I want to share something with you guys and get your feedback. Feel free to agree or disagree. But before I continue, I just want to say that I’ve participated in 8 Ludum Dares so far, and they’re what I look forward to, I love them. Ok, now I’ll give my little spiel.
After making your game in the 48/72 Hour Time Limit, we get to check out and Rate other people’s games. When rating somebody’s game, we are allowed to give them x out of 5 stars in 8 different Categories. These Categories include: Innovation, Fun, Theme, Graphics, Audio, Humor, Mood, and most importantly, Overall. I’m going to talk more about the Overall category in a minute. Let me just talk about something else first:
As many of you may have noticed, probably for a while now, your results don’t seem very honest. The results you get may seem surprising, this could be in a bad way, or in a good way. You’re either pretty disappointed, or you’re really happy. This is because you didn’t get a ton of votes (i.e.: ~20-70 votes, which is what a lot of people end up getting). Think about it, there were about 2,800 other games out there. Do you think that with 50 votes out of the 2,800 entries you’ll get a really honest evaluation? You shouldn’t, because unfortunately, that’s not the case.
If 5 people rate your game and they all give you a 5 on Fun, the average would be a 5/5. If 10 people rate your game and 8 of them give you a 5 on Fun, and the other 2 give you a 4, the average would be a 4.8/5. Now the game with an average of 5/5 is ranked higher than the game with an average of 4.8/5. But the game with an average of 4.8/5 should be ranked higher because it had similar scores, and more people played it. Now I’m pretty sure that in the end the game’s categories aren’t ranked based on just the amount of stars given but still, I just wanted to give you something to think about. The rankings aren’t all that honest. I noticed that many of the Top Ranked games only had about ~30-70 votes. You’ll see that the games that got the most votes weren’t up there in the Top 100. But they did, however, have more real honest evaluations, while the others with ~30-70 votes were just lucky enough to get a handful of good ratings which therefore gave them higher rankings. The Top 100 are great games, no doubt, but are they the best out of the 2,800? We don’t really know for sure.
Ok, now I’m going to talk about this Overall category. The site says that your game is ranked overall based on your Overall category ratings. Do you think that we should be allowed to rate the Overall category? The Overall category should be based on the other categories rounded up. The site should give us the Overall Rating, not us. Here’s just one reason why: I’ve seen many people give a game great ratings, like 4-5 stars on every category, and then they would give the Overall category a 3. Umm… What? Shouldn’t you base the Overall category on the other categories? If you gave all the other categories 5 stars, then why would you give the Overall category 4 stars? The Average Overall Rating would be a 5, so give it a 5. But since people don’t always do that, let the Robots do the math and give us the Overall Rating, not the Humans.
I’m not entirely sure how Mike (Founder of Ludum Dare; Support him on Patreon!) can make the evaluations more honest because you can’t just have 2,800 people play all 2,800 games, that’s just ridiculous. But it’s just something to think about.
Give me your thoughts in the comments please.
Thanks for listening!