I have a mac but lots of windows-only games in my queue, preventing me from rating anything. There should be a filter just like there is for the randomizer.
It does a little, like keeping the tab open, it's just that it doesn't feel as good to play other people's game on the discord or browsing randomly as I'm waiting to finish emptying my queue first.
I understand the need for a queue, and am not contesting that, just wanted to give feedback that it's like a barrier to playing the other games
I fully intend to rate as many games as I can but right now I can only rate games that show up in my queue. and every time I rate one then return back to my queue the queue has refreshed and now has all new games to look at. Many games I have already found and liked and wanted to rate I have been unable to because they are not in my queue. it is frustrating and not sure if this is intended or a bug. It does make me feel bad because I cannot rate the games, just comment on them.
The queue may shift if new games are added into the jam. I know that Mark is still processing some late submissions, but as long as you’ve opened the page to rate a game from your queue you will be able to rate it, even if it gets pushed off your queue.
Many games I have already found and liked and wanted to rate I have been unable to because they are not in my queue.
This is the point of the queue, to prevent people from only rating “good stuff”, or using their friend groups to boost their games. By forcing people to rate entries randomly at first we can get a much more fair distribution of ratings by the end of the jam. I feel that 25 ratings is a very reasonable number of minimum ratings for anyone to complete during the rating week.
Thanks for understanding
You can see how many submissions you’ve rated by going to the submissions page: https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2020/entries There’s a filter for the things you’ve rated
Would be nice if there was a counter of some sort to show how many of the 25 games we have cleared.
It does feel a bit too much, I get that this system was introduced to make it fair for people who don't have many friends still get their games rated, and to prevent those with many friends getting biased ratings on their games. However I do feel 25 games is a bit much to play and download, as a public user. That takes up about 2-3 hours of my time (I think it's also because I like to leave comments on the games I rate). I think 5-15 games would be a more reasonable number. EDIT: It's been 2 hours since I started rating, and I've only rated 8 games, I really don't like this feeling of spending so much time just to be able to rate my friend's game or other people's games I want to rate freely.
I read some of the earlier comments and saw that a filter has been introduced to filter out games that need to be downloaded (for people who are unwilling to download games to rate them), but then this could be potentially unfair and skew more ratings to be given on browser games rather than downloadable games.
Just my two cents. :)
I have some general feedback. At first glance the system looks fair and unique, but it has a major positive feedback loop flaw (somebody here is watching Mark Brown!): once games are being highly rated, they have a higher chance to be rated again and again - because the raters can choose from a list of 5 games and probably just choose the most popular ones on the list (that's what I did). On the other hand, this snowball effect is important to find the needle in the haystack as the rating progresses.
I think it would make MUCH more sense to hide the rating information and only publish it in parts, maybe something like that:
Another thing to consider: if you ask people to rate 25 random games first, you might as well block them from rating any arbitrary games ever (not even after 25 ratings). That might incentivize people to randomly rate games in order to get to the 26th rating (there's no way to enforce the raters to actually play!). I wonder how many of the raters just rate everything but one game with 1 star.
On a personal note: we made what I think is an amazing game, and we get great feedback from our friends and colleagues - but we get so little feedback from jammers and raters and it's really a pity for us. We learned a lot and had a hell lot of fun, that's for sure - I just wish the rating distribution would make more game makers notice our game and give us the honest feedback we need so much.
I think this is great feedback. I think the issue of people always choosing the best game is unavoidable though, since even if the counts aren’t there, the viewer could go and look at the pages and select the best looking ones. There’s always going to be some bias since we let people rate from a queue size of 5. I’ll think about updating the queue page though for future jams.
I wonder how many of the raters just rate everything but one game with 1 star.
There’s no way I can think of to truly block people cheating or trying to work around the system, but at least something like this can make it become more obvious. At the end we can look over the results to identify raters to disqualify.
It’s the same idea for both issues, we can’t 100% remove these types of issues but we can have systems in place to try to mitigate them and get closer to something that is fair.
Just finished my queue and I have to say: It was a pretty painful experience.
25 is just way too many games to reasonably expect people to go through.
It's honestly pretty sad, because you can't give the individual entries the time they deserve.
I actually think the queue is a good idea, it just shouldn't be quite as long - maybe 5.
Feels to long. I'm ignoring the suggested games when I download one because I depend on the queue to be able to rate. It discourages exploring any other way because you only get limited participation. I avoid the main page because I've seen cool thumbnails but I don't want to click on them until I get the ability to actually rate those games. If I play a game any other way it's extra steps to ake sure it gets rated, and the rating isn't even fresh anymore.
There’s also a direct link to your queue if you go the jam’s submissions page: https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2020/entries
I'm getting the "public viewers must rate via the queue" message despite the fact that I submitted a game. My partner made the itch page for our game and set me as a co-creator, do I need to do something else to my account?
Ah, I see the comment above. I'd like to lobby for this to be changed for next time. It doesn't feel great that we're equal partners but my account ended up with second-class-citizen voting status. Maybe cap it at like 4 voting-rights contributors if you're worried about voting power disparity?