My thoughts on the rating process + small Python script
Rating entries is a damn hard job. I know many of you think very little about rating or even openly hate it, but IMHO this seems to also be an important part of LD. Especially commenting on people’s entries, giving some feedback to the community, some constructive criticism. And yet, I can still see many users with 0% coolness. There are 427 (71.29%) people with coolness under average of 3.523% and 190 of them didn’t rate any games… Why is that? I know everybody has a life and so on, but come on! You CAN rate at least 6 games or so! I mean, I’m not expecting everyone to leave their lives and rate games, but honestly – if someone has found the time to participate in LD, he or she should also participate in the voting (or at least commenting) process, even if just a little.
I spent on this more than a few days already, just trying to rate as many games as I can, because for a few days I’m not going to rate anything, as I’m gonna be without internet access (sounds horrible, I know).
A few days ago I was pretty bored and wrote a small program in Python to analyze stuff and help me pick games to rate faster, as I find the webpage with entries a little lacking. And because I like numbers and plots, too. Since I noticed that many of LD participants still have coolness around zero, I figured I could share this thing – maybe it will mobilize some of them to give some feedback. Or will be useful in any other way.
So, feature-wise, the script parses LD webpage with your ratings and generates a html file looking like this:
Here are the links:
- Windows binary package (py2exe) + source (tested on Win7 64bit) (py2exe site says it probably needs this)
- Python source only (clean Python 2.7.2, only native Python library dependencies)
Usage:
- Login onto the Ludum Dare site, and go to the voting page with ALL entries (not the one with screenshots, the one with all your ratings):
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?more=1&q= - Save source code of this webpage to file data.htm and save it in the same direcory as analyze script/ binary
- Run the script (see README.TXT for more info anyway)
- Analyzer data is saved to log.html in current directory. Open it with Firefox or something similar 😉
- To refresh data stored in log.html, you need to repeat this process