Is there a minimum Number of Ratings needed for you game to be qualified for the prizes. Because in other game jams you see a lot of games in top spots with <5 ratings which doesn't really say much about the game. If these 5 ratings are all from friends of the programmer than he will have full points.
Ludum dare has a minimum of 20 votes to qualify.
We would really like to add this constraint but unfortunately itch.io doesn't directly allow us to specify this. We are thinking of just saying "games with less than X ratings won't be considered", but we are still thinking of what to do. We will update the status of this here and on our Discord server. I'll also probably add that to the submission text just to remind people.
not sure how the system works with putting games on top. what I remember from previous game jams is I just played the first game, top left. Knowing that after rating a game and going back to the page there would be another game listed first. I can imagine a lot of people would rate like that, only look at the first 20-30 games on the list. But now that I think about it, if this would be setup as most played game first than it would be a bit unfair, especially with +1000 games.
The voting will never be fully fair because only a fraction of players will play your game. You can get lucky and have people play your game who like it and you get good ratings or you get players who don't like your game (or the game is too hard for them) and you get bad ratings.
Next question is, how fair are the ratings from others. Some could give low ratings to other games to boost their game. But I hope that the ratings will be looked through if there are some weird ratings or maybe cheaters, because this time you are able to win a price.
The problem with itch.io is that we have absolutely no control over rating so we can't do stuff like that. Also games are shown in random order every time you refresh the page.
We expect people to be fair when rating games, and in other jams we hosted we didn't really have problems with this (apart from games with very little ratings, but that should be solved now, kind of).
the way I used to rate in another Gamejam (as in my first jam some months ago).
topic: music
no music :2/5
music (as in a sound): 3/5
something that sound a bit decent: 4/5
I will remember your music the day after/remember your game when I hear the music (in a good way): 5/5
for me you will quit fast hit the 4/5. If I have the feeling you did your best, and did your best to make something fitting the theme/situation you deserve a 4/5. Most people here are not professionals, and do this for fun-in their spare time. So if I have the feeling you enjoyed making this and put some time in it you deserve a nice rating.
*edit, grammar mistake*
