Here is a follow-up announcement for my own version of the good old Ludum Dare Rescue Rangers.

Getting over 20 comments has been tough this time round, due to the need to have the game developers "like" your comments to get ranking (smart balance) score. The basic idea is good: have people try and write meaningful comments, instead of spending 30 seconds on a game and putting in some ratings. As it is now, however, the quality of your comments is the least of your worries.

The developers of the game have to like your comments. This is not going to work if the developers are out on vacation because they finished the rating process already. Since we're near the end of the rating period, a lot of developers are not checking their comments every day! Only about 12% of the developers show "like" activity in the last 48 hours.

Please note: Occasionally, others will also like your comments. However, there is a quirk in the smart balance calculation that will penalize the game that is rated when there are third party likes. A like on a comment is counted much like a comment, which means the game's score will go down dramatically if you like a bunch of its comments. Check the Github issue here. So please don't do it!

So, how do we find those games with active developers? The answer is, use my new search engine! You get a list of only the "active" games (games that show "like" activity in the past 48 hours), sorted by smart balance. Additionally you can also search by platform or keyword.

The search engine scrapes scores and comments every hour. However, since scraping comments takes 40 minutes, it scrapes only 1/4 of the comments at a time, so refresh time for comments is 4 hours.

If you do not get new comments, but want your game to appear in this list, just un-like, then re-like an old comment. Your game should appear in the "active games" list within 4 hours.

The search engine: http://tmtg.nl/ld46/