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what you described is precisely what we wanted to avoid: people (meaning everyone) will go to the submission list, sort it by "popular" 

That's not what I described at all. There's plenty of people using the random order to find games. The idea is that the popular gives an opportunity for those that might otherwise give up and rate nothing a chance to find a way to get involved with the jam. Hope that explains

The same use case with "random" order would at least be more fair to games that are not on the top 50 (even if that's not perfect, I agree)

There's also a sort for least rated. Keep in mind "Top 50" is represented by their score, not how many ratings they have. Nothing about a project's score is made available until the rating period is over.

I don't think it's a good idea to show least rated at the default sort because there are a lot of projects that are broken or difficult to run that will end up getting stuck at the top of the list. This will push even more people away from getting involved with the jam if they're constantly shown those kinds of projects.

Random sort by default is the most fair to distribute ratings. The other sort options are there to let those who are curious explore. I think this is the best approach to encourage the most ratings per project across all entries to the jam.