Only Allow Ratings From People Who Owns The Game

My game is normally paid access for 150 R$ and I turn it off every free weekend to allow players who don’t have the Robux to try it. However, every Sunday night when I turn back on paid access, my ratings always drop around 2-3%. Clearly, these dislikes are not due to the quality of my game, but rather the little kids being mad about the paid access price. If you ever see my Twitter and Discord DMs after a free weekend, it’s all little kids cussing at me for turning on paid access.

My proposal is that if paid access is on, then the game can only be rated by the people who have purchased it to prevent this sort of negative false rating.

28 Likes

Rating it is related to having played it and from there the overall experience. Since they have played, they’re able to give their views on the experience, regardless of what happens to their access afterwards. I don’t support restricting access to voting on the basis of changing a game from free to paid. If it really angers that many, perhaps paid access is not the way to go to optimize your revenue to begin with?

6 Likes

It’s not to optimize my revenue. It’s to limit the number of players. All you have to do is take a look at my group wall to see that all the dislikes are from players raging at paid access.

2 Likes

Regardless, if a player is allowed to play they’re allowed to rate. You’re not really solving a wide-spread issue by restricting rating, and it’s not fair that anyone could restrict voting by turning on paid access.

13 Likes

How can the addition of this feature be anything but beneficial?

2 Likes

The idea of rating, again, is giving their opinion on the experience of the game. If someone is allowed to experience the game, they are allowed to rate it. If you lose the ability to rate by turning on paid access, you are going against the idea of rating to begin with. Suppressing all negative reviews, regardless of what their ‘apparent’ cause is, is fundamentally wrong.

7 Likes

I don’t agree. This isn’t suppressing negative reviews. This is suppressing knee-jerk reviews from people angry about paid access. These reviews do not reflect the game itself, but rather the fact that it was played once by people who can no longer play it and are angry about that.

It is not possible to abuse this feature to restrict negative reviews. If paid access is enabled, only users who own the game may vote, and they can vote negatively if they choose. If paid access is not enabled, then anyone can vote however they please. Votes would not be wiped.

Please explain why you think this would restrict people who want to specifically leave negative reviews from doing so.

19 Likes

People angry about paid access have had to experience the game, and that’s the sole reason they’re entitled to review it. While it’s not very mature of them to vote purely based on it, disallowing them to vote (or change their previous vote, which one is it actually?) goes against the purpose of reviews. Paid access is part of the experience, if not part of the game. If that experience is negative, they can voice it.

It restricts people from voicing their opinion after having played it, and that is not what reviews should be. If it’s truly such a big problem, I’d not use the main place to allow people to experience it for free.

For an example of influencing it, you could have people play for free and give them anything they want. After a while, you change it all to restricted and paid for and no one is able to give a single negative review unless they pay to do so. In that scenario, the positive votes do not represent the game at all and are purely used to boost its popularity and the sales of all the paid content.

6 Likes

You don’t seem to realize that the majority of this site is young kids and everything you said doesn’t matter because they can and will dislike a game if they simply don’t have access to it because of paid access.

20 Likes

You don’t seem to understand that the dislike is NOT a review at all! It’s an expression of their anger. Clearly, they liked my game enough to get mad over it becoming paid access, but they still chose to dislike it BECAUSE they don’t have access. These players are not mature teenagers. They’re unreasonable little kids and because of that, this requested feature is essential.

8 Likes

I don’t really like this, I personally believe in the ‘once you play, you can rate’ motto

because regardless if they paid or not, they’ve played the game, they deserve to have their voice heard regardless (even though, it is disappointing that people downvote regardless)

1 Like

Your use case is a little strange - I am not surprised that you are downvoted when you constantly switch your game from paid access to free and vice versa. Players who purchased the game may be upset that it is now free (why did they have to pay?) and players who did not purchase are annoyed that they can no longer play the game. I suggest not cycling between the two and choosing one option as your game’s permanent state.

24 Likes

You are restricting yourself to your perspective and not the consumer perspective.
It doesn’t matter if you think if a rate, review or whatever is immature or unreasonable.
Players can rate for whatever reason they want, it is THEIR opinion.
Trying to censor those opinions doesn’t change them.
You set a dangerous precedent trying to only allow opinions you approve of.

2 Likes

@Seranok
The game is barely in alpha and I don’t want there to be so many players on the weekdays.

@WhoseTrade Again, the people who are downvoting my game ENJOYS it, but they still choose to dislike because they’re mad about the paid access preventing them from playing. Their anger stems from their enjoyment in my game.

@sparker22 If someone truly doesn’t enjoy my game, they would downvote it as soon as they play it during the weekend. I am not trying to only allow the opinions of what I approve of. I’m trying to prevent votes made in a moment of rage that don’t accurately reflect the players’ true liking or disliking.

1 Like

You are censoring opinions you don’t like by that.
I get they are knee-jerk but that doesn’t matter.
You are trying to dictate whats a valid and invalid opinion.

1 Like

The score of the game after its free to play probably more accurately represents the game. While people might be downvoting becuase they are mad that the game is usually pay to play and they got a chance to play when its free weekend or whatever, there are probably as many people who gave upvotes from buyers remorse. It should equal out, also this seems like a very niche case for a feature like this, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

it sounds to me your issue is that you are constantly switching the game between free/paid

it seems if you keep it one or the other, the game’s rating would be more accurate

@sparker22 A “knee-jerk” vote is not a valid opinion. Like I’ve stated before, these players are driven to downvote my game because they ENJOY it, not because they actually dislike my game.

@chesse20 My ratings dropped 8% in one day lol. Don’t tell me that it “evens out”.

@WhoseTrade I plan on keeping the game free once it comes out of alpha. Right now, this is the only way to limit the number of players while allowing people who can’t afford the game to try it

1 Like

A simple solution would to be to have a demo version of it; users would be teleported to the full version on weekends and the demo version on weekdays if they don’t own a certain gamepass (as a form of paid access while still allowing them to play the demo)

3 Likes

Hmm…that could be something that I can do

1 Like