After some discussion in the Bad Ideas Productions Discord server, we've decided to make the rating system for people who did not submit a game not as harsh. Now people who didn't submit a game will have their rating queue size increased from 5 games to 15 AND if they rate 50 games then they will be able to rate any game in the list of submissions. Hopefully this is to everyone's liking.

Edit: This has been changed due to feedback. Please check the most recent post about the Game Jam Rating Changes.

This could go wrong so fast. People can just have their friends or alt accounts rate 50 other games as 1 stars then rate their friend's game a full 5 star experience.

It's honestly kinda sad if people's friends just vote 50 games badly or whatever... Game jams aren't just for the prize.. (in my opinion) It should just be about friendly competition and opportunities to learn and improve. I have a friend who's not in the jam thats rating games right now in order to be able to rate a specific game he played. (He doesn't even care about voting for my game </3) He actually gives all the games a fair shot and is leaving fair ratings, If you want to support your friends thats completely fine! But you shouldn't try to sabotage the competition for it.. (Sorry for the rant lmao)

I agree with the other comments. I think it makes the most sense to only allow submitters to rate games. Better yet, if there's an option for it, non-submitters should be able leave comments and feedback, but their ratings wouldn't be factored into the rankings.

I understand that the intent is to make sure everyone's entry gets played, but I don't think this would help that much. I feel like most non-participants who are only interested in a specific game would have the patience to play maybe ONE mandatory game first. I could see a lot of people giving up, or worse, start sloppily rating games, well before #50.

It's good sportsmanship to give different games a chance in a jam, but ultimately you can't force someone to play something they're not interested in.

this is going to cause overall ratings to tank since people are gonna start rating badly to get through to games that they actually wanna rate.  Please, remove this or change it to make it shorter.

I thought this was an April Fools' bit. If it's not... ah well... the other comments have said what I was going to say anyway. This is exactly what happened with the Monkey Jam...

thatgamejam #01 let outsiders in. At the last moment, one guy’s support team (his college students, 50 of them or so) shoot his submission from obscurity all the way up to the top spot.

I need to upload a build with a bugfix pls enable it or im cooked

This is bullshit imo. This will easily corrupt the voting system. Please find a better solution

this is an awful idea there is a reason that only submitters should be allow to vote letting everyone vote makes it into a popularity contest

Hello everyone, Mary here. 

Because of the input I've decided to turn the rating settings to submitter and contributor only. To be honest, the previous setting was that the public was already allowed to do ratings in a queue, so the announcement in this post I made was feedback I had received from the BIP Discord Server. The change was made to allow people from Jonny's community and rate the games as many people would be coming in from Jonny's shorts about the game jam. However, I see now that not having this detail about voting be public from the start was wrong, as I had mistakenly assumed that this was pretty standard for game jams to have some form of public voting as that was how it was done for most of the game jams I had participated in the past. 

I'm sorry if this decision has cause anyone stress and/or confusion about the game jam. Remember this is our team's first-time hosting and running an event like this. The size of which I definitely wasn't the most prepared to handle and I'm sorry. I hope this change satisfies jammers and kills any notion that the games that reach the top 100 will be there because of external popularity. I'd also like people to please keep in mind that the top 100 games will be played on stream and ranked by our judges to determine who will be receiving prizes and who will be in the collection. As an extra precaution, I will be keeping the public results hidden until the day of the stream with the Judges on Thursday April 9th at 6:30 PM EST. This will give me time to look over the results and analytics of the jam and make sure no malpractice was done.

To anyone who is not a submitter and is disappointed by these changes, I still urge you to play and comment on the game jam's submissions despite these changes. This game jam is meant to uplift developers and creatives as much as possible. Your written feedback and praise will be more important and influential than any quantitative rating ever could be.

Sincerely,

MaryTheProducer