I'm gonna make this quick, but this is something I've given a lot of thought to over the past month. This doesn't reflect how I feel about how I did; I think I earned my rankings, considering the amount of work I put into my game.

I feel like many people fall victim to receiving garbage votes, or people who mull through the list of games and give completely random ratings to other games just to increase their standings on the Smart filter without having even played the games or giving them feedback. There was a point during the voting process where I had gotten maybe 5 or 6 ratings during a period of time and no feedback at all. As a developer, this is really demoralizing. How am I supposed to know what to do better next time? Why even participate if I have no clue how a large piece of my audience feels about my game?

I believe this shouldn't be allowed. While karma for feedback given seems to have more weight than sheer ratings themselves (I don't actually know this for sure, so if I'm wrong then feel free to correct me), it's still a lot easier to leave garbage votes on a game than to actually take the time to critique it and give it written feedback.

I think this can be prevented in a couple ways. One way could be to weight each vote left on a game. Ratings given by those who leave high-karma feedback would have more weight than votes cast by people who didn't write anything. There could be a way to not even count votes if the LD website recognizes the voter didn't even click on a download/play link. Another solution could be to require those who vote on games to leave feedback. Even if they just write some gibberish to get their vote to count, votes of this nature could easily be reported and taken down.

Any other thoughts, suggestions, or opinions?