It may feel like more five stars may mean you give nobody five stars, but I think that's the case mostly if there were two people voting and one ultimate outcome (i.e. the prisoner's dilemma).
If you only give five people votes, and only give out one of each rating (1 star to 5 stars), then you only are "using" 16 stars of your possible 70 stars (5 stars max per 14 entries). Which might mean you get "more" stars than you give out, but doesn't encourage a fun voting environment. More importantly, it actually lessens your impact compared to others.
If there's five I really like, and I give them each five stars, I've already given submissions I like 25 stars worth of points. Then I could fairly rate the others, and that can easily get someone up to giving out 30-40 stars worth of votes. Making my voting power double or almost triple yours!
Given the above, I think we shouldn't really worry about trying to "game" this and just give all other contestant a rating we think fair, 1-5 stars. Full participation means we all have the most fair rating we get from the crowd too, after all! :D
Viewing post in How Does Voting Work?
Ahhh, that makes more sense; yes!
Sorry, I'm not very mathematically minded and I think my method would work better for a system where you can only vote for or against something - and not rank each item from 1 to 5. Honestly, I'm not sure Itch is really set-up for voting like this in smaller jams and I don't usually do ranked jams, so I'm in total confusion about this whole thing anyway...
I'll vote as you suggest then, giving more stars to projects I like - which sounds more fun too. Thanks for clearing things up!
Happy to help! I don't mean to try and tell you how to vote, it's just that my brain also went down this path since voting is locked to other participants. So I just wanted to share the same thought process I had gone through and come to a conclusion with. 😁
Even personally liking statistics (especially to do with games like TTRPGs), it took me a bit of time to try and parse this style of voting and the impact of individual actions. 😅
I was worried about it being a single vote too! I ended up taking the jump to just vote since there were stars rather than a single "I like this best", so I was very hopeful. 😂
I think ultimately voting amongst contestants is to try and encourage us to encourage each other, rather than to determine who is "best" by popular vote. Which is a good way in hindsight, even though I was confused at first!
I fully agree with this. Don’t game it. Read and treat the voting like giving critiques. That’s how we all get better with future projects. And honestly, if after reading everything and something stands out more, I don’t have any issue with going back and updating a vote to account for the field.
I think the real thing for me is getting feedback; that’s my reward. I’d love to get “stuff”, but knowing how to improve my writing, design, graphic design, setting, etc is way more valuable, imho.