LudumData

First and Last Ludum Dare

[raw] LD20LD #20 - It's Dangerous to go Alone! Take This! 24. May 2011 路 03:24 UTC · 25 days after compo start by Fizzik · 2

I am completely disillusioned with Ludum Dare. I first heard of this competition from a friend telling me to try it out saying how amazing it was. He convinced me to go ahead and enter. Then I burn an entire weekend only to find that in 21 days my entry recieves 22 ratings from 288 submitters (7.639%). Of those ratings, many are blatantly done without reviewing the actual submission. Some were obvious downvoters, others gave undeserved 5’s all around the board, while others just gave random scores, or NO score for categories I KNOW聽 I had, showing me they didn’t even bother playing the game or looking at my community page.

Then I see other submissions with over 100 ratings making me assume there is some kind of advertising/word of mouth meta-game in play which is always a disheartening thing to see in any competition. While I do agree the games that won top 20 deserve those 20 slots, the games that fell elsewhere were completely lost into the void, with no quality control on their placement. I don’t know how you can improve a rating system that depends on a biased party to make the votes, but as a first time participator, frankly it’s just a joke.

Essentially I am a pretty upset that for a competition that has been running as long as it has; so many submissions have fallen through the cracks, and that I unwittingly set myself up for disappointment by entering.

TL;DR – The rating system brings no incentive to participate again :(

Comments

24. May 2011 路 03:47 UTC
It’s best to take the whole voting phase with a grain of salt. If I didn’t I would have been gone ages ago. Just be happy with the game you made and the time you spent making it and let the haters get to you!
24. May 2011 路 03:58 UTC
Yeah, the voting system is a bit flawed, and some childish people really can make things worse… :/

By the way, 22 out of 288 is 7.6%, not 0.07% 馃槈
Orangy Tang
24. May 2011 路 07:06 UTC
Yeah, I’m feeling the same way right now. Only 18 people actually gave my game a score, and that includes one person who left 111111 and one who left everything as n/a except for a ‘2’ for graphics.
24. May 2011 路 07:23 UTC
As far as voters go, I got 14 — and I reached 74th place…
24. May 2011 路 07:34 UTC
I agree with you. As the Guide page says, “our goal with Ludum Dare is to encourage people to sit down and make something”.

Sure, it’s great to see your game popular. But this is not the point of the competition.
samel
24. May 2011 路 07:37 UTC
I think the question is, why there must be a winner? Why not just comments other games without points? IMMO there’s no need to elect a winner, we do this for fun.
britzl
24. May 2011 路 09:43 UTC
I must say that I am a bit surprised when I read that people get upset that their game has received so few ratings. Sure, those obviously bogus ratings of straight 1’s is silly, but for the rest I’m not surprised. As someone pointed out, there were more than 300 entries. The absolute minimum to give a game a fair review is say 10 minutes (and add download and installation time for non-webbased games). 10 minutes per game is a full 50 hours of testing for 300 games! How many people could you honestly expect to spend two full days of their life reviewing games? Did you review all of the entries yourself Fizzik?
thristhart
24. May 2011 路 17:11 UTC
If the entire system is flawed, please feel free to suggest a new one! We as a community are quite open to change. if change is needed.
24. May 2011 路 21:49 UTC
Want lots of votes? Use Flash and put it on Newgrounds and Kongregate for thousands of plays and critiques. My first Ludum Dare I was also terribly disappointed by the deafening silence – now I realize that this is the norm and the only reason to join the compo is for your own feelings of accomplishment, not validation by others. I got FAR less plays then you did! =D
sfernald
25. May 2011 路 15:02 UTC
Having done this for a while, I learned this trick ages ago. I always post my game on kongregate. I got about 14 ratings on here but over a 1000 people played my game on Kongregate in the same amount of time. I get a lot more feedback there too.
25. May 2011 路 04:23 UTC
It鈥檚 a shame that the LD didn鈥檛 live up to your expectations. Keep in mind, post-rating bitterness might have tinged your vision here.
25. May 2011 路 10:50 UTC
1. Your game crashe dfor many people, don’t be mad at people not playing it if it does that.

2. As Breakdance said, flash will gather you some more publicity.

3. Your votes are coherent, nad you got one row of 1s, it’s not bad, probably from a pissed voter that your game crashed on.

4. I feel you’re just being childish, and you couldn’t live up to your expectations of the results.
25. May 2011 路 14:51 UTC
Well… this is exactly like the real world behaves actually. The game market is very close to this… and if you have games available to people to evaluate there will be some unfair evaluations. I often get ratings on my games that clearly want only to push my score down… but then again… what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger :)