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