Dirty, Stinky, Evil Downvoters

well, ive noticed, as i belive others have, that once my game hits a certain rating (it was 3rd place and going up in my case) it rapidly loses points until its gone down a few places. now, the only explanation is that the guy in 3rd place wants the money, so he crated some alts amd downvoted me so he would be back in 3rd. kongregate needs to look into this and do something about it. Ideas and discussion here.

i don’t really know what my game is rated yet, but i suspected that would happen. idk what they can do about it, unless they want to calculate ratings excluding those by level 1 users for the contest, however hard that would be. that’s not what is in the contest guidelines so i doubt they can decide to do that now. but i think that would be a lot more fair.

I don’t think that’s what is happening. People always seem to be more harsh on well-rated games.

The more people that are attracted to the game, the worse ratings seem to get generally. Maybe because the people that actually go through and rate games properly and fairly are nice, and people who just look at the top few aren’t?

Relatedly, Greg has said before that when he gives a badge to a game its rating usually plummets. More people == lower rating

It’s not unique to this contest to have votes get worse as rating goes up. People vote lower to try and compensate for the fact your game has a high rating to get it lower, by voting lower than they think. People also care more about voting if they see their vote actually matters, and users who would normally just skip ahead without bothering to vote will take the time to downvote after a bad experience.

meh ,well, i dont think its mere coincidence that as soon as i say “Woot! im third” i happen to get 5-10 1/5s in a row. amybe 1 or 2 are legitimate, but i know ther have to be alt-downvoters involved. (and if more ppl = lower ratings, then G virus should be waaay down, the game isnt taht good, and it has tons of plays)

Make your game better and beat them even if they are cheating ;)

You should have seen what happened to the ratings on Thing-thing 4 and Tarnation once they got badges. Honestly, this happens on lots of games. I gave a 5 to the Flying Snake because I like the art, but if it were in the top 3 I would probably lower that some as it’s a cut and paste on the shootorial. So I was voting for the hand drawn art, but I wouldn’t actually want it to win.

I’ve seen this drop happen with lots of games. You get judged by a different standard when you are in the top 3. There are “I like this game by a new developer” ratings and “Does this game deserve to be in the top 3?” ratings, and one standard is higher than the other. There is also the dilution of the “friends and family” rating as the numbers go up.

btw, your game has some potential as I think your variety of towers is pretty cool.

It’s Pink Jean Luc. I was in first/second when PinkComp uploaded. He swiftly took first place and I fell to third (losing 0.2 points that day), battled to stay there, but was sinking rapidly (I’d go to bed, wake up, and find my rating slashed by 0.02…along with my fellows: Vector Storm and Rocket Science having lost the same amount).

Now I wake up in the morning and fine Pink Jean Luc in 4th place where it was not last night (where was it? 10th?) and it’s the only game to skyrocket through the ranks like that, no one else has moved.

Gravity Master, is of course, being hailed as a great physics game, despite being a clone of a much better game. Go figure.

Yeah, I personally would prefer not to see either Pink Jean-Luc or Gravity Master be in the top three. I can see why people who haven’t played the games Gravity Master is based on would think it was pretty cool—I was impressed the first time I played a game like that (I don’t even know which it was, Crayon Physics most likely). I’m not sure how much is those games going up or others going down. I don’t necessarily attribute it to any sort of conspiracy theory, though.

Given that I watched my own game’s rating hourly (along with each game within my vicinity above me: that is, Rocket Science, Vector Storm (both), Pink Jean Luc, G Virus), I can say for certain that my rating fell while PJL’s did not (nor has G Virus, but I think that’s due to the sheer number of ratings it has: you just can’t mess with it).

Edit: Pink Jean Luc just took second place again, just as I suspected it might.

Well, running it this way probably increases gameplays more than a judged contest would. I’m certainly checking games more.

Yeah, I was giving games the ratings I believed they objectively deserved (so games that were riddled with bugs and showed no effort whatsoever received one star, games that worked but really added nothing to the shootorials received two stars, and some of the more innovative games received three or four stars), but after seeing that worthless stickman game take 3rd place yesterday I started giving five stars to the games were clearly being lowballed and deserved to be competing for the top spot.

For future contests, if Kongregate wants to get more legitimate votes from it’s user, it should create a card challenge after the contest deadline whose requirements are to rate X contest submissions. Clicking the challenge link will randomly select a contest entry for you to play. Everyone will play to complete the challenge, and the random game selection ensures that all games should have a representative rating. Sure, some people will rate randomly or give all games a 5 or 1 just to get their card, but you’ll still have a decent group that actually plays and rates. At the very least, it should dilute the friends/family/alt votes.

^ this man has a great idea

The rating for my first game has been on from the beginning, and the rating steadily increased to 2.9X, then back down to 2.69 over the course of the contest. Judging by the overall number of ratings for each game, though, I doubt that someone could have inconspicuously created enough accounts to effectively downvote the other games. (I do see a number of level 1 downvote accounts, but that’s too little to do much damage. Then again, I only found them through the comments of entries, so there could be 200 more and I wouldn’t know.)

It’s just the busted way that Kongregate decided to run the contest.

Kong runs ALL their contests like this. (eg: Weekly/Monthly prizes)
It just doesn’t work nearly as well when you don’t have a good 70% of people who see the front page rating the games, or in a more contest-like setting. The Weekly/Monthly prizes are really contests in name only, and are more like prizes, but Scion has all the trappings and resultant problems of a contest.

Relatedly, Greg has said before that when he gives a badge to a game its rating usually plummets. More people == lower rating

Another main reason for the badge-bashing, imo, is that people feel forced to play games in a genre they otherwise wouldn’t even bother with. They obviously don’t like that genre and hence rate low. Also, any little problem with badges, or badges not being automatically obtained when the player played before, will gather plenty of hate-ratings as well. So it’s not just numbers that lower the rating, it’s the fact that it’s a badge game.

@Agh: That’s just begging for millions of instant votes to get the card.

@Kali: I know, I recognize that it will cause massive vote dilution because of the people who will hand out 5s or 1s without even playing the games, but at least it will dilute the friends/alts vote, and you’re bound to get some percentage of players who will bother to actually play the game before voting. The only alternative I can think of is to require people to have been registered for X days in order to vote on contest entries, but then you can’t really use the contest to try to attract new people to the site.

@Cervello: Yeah, the problem is smaller with the weekly/monthly prizes since those games get much more attention, and downvotes or upvotes from the author or his friends/family/alts are too heavily diluted by legitimate votes to actually matter.

Also, the lower rating for badge games, although in part a result of people being “forced” to play games they otherwise would not be interested in (because of genre, style, etc.), also has to do with the badge sometimes. There are some games that are actually quite fun at first, but the badge is so ridiculous and annoying (especially true of endurance badges that require you to do the same thing for hours without any real added challenge) that I hate the game because of the badge, not the game itself.

May as well just give out a load of random votes to each entry and give anyone who logs onto Kong during the week a free card, for all the effect it would have.

On the other side of being forced to play games you don’t normally play: I don’t usually play games on Kongregate, I usually come here to use the forum, but I recently saw an ad for the latest ticket thing, and figured I’d give the games a try. Didn’t think much of the card deck one, but I was really impressed by the adventurer one and the tower defence. After playing them for quite a while to get the ticket I’d got to like the games whereas I would normally have just skipped by them.

Btw, I am almost certain something is hapenning right now. All the games went down rapidly, according to what their number of rating is, I think I could see a definite ratio if I had some data (I wasn’t writing anything, but I just noticed), so it seems somebody somehow rates all the game 1 (and quite strongly as it seems)?

Some more observation – most of the second half (or, from number 4/5 downwards) of page 1 got downrated somehwere on page2/3. G-virus has moved from 2.88 to 2.84 which is quite a lot for game with nearly 900 ratings. Not sure about Gravity Master, cause I don’t watch it’s ratings, it’s a clear winner already, but Jean Luc hasn’t changed. Don’t wanna sound too sure, but looks weird.

edit #2: great, my game got from #5 to #38. Lolz, I didn’t expect to win at all, it was not “TOP 3” material, but At least #5 looked cool.. :P

I do sometimes see one game skyrocketing and the 4 or 5 games above it dropping in rating consistently. But you have tot ake into account how close the games are qua ratings. The difference between 4th place on page 1 and 4th place on page 3 is 0.03. My game keeps jumping pages because it does not have a lot of rating. The way it goes with my game is it starts on page 1, so somebody gives it a 1, so it goes to page 3, hours later somebody else rates it a 4 and it’s back on page 1.

I know, because I am watching the ratings closely. But this definitely looks like at least 15 downvoting accounts, becasue games weren’t skyrocketting, but they all went down. There are at least 5 games from page 1 that falled in about 10 minutes.

All I know is, the moment my game gets anywhere near the top three, it will be bombarded with bad ratings, which will be pretty efficient because I’ve only got about 80 ratings.

I would agree – it seems that this afternoon, all games with over 2.8 rating droppedto 2.6 or so. :(

I think we know the top3 already. #1 because it’s the best game (although a filthy copy, but what can one expect from the internet), #2 because it seems to be unaffected by any downvoting that happends (and also has the most weird rating/comment quality ratio I’ve ever seen) and #3 because it has nearly 900 ratings and there is a big gap between it and #4.

tarus: I can tell you that it happened exactly in ten minutes about an hour ago. I was refreshing almost every minute back then and suddenly, over few refreshes, the list completely changed.

Somebody just changed their rating on my game from a 5 to a 1, that might be how the downvoters are doing this. First they give games high ratings, and then at convenient time, they kill the game by changing the ratings. Think about how much bigger the effect is when a 5 turns into a 1. I know because my game dropped 0.03 and it didn;t get an extra rating.

Now thats a cool idea for any downvoter alt-accs out there. You may now aswell thank Salvator by upvoting him (but not changing the rating afterwards)! :D