did not see it. i rate what i think of the game, comments on my game my match my game

I don't want to expose them publicly, since I believe a massage from a mod would notify them of being watched and make 'em stop. Kids are stupid after all, but a more malicious character could use the rate4rate mentality to entice everyone to a downloadable virus or trojan. So I feel like this should be monitored and measures should be taken.

I've seen two guys commenting the same copy and pasted comment on almost every game i rate. Just needed to look at their comment history. One of them said he liked the sounds, but there is 0 music or sounds in my game lol. He has the same comment on almost every submission.

I said this in another thread before, the problem with pretty much any voting system is that it relies on fair ratings and human decency, I don't think I've seen so much concentrated dishonesty in one place before and it puts a damper on the game jam. 

As you said, I've noticed plenty of 1 minute ratings, copy paste spamming every rate thread, comments that make no sense to the game I've just played and people lying about reviewing a game just to try and trick as many people as possible into playing their game.

This is my first game jam and I've quickly learned that I'd rather have 20 people rate and get some good feedback about how I can improve as a developer as oppose to 40 rates that just say 'rated'

I think some of these guys might be rating games super low. One of them accidentally voted on my game page and gave me a 1-star rather then rating on my rating page (or maybe they did too). I'm not saying my game is like a 5-star game but it's most certainly not a 1 star game.

Well actually i can agree what you said but getting people to play your games will be difficult if you dont do the exposure thing, you can also go to other games and then comment and if they want they will see your game or not it depends on them. but if you want your game to actually get noticed from these 1,800 games or more then you have to do the rate for rate(the right way by actually playing the game) otherwise only the people from the most popular one are going to get rated and perhaps the most ratings. 

As much as I’d love as many people playing games we make as possible (and myself to be playing as many as possible) I think it would be interesting if every participant was given a random allocation of X number of games to review in these 2 weeks. That way everyone gets some feedback and that feedback may be more meaningful as each participant has a specific total to go through. 

Meaningful feedback is way more important than ratings. I’d like to hope we all want to improve and make better games in future jams and meaningful feedback does a lot to aid that. 

haha when they rate the comments increase by one but not dowloads, and the game cannot be played in browser!

You're so right! On my first gamejam i was so happy about the positive feedback - "great", "awesome", "nice game"... But now i can't read it anymore. I love to get some criticism, learn from others and get some new ideas. But the rating system will not change. The best way to get some real feedback would be to create a small and active rating/gamecreating community where everyone does their part with heart. 

This post need more up votes, someone needs to control the amount of comments and posts people can make.

Well, I feel like I need to explain myself (for my own sake). I'm currently rating games that people submit to me in a thread. I saw this as a necessary evil beacause before that I hade 3 reviews. T H R E E. I saw this as the only viable way to get rates when not being famous or particullarly lucky. Btw I give people feedback, these are not empty ratings. Also I saw a guy that made about 5 r4r threads at the same time. The same guy also submited his game to 8 different jams. Also the game is Android only so I doubt many people played it, yet he still recieves ratings. Also the "most rated" sort option allows to snowball for the more popular games and leaves other creators with no way to get anyone to play the game. Something needs to get changed. Idk what but something is wrong, I can feel it. Cheers :)

Hey I'm gonna give some perspective from the organisers side here.

So first of all, this jam has an insane amount of participants compared to our other jams. Our other jams were also big, but this jam has about 3(!) times the participant count of the previous jam. The submission count didn't grow as much, but still over doubled compared to the last time.
This means there are a lot of new problems surfacing. For example, the dedicated jam channel on the server has been pure link spam for the first day or two. In the past, we didn't have to do any kind of separation for promotion of games and discussion, while it was definitely required this time. Is that just because of the increased amount of participants? Or maybe the mindset of the participants? No clue, we don't have a way to find out either.
On the Discord server, we are easily able to solve this. We are familiar with the moderation tools and able to customize quite a bit. We have our own bot and if it's really needed, we can make the bot help us with keeping the channels clean and orderly. 

The itch.io community tab is an entirely different beast. I think I can speak for all organisers here when I say that we have almost no experience using them and that's not even talking about the moderation features. Learning to use a new set of moderation tools while everything is already a giant mess (yes I admit, the community tab is currently a disaster) is a bit of pressure and takes time. It's currently summer break for most of the staff members so some have trips planned, volunteering work, or other activities during the day. For me, after working on the jam for a week, energy levels are definitely low and not really being recharged with the heatwave going on. This also has it's effect on how we are moderating the community tab, for example. 

Personally, I don't have a problem with rate 4 rate being a thing. I think it's good to encourage people to play eachothers games and give feedback. I do agree with the concerns you bring up regarding people just rating 1 star without even downloading/launching the game, just to comment "good game rate mine too thanks".

(This next bit is what I believe to be true, but if Leafo is reading this he can maybe give a little better explanation as he knows how it works behind the scenes..)
The itch rating system has a weighted rating, which means that the ratings of people that just spam 1 star on everyone will be counted less than the rating of a person that gives honest ratings to everyone. This should at least take care of part of this problem.

There is still the problem of people just commenting on games saying "nice game". There is no way for us to block this kind of behaviour. There are too many ratings and comments coming in on a daily basis to moderate all of them. There is also no way for us to know when the comment is a genuine one. Maybe the person commenting really thought it was the best game they ever played and they don't have any criticism, maybe it's just a rate farming spammer. Of course we can check the history of the user, but that's another action we would have to take per rating, consuming more of our already limited time...

Then there is the rating queue idea. GMTK jam had a rating queue where you first had to play x amount of games from your queue, before you were able to rate anyone. This is something we also wanted to do for our jam, but I think something went wrong in the backend of itch (it's not a released feature yet, we had contact with itch to see if they could set it up for us and it should've been set up correctly). We don't want to keep people locked to their queue completely, because I know that I want to rate the games from my friends freely. If I would have to find them by pure luck... That would be a disaster! It would of course help with people like Dani getting insane amounts of ratings, just because they are a content creator. I have considered talking to him to see if he would be ok with not being able to win because it's not fair with his community behind him, but at the same time it's not fair to do that either! If he does win in all categories (or any category), we'll see how we can handle it. Especially because there are no prizes on the line, it's a lot easier to just also mention the 2nd place games too.

I am definitely going to bring up some points about the community tab (and post-jam community in general) in the post-jam organisers reflection chat, so we can hopefully make the experience a better one next time. I will also discuss if we should block the rate 4 rate threads completely and start cracking down on them more during this jam, or if we see another solution.

I think I have talked about the most important issues brought up in here, let me know if I missed any.

TL;DR: We don't know how itch community works, time is valuable and limited, we are going to reflect on the current state of the rating period and hopefully improve for next time.

i always play games before rating them but mostly leave "generic comment" since i'm not smart at judging games 

I just posted a new topic where I ask if people can help me reach 20 ratings (I needed 3 more). 

Someone answered it and wrote in the comments that it is a "cool time killer". My game is a puzzle stealth game. I have no idea how it could be a "time killer" and chances are that he didn't even play the game, and didn't even read what the game is about. I was really afraid to make that post and I actually asked there for more detailed comments in order to avoid that it would become like that but people just don't read the thread. 

It is just so disheartening.

So I have been working on what I am from now on calling the "comment uniqueness index rater" (will be referred as CUIR in this post) all day.

Turns out interacting with a website is actually pretty easy! Almost as if people have been doing this for decades and created special tools, libraries and packages... *big hmmm*

I  am now able to scrape the jam page for all the usernames, the game names and the urls. Following the links to the game page and collecting all comments and running them thru my CUI calculator should be a breeze now and will be done by tomorrow.

The whole functionality will be as follows:

1. After entering the Jam url the program automatically retrieves the game name their author and the link
2. This data is then saved in a database with an additional slot for the list of comments. In this database the author is the primary key attribute
3. We then go thru each link and retrieve the comments/ratings. Then each comment is saved into the comment list of the respective author.
4. If the webpage hasn't kicked us by this point for creating too much traffic, we can go offline and analyze the data we loaded.
5. Depending on how fast the results should come in and how cheat resistant the CUIR is supposed to be, we can enable or disable the comment spellcheck. (I would personally give it a pass without and a second pass with spellcheck)
6. For each authors comments we calculate the Jaccard Index and calculate the arithmetic mean to get the average comment similarity. This value will be then known as the CUI, with 0 for completely unique comments and 1 for only one copy pasted comment.
7. The results are then saved into the database, where we can filter out the cheaters

Features:

• Detect copy paste comments
• Swapping sentences or parts of sentences around won't change the result
• spellcheck will disable the possibility to evade detection thru misspelling

Flaws:

• The spellcheck will shit itself with foreign languages. In theory there shouldn't be too many non english users, since only few would actually understand them. The foreign script by itself won't cause any issue though, since the must be UTF8 encoded to be properly displayed on the website anyway.
• Few comments may result in a high CUI. This means there must be at least more than one comment per person analyzed. These mutes can be filtered out and put into a separate list for different use.
• I don't know how it will handle images and emoticons as well as special formatting. This might crash the system and therefore this will require some testing.
• One can evade detection, by swapping words for their synonyms, since the Jaccard index only cares for the syntactic value of a word not the actual meaning. This isn't an issue actually, since we only want to find blatant copy-pasters. Finding synonyms for a single protocomment would actually require more work than writing a completely new one (an this is what we want).

When everything is done and in a presentable (and hopefully working) condition I will release the sourcecode on my github for you to scrutineer. If we're lucky the program will do what it's supposed to do by the weekend.

Saw this topic and instantly connected with it! When I go and check out a game, I read the comments first and most of them just say that a game is great! But when you do play it, it doesn't feel like so. I believe it does hurt the creator in a way that they can't grow better as a developer.