@Himuton I would support your idea of switching from a stars based rating system to like/dislike or favouriting.
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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)
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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…
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@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. 
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Same here 
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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.
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May I name “Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter”? 
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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.
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Hey Peter, I just noticed a little bug. When I delete comment, it doesn’t remove that comment from my profile under the “comments” section.
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I’ll look at it. I think I’ve seen that happen before. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s important to make sure the activity goes away once a comment is deleted so no one else can see it.
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Apoligies if this is supposed to be posted under a dedicated forum, beacuse i couldn’t find such a thing, but the game factorio has two entries.
I don’t know how it doesn’t take this into account. According to the way the system is defined, you are rating the games based on how you enjoyed the game, not on whether the game is terrible.
I say this every time the conversation comes up. The system is defined and if everyone used it as such, there would not be issues.
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I agree with this now that I’ve noticed how Grouvee defines a rating. Someone mentioned earlier that it doesn’t show up on mobile, which I think is the cause for some confusion. (at least on my part)
I saw that the other day when some trailer got big on Reddit.
There is a thread here to report duplicates. My slow butt is working on a merge tool for the curators. I’m in the middle of CrossFit season right now, so my free time is limited, but I want to get it going.
Duplicate database entries is the thread.
I suppose part of the issue is that on mobile the definitions tied to the ratings are not visible, sadly.
The other is that one’s enjoyment of a game can be independent of perception of quality. I find this applies easily to film but can also do so to games. One can recognize the technical and narrative quality of a film and dislike the experience of watching that film. The inverse can also be true. I think the same can apply to games. Let us use something like Flappy Bird as an example. One may think the game technically and conceptually poor yet still find the experience of the game enjoyable. That person might think that Flappy Bird is really only a two out of five game. The question is, should they rate the game higher because of enjoyment? This is where being able to like something and also rate it out of five would allow for more nuance. I can like a game while simultaneously indicating that I do not think it is a very good game, and vice versa. It allows for the communication of a more complex relationship with the game.
That said, I’m not necessarily advocating that you change anything or that what you have is insufficient. I’m really just engaging in a theoretical discussion of the problems related to communicating a subjective relationship to games and their enjoyment.
I think you are missing the point. The Grouvee rating system is defined by the users enjoyment of the game. If you hover over the ratings (given that you can’t do that on mobile), you will see that each rating is defined by how much you like a game. If you are using the rating system as it is intended, then you should be rating based on your enjoyment of the game, period. The technical or conceptual quality of the game may influence your enjoyment of the game, but it should play no part in the rating on its own.
This just gets to the heart of why I hate rating systems. People try to over complicate things. In the end, when it comes to entertainment, I just want to know if the thing is worth my time or not. I don’t care if it is the best looking game in the world or the worst. No reviewer can cover the nuances of everyone’s opinions through some rating system. They can simply state whether they thought the game was worthwhile, and then others can use that, along with the reviewers previous opinions, to decide how that lines up with their own subjective tastes.
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