Hello, I wanted to put this idea in website feature ideas, but I am unable to create a post there.
I am aware that this feature has been brought up in the past, but I believe I could shed some more light on it with a slightly different possible solution.
I believe it would best serve players as well as developers to remove the thumbs down vote option.
The thumbs-up icon is ubiquitous but the thumbs-down is much more ambiguous.
Is it for games you personally don’t like, games that are full of bugs, ugly games, games that have stolen assets, games that are scams, games that are pay to win, was it bot down-voted, or any and all of the above?
What I am afraid of is people seeing that some people didn’t like a game, but misinterpreting that as it is a bad game and so they never try it out for themselves.
If the options were report, support, or do nothing, I believe it would put an end to bot down-voting as well as be a much more accurate portrayal of how the community feels about the game. You could still display a % as in 90% of the people who played this game have up-voted. I realize that this would drop many ratings as most people do not vote on a game, but at least the drop would be level across all games and encourage more people to vote if they enjoy it.
The devforum and facebook use a similar tactic where you can heart or like a post, but you can’t downvote it. If downvoting were allowed on these platforms, I am sure many people would be afraid to express their creativity due to the negative backlash.
It literally crushes my soul every time I log on and see even 1 extra downvote when I have worked so hard to the best of my ever-increasing ability to make something great. (Studies have shown that I am not just crazy as I had previously thought and that many people also feel this way)
I made a math-based game (it was ugly and had bugs as it was my first game) and people would tell me the game sucks because it is about math and they hate math and would downvote it once they realized that 30 seconds into the game.
Sorry for making this so long and thank you for reading.
TL;DR Remove downvoting because of bots and because it is unclear as to why the game is downvoted in the first place to devs and players alike, while positive reinforcement is obvious, negative is not when lacking comments or additional feedback.