My sincere apologies for the delay, but Judging is now Live!

What is new?

To get score at the end, you need ratings! As we've done for many years, the best way to get ratings is to score coolness points, as that prioritizes you when browsing games.

The coolness score is now a combination of ratings you and your team leave on other games, but new it's also affected by the :heart:'s your feedback receives. So leaving good feedback will score you coolness points.

Please give :heart:'s to any quality feedback you see others leaving

For how effective ratings are vs feedback, you want both. Past a certain point there are diminishing returns for each, so to maximize your coolness score, do both. Exactly how much effect they have is to be determined. I'll be playing with the numbers over the coming days as I get more data to work with.

Also due to the added complexity of the coolness calculation, you wont see its effect immediately when browsing. It can take upwards of 30 minutes before your efforts take effect.

What you should do?

• Visit your Game page (click My Game up top)
  • If necessary, opt-out of any categories your game shouldn't be eligible for (if you made original graphics and audio, you're fine)
  • Set your cover art.
• Start Playing and Rating games. The game views are currently sorted by coolness score.
• Check out the Dare To Play thread for YouTubers and Streamers looking for games to play
• Check out these neat community-built tools for judging (let me know if I miss any)
  • Feedback Friends: An alternative way to browse - http://feedback.ld.intricati.com
  • Randomizer: Get a random LD38 game - https://sse-search.ovh/randomLD38game
  • LDNotify: Get notifications on new comments - http://ldnotify.timtips.com

When does this end?

Wednesday May 17th. I was going to push it back to the Friday of that week, but now that I've checked, it looks like I have some travel coming up that weekend. Just to be safe I want to be sure we end before that.

That's in for me. Go vote!

PS: Please keep the debate about how I'm ruining Ludum Dare over here. I would like to use this thread to answer questions about judging and help people. Thanks!