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Clearing a game from the jam rating queue should not require a global report

A topic by Deerbell created Jul 14, 2022 Views: 248
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(3 edits) (+1)

We are participating in a game jam where rating entries is set to the random mode, where you are given a queue of 5 games to rank before being given more. This is a nice system, and the capability to shuffle games and set the desired platform is great (although it would be even better if you could select multiple platforms)

The problem is when a game can't be rated, but is not really "broken". In our case, a game in the queue uses the Godot runner and refuses to launch on a fairly new laptop with discrete graphics. This isn't really the dev's fault, and there are commenters that have had luck starting the game. Reporting the game as "broken" would be inaccurate, but more notably appears to send a report to Itch moderators, which is hugely overkill. 

There are also a few games with other significant barriers to entry (requiring an emulator, being exported as an installer instead of a single executable, apparently triggering an AV false-positive). Users may feel unwilling to deal with these issues and may not want to rate those games,  but that doesn't really merit reporting the entire page to Itch. In most cases this will probably just lead to people rating the game 1-star and moving to the next game instead of filling out a big scary report form with their email address.

It seems much fairer for devs if jam rating-related reports were a little lower stakes, going directly to the jam owner with an optional checkbox to send a copy to Itch moderators in the event a game is actually completely broken, spam/malware, etc. If there is a concern users might abuse this functionality, a jam owner could approve or deny based on the information in the report, there could be a cap, etc.