I have mixed feelings about the new rating system, and I am not sure if it is the best way to go. Just to give this some context I will ellaborate below, but to preface everything I liked the old system much better.

So our team consists of some enthusiastic programmer and art guys, and we do game jams mostly for fun. Usually the whole reason of doing a jam is the thrill of making something fast, and trying to come up with a scope that is actually doable in a short time (and of course fail at that miserably).

But half of the fun is doing the whole community thing after, where we take a look at different games that got popular or very rated and see what makes it so. Until now we kinda did it as a continuation of the game jam, that when the submission deadline was over we went to the submissions and started rating and commenting on games that stood out for whatever reason, or got our attention with their capsule art. And it had a nice back and forth effect where we could comment for comment and rate for rate. I know that having many ratings does not necessarily means that we will have a good score, but still getting comments and getting rated was a number go up game that motivated us to engage more and more with other games and the jams community during the rating window.

I know this should not matter, but I feel kinda cheated with the new system, that I cannot rate whatever I want to. I get the problem that sometimes games don't get enough rates etc, so there should be an egalizing force that helps these entries. But for me having a random rating queue is just not justifiable by any means. I would understand if I could only rate 5 games first that have not been rated / played by a certain number of people, but after a threshold of like 5 or maximum 10 games I should be able to rate whatever I want. 

The main reason for this I think is that playing jam games, and taking them seriously and giving constructive feedback is a lot of time and energy but if I cannot choose what games I spend my time on it becomes kind of a chore. Realisticaly I have time to play like 20 games / JAM so not being able to rate the ones I play made me not that interested to play them at all. I know that's kinda weird but that is how it is.

I have 2 more points that I will say.
1. is that I understand that the old system was kind of unfair to single dev games because they could not engage that much as a 5+ person team like ours so it is true that it was not completely balanced, and I do see that.

2. is that I understand that we can still do the comment for comment thing in any games that we want to, so the community engagement does not disappear completely, but for some reason it does not give the rush it used to. At least for me it doesn't.

Uh and an extra technical detail that I don't understand: Why can't we see the capsules of the games that we are supposed to rate? It makes choosing what to play and what not to play even from a small 5 title list very cumbersome.

Whad do you guys think? Am I being unfair here? Do I not see something that makes this a superior rating system? Any thoughts?

I agree 100%. I’m like just a student and I’ve always wished to be able to participate, play games, comment tham, and get replies and ratings. This new system is basically making my logging in everyday to see if I have new ratings useless.

Yea the new system seems have really dropped the quantity of ratings overall in this jam. 

I completely agree with you.
I think that up to a certain point, it's "fair" to highlight and offer rating opportunities for games that haven't recieved many views. But I could imagine that doing so would involve some kind of reward, for example, appearing on other people's lists or something. Because in reality, I've voted for many games, still have games on my waiting list so I can't vote for games I've chosen to play, and my game still has no votes. It makes everything tedious and frustrating. 
It would also be helpful to have an idea of the number of games in our queues, because I initially thought there would only be 5 and then I could vote on the chosen games, but it seems to be infinite -_-

I think the random queue idea is actually a very good one, and should make the rating distribution a lot fairer.

However I agree that there should be a threshold (around 10-20 IMO) after which you can rate whatever game you want. I was surprised to find that this is not the case after rating 47 games. At this point, in all honestly, what remains in my queue is what I would rate quite low and I refrained from doing that and have stopped rating altogether.