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MMORPG.com's Rating system
Erillion
Member EpicPosts: 10,297
Hi there,
does anyone know if the rating system of MMORPG.com works with weighting factors ? Lately I wonder about some of the ratings, which seems to me to be a minority pushing game ratings either up or down with ratings of all 10s or all 1s. Now I dont think a game is THAT good to justify all 10s or that bad to earn all 1s. So any total rating of above 9.0 or below 2.0 is either a fanboy or a flamer rating, which does not really help in finding out if a game is good or not. Usually such extreme values are used, but with a factor to reduce its effectivness on the overall rating ...
Does this site use such factors ? And if not ... would it be a good idea in your opinion to intruduce them to make the ratings more objective ?
Usually the "our rating" from the site admins can be used as a good way to measure how objective current game ratings are. However , recently I have found such ratings to be absent .. most notably in the list leader WoW. I also get the impression that this "Our rating" does not change ... even if MMORPGS are by definition long running, often changing games .... so a yearly reevaluation of these ratings may be a good idea IMHO.
What do YOU think ?
Have fun
Erillion
Comments
I think people pay far too much attention to the ratings.
I would welcome the discussion of a more advanced algorythm...but just cutting out many 1 and 10 votes will just lead to people voting 9 and 2's.
We do have some other ideas for game ratings. One of these is to give members the option to select their "top 3 favorite games" - this data could then be used as part of the score for games. Because this is a "postitive only" system it really prevents bashing of games.
I am no math wizard - but if someone out there has a really impressive formula for pulling out a more "true" score I would like to see it
Also note that our ratings do have a "curve" in them. What this does is basically "zoom" into the scores and in effect increases all scores (those at the bottom move a little up and those at the top move a lot up). This just makes the ratings spread out more - and it does help compensate for some abuse.
- MMORPG.COM Staff -
The dead know only one thing: it is better to be alive.
This is why we have the "rank of 5 or greater" rule to post hype or ratings. This does not 100% prevent duplicate accounts - but drastically reduces it. Few people have the patience to create all the accounts and wait for them to rank up...most punks who would do this need more instant gratification
Unfortunately, do to the anonymous nature of the Internet - there is just little you can do to stop people from creating multiple accounts. Dial-up users get a new IP every time they connect and many ISPs use proxy servers which make thousands of people appear as the same IP.
- MMORPG.COM Staff -
The dead know only one thing: it is better to be alive.
>>>>
The trick is to NEVER tell us what those cutoff points are. Also, throw out all votes where all eight scores are the same (like someone voting all 2's, for example). That's just a lazy fanboy/flamer.
>>>>
Excellent summary.
You admins could throw out any votes where all scores are the same ... you KNOW they are bogus votes.
You should have a cut off treshold (dont tell us !) where you dont use ratings because they have no value ... those typical 9.9 or 1.1 votes have no informational value ... those are just fanboy or flamer ratings.
Forget my suggestion about weighting factors ... these methods above are clean, easy to implement ways to get more useful ratings.
And IMHO take a look at your "official" ratings every year or so and readjust them .... games may change a lot with updates, patches and expansions.
Have fun
Erillion
Good idea, rentantilus--a select board of raters/reviewers. They could also have their own pages of reviews. When you identify a reviewer who shares your tastes and interests, you could look through his/her reviews to identify games you want to try, kind of like having a favorite movie reviewer.
I'm really tired of spending a lot of time downloading top-rated games only to have them turn out to be crap, and I REALLY don't want to waste my money on garbage. That's why I joined MMORPG.com in the first place.
I wasn't allowed to write a review for months, and I thought that meant only long-time members were able to review games, which I thought was a good idea, until I found out it just took some posts in the regular forums to qualify to write a review, and some people are joining and reviewing the same day. People shouldn't be allowed to review until after being a member of MMORPG.com for at least a month--that would keep a lot of the garbage and spam ratings out.
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