Rating system
I think the rating system in Ludum Dare is not good (and in many other websites as well). I don’t know a better solution, but I think it is worthy thinking about this problem.
Let’s say there are 1000 submissions and 1000 reviewers. If each submission receives a lot of reviews, then the average of the reviews will give a good estimation of the quality of the submissions.
However, if each reviewer only reviews a few submissions, each submission will only get a few reviews, which means that the average will yield a very poor and “noisy” estimation that doesn’t represent the opinion of the community as a whole.
This means that simply asking people to rate and averaging the rates is not a good idea in this case.
I suggest that we invite our mathematician friends to come up with a smarter and more elegant solution for this. Wouldn’t that be awesome?
Problems:
If a game gets advertised through the right channels, it gains additional hits that will likely never reach other games in the competition. A well advertised game will be played more often, causing it to become viral. It’s a virtuous circle, but it plays against us in this case. One game will have many reviews, the rest will have little to none.
Votes go from 1 star upto 5 stars, and there are an average of about 20 ratings per game, so there are only about 80 graduations between 1.00 and 5.00. So when 1000 contestants are put into those 80 boxes, there are going to be over 10 people in each box. Rankings have error upto 10 places, due to this quantization.