We don’t disclose the details of our sorting and recommendation algorithms. We recommend focusing on naturally building your audience and encouraging them to leave ratings as they see fit. Attempting to “game” any of the systems through artificial rating scores, or comments, will result in your page being unlisted. We take this very seriously.
To answer your question about if a 4 star rating will “hurt” a game. An individual rating exists relative to the ratings all other games receive. There is nothing in our code base that will penalize a project if it receives a rating less than 5 stars. The rating system is designed to look at scores in aggregate, with a higher confidence level based on the total number of ratings received. No individual score will cause any significant impact to a game. My advice is to not get caught up in individual ratings, and instead focus on building a good product.