I’ve come across one participant who seems to be spamming pages with AI-generated comments - all rehashing feedback given by other players, all ending with the same invitation to play their own game, often posted within seconds of each other. It’s hard to imagine they’re even playing the games they comment on. Can we do anything about this? It’s not strictly rate-for-rate, but at best it feels scummy to have the jam flooded with this stuff and at worst I’m concerned they may actually be giving low/random ratings along with the fake comments.
Viewing post in No rate for rate. Please.
Tracking and moderating this sort of thing is unfortunately fairly tricky, since it would be hard to separate people who don't play the games at all from the people who are playing the games, but only very briefly and giving a score based on only a few minutes of gameplay. (That's not ideal either, but everyone is going to spend a different amount of time rating/playing each game.)
This isn't the exact same type of rate-for-rate that I'm asking people to avoid here in the community tab though, because this is (I'm assuming) at least asking people to play their game, and so if they follow that suggestions, the person who's spamming will still have to have a good game in order to get a higher rank because of it. (Total number of votes doesn't really say anything about what scores people have been giving their game.)
The type of rate-for-rate that I think really ruins jams is the kind where two people agree to rate each others games, because one or both people may give scores without ever playing the game, and if several people do that together, they can all end up with scores that don't reflect their game in any way.
That’s fair. I definitely think that the actual scores are the main thing to focus on, though I also feel that getting a chatbot to sum up other people’s comments sort of broadcasts that a participant really isn’t interested in anything other than boosting their own submission. It’s not particularly subtle, and I wouldn’t be surprised if seeing it go unchallenged prompts others to take the same approach. More ratings don’t guarantee higher ratings, but jams on itch do penalise entries with fewer than the median. There’s every chance that someone bulking out their numbers like this will edge out someone with a higher raw score, and that chance increases with every other person who sees this happening and thinks “Well, I can’t compete if I’m only commenting on stuff I actually played.”
That's definitely possible.
We mostly focus on making sure the judge voting is done as fairly as possible, because those are easier to control, and those games will get the prizes in the jam. But it would be great if we could improve the accuracy of the community voting too. (Not that it's been a huge problem in the past. The results over the past jams that we've held were pretty fair, with only a little bit of randomness in the results.)
I'll add a note though for the next jam, to consider adding a rule about spamming/low quality review comments during the voting period. 👍
Thank you! Honestly, I think just mentioning it in the rules could do a lot of good. I suspect people will be more likely to do this sort of thing if they feel as though they’ve come up with some unforeseen ploy, rather than just being “that guy,” doing the thing they’ve been specifically asked not to.