni… i need to speed the fuck up
testing: my username seems to have vanished
but now it’s back!
Charts and graphs and spreadsheets are always good.
Phil added a view to help out. Lets you see the lowest rated games.
Thanks for that
And to encourage people to use it you could say this:
Ratings are averaged, so if a game has few votes so far, then your rating of it will carry much more weight than it would of a popular game.
I think it’s time to update this one. I’d like to see how the ratings have changed in a day.
http://img.ie/1013a.png
http://img.ie/c5377.png
And here’s another showing a Poisson curve for the data. If games were being selected with uniform probability, we’d expect the distribution of ratings to follow this curve. The difference clearly shows that games are not being selected with equal probability.
This could be down to:
– screenshots are not all equally seductive.
– game names are not all equally seductive.
– people choosing already popular games, rather than random games, because they want to play a good game.
– people preferring some platforms over others. (eg web games take less effort to run than standalones).
– people are interested in some developers more than others either because they are well known or have good reputation.
If I had more data to hand I could test these hypotheses and look for correlations.
Hah, thanks.
Today’s chart :-
http://img.ie/a9164.png
The “least rated” list is definitely helping to reduce the overall spread.
1266 ratings have been made over the past 24 hours (Wed-Thu).
1291 ratings were made in the previous 24 hour period (Tue-Wed)
So ratings are coming in at pretty much the same frequency as they were yesterday.
Awh man, if i’d have entered like usual there would have been exactly 600 entries!
Just wait until LD22 in december, when we’ll have over 1000 entries… and see a $1000/mo server brought to it’s knees. :p
But how are we supposed to play all that?
Seriosuly though: As great as more participants are, going through several hundered of games is becoming a slog.
Aim to do 50 like me.
As for the spiraling server costs, could the contest get a sponsor, or are the organizers comfortable paying $200/mo?
Yes. Rating 50 games does way-more for the average than 1 or 2. We need a good crowd of players, and if the majority of games can get 20+ ratings, we will have good averages.
You aren’t expected to play them all! If you get about 20 rated I think everyone would agree you’ve pretty much done your fair share.
Ideally, everyone should aim to give at least as many ratings as they get. Many people have done more than their share, but there are still a lot of those who have a coolness rating of 0.
Okay, so everyone has currently at least 5 ratings and nobody’s getting ignored because of idlers. But it’s just weird how one would participate in a gamedev event and not be bothered to play a single game.
The link to my journal is broken: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&uid=2355
Anyone else have that?
So far as we’ve heard you’re the one with this problem. If anyone else does experience this, please do let us know.
It’s affecting a lot of people actually. Clicking through 10 names, the link is broken in about half of them… and it is broken on my page too.
I’m thinking it could be case sensitivity in some part of the database:
Martoon is written with capital M, but the working link is martoon, in lowercase. This means that username and database name will not be equate as is, because SQL queries are case sensitive. So if it’s returning an error, and that in turn is being translated into a empty field, we would have an explanation.
I’ve seen a lot of entries with broken links like this as well. I usually add the user’s name as a parameter on the broken link, and I get what I want. This is not a solution to the problem, but it might help you get to that page. I’ve also seen people adding the correct link alongside the game links.
Same for me!!!
Might have been an even 600 if I had internet access. Always next time, I suppose. Good work everyone! 😛