I don't get it...

I don’t want to sound whiny, but every time I submit a newer game, it gets shot down even faster than the last.

Are the “improvements” I made really making the games worse?
Shoot+ Vector Storm (2.70 avg)
Vector Storm 2 (2.56 avg)
Lumina (avg worse than Click The Panda) – I noticed how many people simply dislike the control after showing it around in real life, so I guess it’s deserved in a way, but…Click the Panda?

Dunno, your first vector storm actually inspired the idea how to solve the super ugliness of my own graphics… but aside from that for some reason your games are losing their simple beautiness(how the sea do you spell that) the first game had…

Yeah I know Cervello. I as disapointed in my game’s ratings as well. I was like “but look at the games that scored higher than me!”, but than I realised how random the scoring happens. You have to realise what kind of crowd you are reaching when you upload something for the contest.
Most likely, 80% of them is randomly playing new games. Their attention span is 10 seconds, fail to meet their expectations in those 10 seconds and you will get 1 star for your game. Most of the people that will play your game before it gets on the front page will be younger than 14 (guesstimation).
I’m thinking about rereleasing my game tonight see how it does with some modifications but I’m not counting on great ratings. If you want a fair judgment of how good your game is, you need to find a website that has the type of crowd you designed the game for.

Hmm, you know I think I may have somehow missed Lumina but will look for you. I may have forgotten to rate Vector Storm 2 because it was so similar to Shoot+Vector Storm. That may be a common reason that similar second entries (with the notable exception of Save Puggalon) tend to have lower ratings. I think having the same graphic on the list makes it more likely people won’t play the second entry. If you have chat friends you may want to ask them all to check out all 3 and see which is best—that’s a good way to get some people to play your game who might be predisposed to give out ratings over 3 stars, and sometimes personal feedback will give you more of the highs (what’s fun about the games) and less of the negatives, which can actually be useful as well as boosting ratings. Lots of games are getting missed at the moment.

I think the same thing as Salvator whenever I look at my games rankings. I believe this is beacuse many people who are in the top are getting their friends to rate their game a 5 while rating everyone else a one.

I know it would be really nice if the contest appeared on the front page starting tomorrow. Than the games would be rated fairly for sure, because then the general public would get to see it…

How exactly do you encourage people to rate sensibly? It’s not an easy problem.

just enter the following code into your game description “Vote fairly or die!”

ha! I didn’t say sensible that would be too much too ask. If you can;t even get people to vote sensible in the real world how would you do it online. But I would prefer it if the general kongregate public would vote for all the games. That would be fair to the extent of this website.

Yeah seriously, the hit-and-run downvotes from other entrants (or friends and family members thereof) are ridiculous. My game is rated about 2.0 after 22 votes, even though only 12 people even bothered to kill more than 1 enemy. And I don’t have even one comment yet. I’m tempted to remove and reupload in the normal section just to test my hypothesis that games entered in the contest attract downvoter scum.

I’ve noticed a similar discrepancy with ratings. G Virus is a good game, Pink Jean Luc…I don’t know. It’s got a terrible control scheme. Spike on a Spring and Yelo Bird just suck while Etch N’ Shoot has problems (why do enemies move faster than my bullets?)

As for Lumina, it’s a decent game, but the controls are terrible. I want to be able to hold down the space bar to continuously fire (see: every other shooter submitted) and use a different control to do a charge fire.

Also: there’s a problem with space bar + up + left on most computers, which is why my control scheme uses X and Z.

It’s not downvoter scum that rates yours and mine game low, it’s the people I described earlier “80% of them is randomly playing new games. Their attention span is 10 seconds”. The problem is that most people who see yours and mine game are the people who constantly play the newest games that came out. Every game has to go trough this fase. But the process is flawed since the general public votes different from the public that randomly plays new games.

There isn’t an easy solution though, because you can’t put new games on the front of the website since that would mean other games, usually better games, have less space. Whatever appears on the front page is the result of supply and demand.

Perhaps it’d be better if there were judges instead of being based off public opinion. People with programming experience can judge the game not just on how fun it is in the 10 seconds it gets played, but also on how much has been learnt and achieved by the designer.

Yes that would be nice, but than the democracy of the system would be pretty much lost. I’m not saying that would be a bad thing per se, but a lot of people value that system.

I’ve thought about what it would be like if there were judges deciding who became the world leaders. It would be the best system ever if the judges were perfect. But who decides what’s perfect or even what qualities are import for such a judge. The same issues arise in this small context.

I don’t think random people play new games… they play games that are linked from other sites or followable from google or featured on the main page.

And even if they didn’t, they wouldn’t bother to rate.

I think the raters are people with a vested interest (other contest entrants) and their buddies; and people who are running out of badges to get points from.

A flash game contest is a lot easier to judge than who should be world leader. There aren’t too many complexities that would spring up. It’d also help people improve more as they’d get proper feedback on their games.

perhaps anyone who enters the contest should be disqualified from rating the other entries until the contest is over?

The thing is, a game contest should be judged based on how fun the game is, not how much the new developer learned or how complex the programming is. Unfortunately, if your programming is super complex and never-before-seen and your game is just plain not fun, you won’t (and shouldn’t) win.

If I start a game and the graphics immediately look like they were drawn by an 8-year-old in paint, I probably won’t give it more than a few seconds of attention. If there is some horribly annoying feature (like having to sit through a minute-long intro every time I restart the game), I won’t play it more than once. If I die without apparently having been shot by anything, I’m not going to play again and again to figure out what it is that’s causing me damage. If the controls are super awkward and can’t be changed, I won’t play for very long. If I can’t even figure out the controls in under 5 seconds, I’m playing something else. These are all game design issues that are more important than upgrades and features and bosses and all the other snazzy things that make an already-good game even better.

I haven’t played all of your games, so I can’t say specifically what the problem is with all of them, but if any of you want me to give some first-impression feedback on your playability and tell you why I think you’re not doing so well, I’m willing to help out.

That’d help, but it still wouldn’t fix the issue of uninformed votes, or friends/family/alt accounts voting.

If I had my way (and I won’t :<), contests like these would be judged by a panel of staff.
Not to say the current top 3 don’t deserve it, the’re all nice games, but when you sort entries by rating there’s games in page 7 that are arguably (or undeniably) as good or better as those in the top 10. If you go past page 2 of the ratings sort, the ordering is messed up as could be.

Why? Don’t average ratings work splendidly in the weekly/monthly contests?

Because average ratings simply don’t work as well as an indicator of quality in a minor contest like Scion, even if they do fine for the top 5 in weekly/monthly contests or all-time tops. The weekly/monthly contests are really a competition between games that get popular and spread across the internets to gather a storm of ratings. No Scion entry did anything remotely similar to that, save the one that some Norwegian gaming blog linked to. Like Salvator said, it’s a skewed population that plays and rates the Shootorial entries.

Another problem in using average ratings for the Scion contest, though, is that the mere fact that it’s Scion skews opinions one way or another. Some think “aww…it’s a first timer” and give 1 or 2 stars more than they’d normally give, while others go “A SHOOTING game? AGAIN? KILLKILLKILL” and give it a 1, or “It’s NOT a shooter? ORGINALOL 5/5” People will have a (more) biased reaction when they see that black background around your game.

But in the end, this can only devolve into an argument of whether or not impulsive ratings are valid, since impulsive ratings aren’t totally meaningless – like Aghannor said, SOMETHING must be making people recoil, even if it may seem to be a horribly stupid/selfish reason to the dev, or one they didn’t even think of as an issue. (My Dad bashed mine (Lumina) because he didn’t read the ingame instructions, clicked through the control/ship selects that explained the controls without reading, and tried to play it the same way as other shootorials, failed, and blamed the dev, so yeah.)

are you in the right topig Agh? we were talking about making ppl vote fair… but you’re right, nonetheless.

truefire: I’m just saying that voting fairly doesn’t necessarily mean voting on who learned the most or who had the most complicated programming. I’m sure there are some subset of votes that are family/friends, but the people in this thread seem to think that the vast majority of votes they’re getting are unfair and biased, and I’m just saying there are a lot of reasons why someone might play for a few seconds and decide the game is trash and move on. Little playability issues make a big difference.

Aghannor: Do you at least let the developer know that there’s an issue (such as dying without knowing why)?

I had a problem like that with my game and took me forever to tract down because I had very little information to work with (just a location). Turned out it was a copy of the enemyMissle (complete with class) in my award menu: it didn’t bother anyone until they’d achieved a certain award (which is why it effected very few people and why I wasn’t seeing it: I had deleted my local version’s shared object).

But yes, there are a HUGE number of people who rate games down based on almost nothing: either alts for another game dev (I wouldn’t be surprised, my game is constantly losing about 0.02 points a day—that’s roughly 10 new 1’s) or otherwise uninformed or “unimpressed in 10 seconds” voters.

edit:

I’ve got two things I want to try, but won’t:

1) Upload my very first game (Dragon Run) and see how it does in the contest

2) Upload my contest entry (Flash Beryllium) as a non-entry and see how it does rating wise.

Agh: Everyone makes mistakes, especially when you’re new. And when you’re new, they’re often very hard to fix. People who’ve spent the last month slaving away on their games are being stumped at the last because of a small issue, and are getting no credit for what they have done. The public are used to Flash games made by experienced devs – anything that isn’t is simply downvoted and forgotten. The attitude of these voters it’s right for people making brand new games.

Just because programming capability should be taken into account, doesn’t mean it should be the sole factor (or indeed, the major factor). Personally, I have a strong dislike for the supposedly “professional” flash studios that produce factory, cookie cutter games with perfect execution. 90% of the work in making a flash game, in my experience, is getting the idea right. Once you’ve got an idea, making the game is easy. If you want to judge newbie flash developers, then it’s important that they’re judged on their ideas, not just on the few glitches that spoilt it.

Draco18s: For what it’s worth, your game is probably my favourite of all the entries I’ve played so far. It’s more than just simple movement, it’s more than just simple shooting. It’s got better mechanics than the others I’ve played. It’s let down somewhat by some areas of the gameplay, however, and I guess that might be why it’s not achieving as much as it could. Mostly, my main issue is that the enemy attacks all seem to involve a massive slew of small balls, with no regular pattern, and there’s not much risk from being hit by a single one of these. Heck, in my first playthrough I didn’t even realise these were shots, I thought they were decoration. You’ve got the workings of some nice physics already made, why not make your incoming projectiles a whole lot more interesting? I think these surface issues are hiding a lot of the better parts of your game.

Kali: I respectfully disagree. This isn’t a game concept contest, it’s a flash game development contest. One of the criterion is that the submissions be made by new developers, true, but that just governs the level of design that will be submitted, not how the games should be judged. Anyone can come up with a cool idea for a game. Executing it is just as important, if not more important.

Your great ideas are important to make your game stand out, but if you can’t get past the fundamentals of playability, no one will stick around long enough to see the great ideas. I don’t know why we should sacrifice those standards. The game that is best made and best designed is the one that is playable AND original or different or unique, not just the one that’s a great idea but didn’t get implemented very well.

For example:

Cervello: Although Lumina is heaps more complicated and more interesting than Shoot+ Vector Storm, the controls make it practically unplayable. Since there are waves of enemies coming at you, you need to be able to shoot rapidly; unfortunately, I can’t shoot rapidly, because holding down space charges my weapon, and sometimes even if I press space and release it to avoid charging, the game doesn’t capture the key release and starts charging anyway. This by itself makes Shoot+ Vector Storm more playable and more fun.