Second rating system: rate the difficulty

Yeah, it does seem to be that games are sometimes rated on difficulty rather than how well put-together they are.

We have everything from grade school students through medical students to 50-somethings to retirees. What is challenging for one may not be for another.

I try to take this into account. When I see a game made by a 6-th grader, I try not to give it a lower rating just because it is simple.

Budt ultimately, I'm trying to take 2 factors (quality and difficulty) into account with one rating, and that is not easy (especially since "quality" itself consists of many factors).

I think your idea has merit, so I'll rate it at 5 stars for quality.

I'll also rate it as moderately to very difficult (for David).

Maybe the difficulty could be spectral: ranging from Red (difficult) through orange, yellow, green and blue (easy).

So five stars and a red dot is a rating for a game that someone like BoboLo would like. Five stars and a blue dot might appeal to some of the youngsters.

But whatever form it takes, it does sound like a good idea.

My idea was a second set of five stars: "very easy" to "very hard" which you rate after you have played the game. Then the difficuly rating would develope by itself.

This would also result in a survey on how knowledge is spread.

Ratings will always be subjective. If a person is for example a geographile, even the hard games can be easy for him.

Yeah, the problem is that not enough people make an effort to rate a game.

You could counter both problems by letting people mandatory vote after finishing a game for the first time.
- So you could base the rating on what you already knew and how difficult it was to solve the game. -> you could make this automatic based on your percentage of a first try. or even a second/third play.
- and you get a rating.

Yes, and those tries after the first can even indicate what the difficulty is of "maxing" the game. The disadvantages are of course:
- F5
- I don't know how much load this will put upon the site

Anyways some of the other things I would like is:
- colored dots for clear distinction between answers.
e.g. a game about people: if you want to make it more difficult with person and: age, function etc...
- More than 5 quick column tabs

Would like to hear what anybody else thinks about it or what he has in mind.

I don't think an automatic rating system will work. And mandatory rating will just turn folks off.

Warts and all, voluntary is the only way to go. And it does have a lot of warts. For example, there are games out there with a single one-star rating, which have someone who didn't rate the game nevertheless leaving a message like "Great Game". Games with thousands of plays may have a handful of ratings.

Unfortunately, there's not much that can be done about this. Optional rating is the only thing that will work, but it's always going to be problematical.