Players who haven't bought access to a paid access game can rate it

Feature Requests Website Features
#1

I noticed this recently with the game Strucid after they did a free weekend.

If a player plays a game while it is not on paid access, as soon as the game is set to paid access the player can still rate it, despite not owning access to play the game. This doesn’t make sense in my opinion and I believe it may have been an oversight in the rating system.

A player trying to rate a game that they don’t have access to should be treated similarly to a player trying to rate a game that is inactive, in other words they should not be able to rate a game they don’t have access to play.

9 Likes
#2

Yeah, this was brought up recently here. Mixed opinions

1 Like
#3

I mean. They played the game. They should be able to rate it. :man_shrugging:t2:

#4

It doesn’t make sense to let players dislike a game for not being able to play it. The feedback has no purpose or indication of the game itself. If a developer cares about their game’s ratings then they will not do this. If this were addressed then it would become an option.

7 Likes
#5

This. The vast majority of players who downvote a game after it goes paid access aren’t rating the actual experience. We had to migrate 11+ places, hundreds of game assets, and many LinkedScripts over to a new game when we decided we wanted to release with paid access, otherwise all of the people who had tried our game for free while we were testing would have downvoted us to hell.

That isn’t a positive experience for anyone.

A lot of the replies to the other thread were just “hur dur don’t go paid access then”, but developers shouldn’t be punished for wanting to use paid access.

13 Likes
#6

Exactly this. I felt punished when I decided to turn my game onto paid access after having it a free-play pre-Alpha for a month. I earned about 500 dislikes in the space of a day, bringing my ratings down from 92% to 84% which haven’t recovered since.

Anyone who opposes restricting voting probably isn’t seeing it from this perspective. Players are rating the fact they can no longer play the game due to a paywall, rather than the game itself. It’s dumb and undermines the whole rating system.

13 Likes
#7

Something I think might help would be to have separate ratings for a game being in paid access versus free, so the free ratings won’t affect the ratings whenever it’s in paid access and vise versa.

I. E.

My game would have 50 likes, 10 dislikes while free. I turn on paid access and then it gets set to 0 likes and 0 dislikes, and only users who own the game can vote. I gain five likes and a dislike and make it free again. Anyone can now vote and the ratings are set back to 50 likes and 50 dislikes.

#8

Yup, I’ve seen this with Strucid, and a ton of other payed access games (most of the time). Its not only annoying, but severely obstructive. Take Strucid for example, it is a well developed game that tons of people enjoy playing, yet the chances of it appearing on the best rated sort is near impossible due to the amount of people dissing off the game because of the price tag. Makes no sense :man_shrugging:.

3 Likes
#9

Yeah lmao. Over the period of three free weekends, my ratings plunged down from 91% to 70% :sob:
I’ve kept it for free for a few weeks now and my ratings are up to 82% but it should be much higher.

3 Likes