LD Needs Optional Rating Categories

I was looking at the ratings for my game.

jisLd28Results

 

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not disappointed with these numbers at all, considering how simple my game is. However, I’m surprised by a few of these numbers, especially Humor.

Given I am 776th place in Humor, that makes my game “more humorous” than over half of the entries in Ludum Dare 28 (assuming over 2000+ entries). But my game has no humor in it at all; it was not an intended focus.

So one of my questions is: how did my game rate so high in Humor when it didn’t have any? My other question is: would it be possible in the future for Ludum Dare to have certain categories, like Humor, be optional? Like for example, I want to be able to disable Humor for any game I make that doesn’t have any humor in it. Same with audio, etc.

Tags: categories, ratings

Comments

09. Jan 2014 · 17:17 UTC
First off your rank is within your category of submission (compo or jam). So you are #776 out of #1010, still it puts 25% of the compo entries after you. If you look at the star-value for your humor rating it is actually your lowest score in terms of stars. To some extent this could imply that there are many non-humorous games. Which is probably partially true. However part of it is that people don’t think that the categories are optional when voting, which indeed they are. You can, as I think you should, skip voting for audio if the game has none (alternatively maybe you should vote 1 because many will think they have to give a vote on all categories and some will sloppily give 3s to most things). In that sense, in part, I would agree with you. But I would say that its simply a graphical thing. There could be a N/A button that you can click instead of the stars. Voting system is fine as it is.
09. Jan 2014 · 18:50 UTC
Believe me it gets worse. I once made a game that I thought had decent graphics. After it ended, I was playing a game when I suddenly realized that it had placed better than I did in the “graphics” category. Nothing wrong with that, other than the fact that it was a text adventure!