I have a slight colorblindness known as red green deficiency, and something that is a problem for me is seeing the ratings on other people’s profiles. The dark red stars and the dark gray empty stars are hard to distinguish for me. At first I thought I wasn’t able to see other people’s ratings so it just showed me blank stars. But after looking closer and harder I noticed it’s just the colors that make it difficult for me to see. It would be nice if there were a way to fix this, maybe let us choose custom colors or something like that. I think just making the gray be lighter like it is with the yellow stars would work fine though. I hope there is a way to help me, Thanks!
Hi everyone! I just joined Grouvee yesterday and so far I’m loving it! I spent hours organizing my played-list and that was tons of fun and now I think I’m a bit weird I hope to make some new friends here to discuss video games with.
Hey guys, been on this site for awhile now and I would like to post a little information about my business (just getting it started). If you’re interested in having your old NES and SNES games cleaned and consoles repaired let me know. Sorry to advertise but I figure this is a good avenue.
@bmo Good question. Probably the best way to do it would be to have the customer pay as a separate charge. I know it sounds bad but either way I would have to charge more to cover it. If the customer is local (within 50 miles of me) then they could drive it over and I’ll deliver to them once the services are complete. What do you suggest?
@peter I thought this might not really warrant an entirely new post and figured I could post it under feedback and suggestions. Since you allow markdown on the forum side of the site, is there any chance you will implement markdown on the main site? It would be nice to have the use of markdown for quick editing.
Option to hide columns such as completion date, which I don’t care, or avg. rating, not telling much because of extreme voting possibility (1 star / 5 star).
Night Mode
Black background & highlighted text.
Rating
YouTube killed 5-star rating scheme in 2009 and replaced it with the like/dislike rating scheme saying that most people only rated if a video was worth 1 star or 5 stars.
Could the administer find out if the same happens here? If anything, I acted differently, giving the majority of my games 3 stars. Perhaps I am getting old so I usually keep my cool about video games.
My would side with LIKE/DISLIKE or FAVORITING. This site needs not become a statistic hub because we already know Metacritic.
I actually really like that idea. I already do something similar where I put the games I like on the “played” shelf and when I get around to it, the ones I don’t like on a “dislike” shelf. My reasoning is simply that I don’t want to look at the games I dislike on a regular basis and that I want to clearly distinguish between the games I like and the games I dislike. Replacing stars with a like/dislike/favorite rating system would add clarity to ratings. For example, a 3 star rating for me means that I enjoyed a game but to some, it means they found it mediocre. I’d click “like” for a 3-star game while they’d probably click “dislike”
Also, it may encourage people to leave the finer details of their opinion in a review instead of trying to represent it in the difference between 3 and 4 stars (for example)
I’m curious as to what those reasons are. Wouldn’t specifying platform focus the ratings too much on the technicalities of the platform instead of on the quality of the game itself? For example, Finding Nemo is still Finding Nemo whether you watch it on DVD or Bluray. Yes, Bluray is one of the best ways of viewing the movie, but it doesn’t have anything to do with whether it’s a good movie or not. Another example, Arkham Knight is broken on PC, but that doesn’t mean that Arkham Knight is a bad game. It’s kind of similar to a scratched up DVD of a good movie. Just some thoughts…
@Kriven Yeah, I agree with you that something might have to be done about your second point. I remember playing LOTR The Third Age when I was a kid. The GBA version was a Fire Emblem style tactics game and the GC version was basically Final Fantasy X: Lord of the Rings Edition. Glad the days of half-assed movie liscenced games are over.
This is definitely being worked on. It’s slow going, but specifying the release of a game will be an option in the future. The issue typically happens on licensed games, but there are definitely other cases where it pops up. I think being able to specify which release of a game you have on your shelf will fix that.
As for specifying a different rating for different releases, I don’t know if I want to get into that or not. If I were to do it, the “overall” score of a game would ignore which release/platform a rating was for, but it might kind of cool to see a breakdown of what people are rating.
I’ve never done an analysis of ratings distributions. It would be interesting to see! I think over a large sample, the games that people like more tend to outrank others. I know that’s a silly thing to say, but if it we went with LIKE/DISLIKE, everything would just get lumped into two piles. If you look at this list: Top 250 games on Grouvee, I think we have a pretty good list of games for the top 250. It’s created using the IMDB Top 250 formula which weights a games average with its number of ratings. I would be sad to not be able to do something like this.
I actually do want this site to become a statistics hub. I realize there’s a user component to Metacritic, but people go there to look at critic’s scores. I honestly don’t care what critics say anymore. I want to know what normal people, who play on a normal person’s schedule, have to say about a game way more than a game critic who’s job it is to play games in such a different environment. I want Grouvee to become the place people come to find out which games normal people like!
As for favoriting a game, that might not be a terrible thing to add in. I think there are 4 star games out there people put on their favorites lists over 5 star games for one reason or another, and it would be a good data point to have. I think Letterboxd does something similar.
I love the ideas! Keep posting so I can figure out what to focus on.
It does. You rank a movie out of five stars and you also have the option to mark whether or not you like a movie. I have, on occasion, liked a movie that I simultaneously believe only deserves two stars.
That is probably not a bad thing, especially given it presents a percentage of like vs dislike which is argualby a better metric than the number of stars a game receives.I am of the mind that a four or five point rating system provides very little reliable data. Stars, or points, are arbitrary. What four out of five means to you likely means something completely different to me. Because the experience of media is an affectual one we really cannot quantify that experience. Thus, it is my feeling that assigning stars really has little significance. Even more so when someone attempts to use a five star rating system to objectively prove or measure that a game is good/bad. It really holds very little water because that metric is based on the personal experience of pleasure or displeasure related to the game. Taking a rating of three out of five stars really has little value because the meaning of three out of five varies wildly from person to person. And since the experience of enjoying a form of media such as video games is subjective, a like/dislike system is most likely a superior one. It tells you accurately that x number of people like and x number of people dislike a particular media object. I find it much easier to understand the relationship a community has to something like a movie or a game if I can see the percentage of people who like versus dislike. A star rating is far more difficult to decipher.
I don’t disagree that stars mean something different to everyone as an individual. I chose it because it’s a standard rating system that people are familiar with.
It would be an interesting experiment to see how like/dislike percentages turned out for a site like Grouvee with a lot of data points. When I started the site, I was actually trying to build a Rotten Tomatoes for video games. I would grab all these reviews from different sites and try and translate their score into like/dislike. Everything was either a 99% like or a 99% dislike. It provided no valuable information whatsoever. I don’t know if that would be the case on Grouvee.
I still think the 5 star system is valuable over a large group though. Like I said before, our top 250 games list is pretty representative of games that people like on the site.
I’m liking the idea of adding in a hearting/favoriting system though.
It might be interesting to see if it would be different based purely on Grouvee data.
That’s fair. I’m not strictly against it, I think it just requires some interpretation. Like and dislike tells me something solid based on player experience. Stars present much more fluid data that I find less reliable. But that’s not to say it has no merit and I respect that it is the way many people like to evaluate their own media experiences. I simply come from a background that finds it difficult to accept the idea that we can translate experience into quantifiable data, so I tend to skew toward different systems for representing that experience.
To be fair, Grouvee defines star rating itself. Hovering over each star triggers a pop-up which says (e.g. 5-star) “loved it” and so on.
If everyone sticks to Grouvee’s star definition, the ambiguity problem would be little. But this is too good to be true. There must be oblivious users and extreme voters joining the fray.
I had not noticed it does that. I does not appear to on mobile or tablet which is how I access Grouvee most of the time.
That also doesn’t take into account situations where I may love a terrible game. Just like you can absolutely enjoy a terrible movie you can adore a terrible game for personal reasons. It’s not unreasonable for me to like something I believe only deserves two stars. I think this is largely due to the fact that the act of liking something can actually be very different from ranking or rating it. But @peter need not worry about building a system based solely on that rare case usage.
I hope to make some new friends here to discuss video games with.
