Replace the 5-star Rating System

Reincarnated OP speaking!

Even though I’ve asked for a one-click-away nuke on my game ratings, I’m still shamefully fond of the subject of rating stuff.

Here’s the link to a worthwhile article about the internet’s best rating systems:

Thumbs-up, Thumbs-down

Alyssa Bereznak:
First off, I despise the fact that review systems are built into almost every corner of the internet. Assigning a range of stars and numbers to films, TV, music, and restaurants make sense, yes. But doing the same thing for the anonymous Amazon seller who ships you pet food every couple of weeks feels especially silly. I don’t want to be forced to score such a simple transaction on such a nuanced scale when the whole point of most online transactions is efficiency. More than anything, I think the overinflation of online ratings can be blamed on the fact that we are too often asked to judge non-noteworthy experiences, and as a result, we round up.

As for food and entertainment, I’m a fan of the good ole Siskel and Ebert method: thumbs-up and thumbs-down. It requires you to make a snap judgement based on a gut feeling, record it, and then move on. If you want more detail, read a full review! And if we have to have a rating system for all that other dumb, inconsequential stuff on the internet, maybe include a “meh” horizontal thumb, to indicate no preference or feeling whatsoever. Tech companies seem to underestimate how often their users are simply indifferent on a day-to-day basis.

Well said! The Like Vs Dislike Rating System can get better by offering a third option - Neutral. :cowboy_hat_face:

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in a way yea. but for me the whole point in rating is sorting by ascending or descending stars. a 2 or 3 point system doesnt do it, a 5 does (if one is reserved about handing out 1’s and 5’s)

Agree with the review thing. Still that doesnt help for sorting. :slight_smile:

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The system provides it’s own definition for what each number of stars mean 3 stars means you liked, 2 stars means you mostly didn’t like, etc. The problem is that I don’t think many people rate it according to what the system actually says. They come with their own interpretation. This makes any sort of averaged weight a completely meaningless statistic. A guy that uses 3 star to mean “I didn’t like it” is averaged with a guy who thinks it means “I did like it” and there will of course be people who use a 3 star to mean yet something else. And so the average rating for a game ends up communicating nothing what so ever.

There is no way to come up with any sort of fix for this because there is no way to go back to each individual person and check what they were using 3 stars to convey. Tthe same problem would occur if any new system were to replace it: whether it’s out of 10, 100, thumbs up/down, or anything else. Averaged ratings only convey information if everyone that uses them is applying the same definition to each rating, a goal which is impossible to enforce or even verify when users submit reviews at will. To repeat, the average rating is a totally useless statistic and always will be.

The only useful information here is the textual parts of the reviews because you can tell what each individual person is trying to communicate.

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I need a 100 point scale! With hundreds of games that I have played and completed, I like to sort by rating and see my creme de la creme. Of the 300-ish games played in my life, I’m going to have maybe 50 5-star ratings… that doesn’t really help me figure out which are my absolute favorite… with a 100 point scale, I can have my absolute favorites as a 10 and some nearly perfect games could be 9.8… but when I sort my games by rating, the best will rise to the top… not just a lump of all my top 20% or so. 5 stars is seriously the worst way to rate games. Metacritic, like it or not, is the closest thing we have to a standard game rating system and they use a 100 point scale… so should you. :slight_smile:

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Good luck with consistency!

You’d have to mindfully rate games so that none’s ratings fall out of place. The system is as stressful and fragile as say Jenga.

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As the OP, I’m still an advocate of LIKE vs DISLIKE instead of 5-Stars. But I think a separate FAVORITE mark would go a long way to highlight those games we swear to replay down the road.

EDIT: I forgot my own LIKE vs. NEUTRAL vs. DISLIKE proposition. I still back it!

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Steam uses like/dislike and it’s useless because most people have a very low standard for “like” unless a game on steam has technical problems that keep it from even running smoothly or the publisher does something that morally offends the player base it’s going to get a thumbs up. The result is the rating system is nearly useless, everything has a positive rating, including plenty of blatant shovel-ware.

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I think the current system has redundancy.

1 means “I hated it”
2 means “I mostly hated it”

Whether a game is entirly or mostly hated communicates the message “Don’t play this game, it’s shit.”.

4 means “I really liked it”
5 means “I loved it”

These things mean the exact same thing, the difference is semantics. They also have the same message," If you play this game I think you’ll have a really great time"

I think the easiest solution would be to just remove the redundant 1 and 5 stars entirely: leaving “mostly didn’t like” “like” and “really like”. That’s sufficient to tell you whether you or you should be playing the game, which is what rating systems should communicate. It would be very much in line with how things have already been, is perfectly clear what each number means, and would be compatible with all old data.

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To be clear, I couldn’t care less about how others rate their games. Like review sites, reviews are biased and personal to the player. So the “consistency” in people’s ratings is never going to happen.

I personally need a 100 point scale in order to rate my games properly and give it any sort of meaning. I like to know what my top 10 games are simply by sorting by rating. With a 5pt scale, I don’t get that… I get a lump of my top 50ish games in no particular order, which is silly and not helpful. My reasoning is purely personal, as rating games is personal.

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The entire point of a review is to be bias and personal, it’s describing your personal thoughts and experiences with the game and how it measures to your experiences with other games. Consistency is just everyone using the scoring system to communicate the same. One guy says a game is a rating of X which means he thought the game wasn’t worth playing. Another guy uses that same rating of X to communicate the game is playable but not great. That’s inconstancy. But you can only have consistency if every rating has a clearly defined term and everyone uses them as they are defined.

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Right… consistency is too big a problem to crack here. And for Grouvee, it doesn’t need to be consistent… this is a user based rating system. If people want “professional” ratings on games, they ought to go to metacritic. I’m only suggesting it’s changed to a 100 point scale for my personal use… completely and utterly selfishly. :stuck_out_tongue:

Anyways, just sending in my vote to the devs that I won’t be able to use this site as a means to document my gaming unless it has a 100 point scale. Sadly for me, it has all the other features I want except for that… but the rating is almost the most important aspect for me, along with when I played it. For now I’ll continue using good ol’ google spreadsheets!

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This makes me think custom tags might be a good idea: private labels that can be thrown onto games. That would help with all sorts of organization

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To be fair, all Grouvee’s game shelves except “All” has a green button named “enable sorting”. Click it and you get the option to sort games your way under “#”. You should be able to achieve the hierarchy plan without the 100% score scale.

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