I think these goals are desirable and good for the community of LD:

1. We need people to rate more games;
2. We need people to give more help/suggestion/comment to less appealing games too.
3. We would like people to give more insightful opinions/suggestion than “Great, nice_work, great_graphics, etc”
4. [Optional] Discourage behaviors that like giving false rating or just give random rating without playing.

I think the best method to achieve that is to provide more **INCENTIVE** to people;

Current rating system already provide much incentive for people to keep rating other games, but the drawback here is the incentive will fade quickly after receiving more than 40+ rates, you will have much less chance to be in the first page, and that’s when self-promotion blogs become more effective. (Of course, Post-mortem is valuable, we should keep the incentive for people to keep writing that)

It’s hard to design good incentive to drive people to do things, but luckily, we’re all game developers, and that’s what we do daily.

I believe many of you could come up with good ideas for that (with low development cost).

Let me just give my own idea first:

===============================================

(1) The “Top-Page Featuring” hidden-ticket;
Add 6~8 special feature slot at the top page;
and every 15min, for each slot, the featuring ticket will be regenerated and hidden in a random game entry, the guy who first comments that game after that will dig that ticket out, and gain the 15min “special-featuring” chance.

[Optional] add some fun for digging, give hints like “VeryFar/Far/Near/VeryNear”;

This plan might give incentive for people to play random games and give love to those games less appealing.

(2) Add some gamble elements

We all have a sorting-score for sorting in the pages. Use that to boost the incentives.

Even if you didn’t dig out the ticket in (1), you would get some random credit for rating a game;

People could place some credit into the slot machine and might earn a boost of the score, or even a ticket.

(3) Improve the comment quality

(1)&(2) aim to add incentive to drive people to keep playing & rating; but we also need to give incentive for people to improve the comment quality.

An upvote system for comment could do, and the upvote will boost sorting-score.

[Optional] every one could only give X+D+5 upvotes, X is the upvote he received, D is day in judging. This is to prevent vote rigging.