Congratulations to everyone! It was an incredible adventure. By the way, how does the rating system work? My game took 804 place, I'm surprised :O
This is what is confusing to me. It seems that 'winning' does not really mean anything (at least to my understanding). As you have rightly observed, there are games in top 50 with less than 20 ratings. By the rules, they haven't 'won' but they were given a ranking. So technically, a game with even 10 ratings of an average of 3.2 would outperform a game with 100 ratings with an average of 3.1 and get a better overall ranking :(
yup, this was my experience as well, i was fifth most rated in the jam with 201 ratings, and pretty consistantly in the top 10 for popularity, but ranked 206th in the overall.
I know that is a good result really, and hey, this was my first jam and my first attempt at making a game, but it still feels a little.. meh..
Rating system is unfortunately bad.
It does not account for a number of deviations, such as people rating without even downloading, does not have weights at all as the overall rate of a game with 300 rates is more reliable than a game with 20 rates, obviously this is not easy to solve, but again, the results do not make much sense to me.
It is evident that games with high rate count got bombed with blind ratings, and I am sure this is the case with our entry as well.
There were a number of cases were our rate count increased while the download count stayed the same, this of course does not necessarily confirm what I imply, but there were more than a few cases were this happened.
This may sound a bit arrogant, but I firmly believe there is not in a million chance that at least half of the 2 and 1 star ratings our game received are not just blind rates if not most of them.
Completely agree with you.
But you should also understand that it is almost impossible to control the process of evaluating games. Even if we made it so that the opportunity to evaluate a game appeared only after downloading it, this would not guarantee objective assessments, since a person can download the game but not play it.
I am also dissatisfied with the results, and it is not only about our game. I believe that games like "Diapers, Please" and "Technical Movers" deserve higher places. In my opinion, we deserved to at least get into the top 600.
Nevertheless, I liked our game, we received a lot of useful feedback and are going to continue working on improving it.