Leave constructive feedback, learn, grow.
The community comments are filled with Rate-for-Rate offers, which seemingly creates a sort of quid-pro-quo environment.
Is this a constructive process that enhances the game dev community?
Understandably, it is difficult to have your game viewed, let alone played(especially for .exe games, many of us are wary of malware). There are many, many submissions.
However I feel this practice leads to a sort of negative player behavior, essentially gamifying the jam itself (Don't get me wrong, we all love a good game :P). However, to suggest that if someone really wants to win, playing "Community Message Board, The Game!" seems flawed.
Not trying to call anyone out for Rate-for Rate, gotta do what you gotta do and marketing is very important. Games gotta get rates!
I also understand the difficulty in running an event like this. A method to parse through every entry may not be available to those in charge and it's up to the community to see through the judging process, within the limits of the platform.
We have a lot of young developers in this community, and it would be a disservice to deny them some useful knowledge or a chance to learn after putting in such hard work . Not everyone has the social capacity to keep up with message boards or be consistently socially interactive, for whatever personal reasons they may have. It's a very stressful process uploading your first game, or any game, as we all know. It is a concern that those unable to engage directly will be missing out on very useful feedback.
For those who are doing Rate-for-Rate, please keep doing what your doing. You are driving this process forward and we very much appreciate it.
I feel it is worth questioning if this is best practice, or if alternative methods can be explored to enhance community feedback.
Regardless, I urge everyone who has the ability, to play a random game, comment, give constructive feedback, and rate without incentive.
The game Dev community will certainly be better for it :)
Thoughts, ideas? please share.
(Don't worry about rating my game, the feedback I've already received has been plenty of value and you are all so amazing <3)