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.