Edit: This thread is meant to help out with making scam / falsely-advertised places (i.e. games with minecraft icons) indiscoverable and providing more feedback to asset creators than they currently get from the (mostly spam) comments.
Edit2: Hah – I found a way to make it easier to read even though I said a lot of stuff
Explanation of how this isn't the same as similar requests
The idea was spurred from this thread, but as that thread started off (and continues) on a sour note and as this request is different from what was requested in the aforementioned thread, I felt it was more appropriate to post a different thread.
We’ve had quite a few threads similar to the one I linked previously, and they all request people who dislike their game to either leave a reason or to have been in the game for x amount of time before being able to dislike it. It’s to my understanding that the first request was desired because the people who asked for it wanted to know why people didn’t like their place. The second one I imagine is because “it should be harder for people to bot-downvote my game” and “you shouldn’t be able to dislike my game without giving it a chance”. There are obviously problems with both of these suggestions though. A time prerequisite for disliking a place would result in less dislikes on scammy places because legitimate players don’t want to stay in them. A box you have to fill out can just be filled with “asdsdfgsgdfhdhg” and then it’s not very useful.
How the reasons people dislike your game are useful
- Even if past suggestions regarding dislike "reasons" / time prerequisites have their flaws, knowing why someone disliked your place is helpful information. You might ask "Well if your game is getting downvoted, the problems are probably already obvious, right?" or "If you only have 10% dislikes, why does it matter why your place was disliked by those people?"
To respond to the first question, do you know why Phantom Forces has 4,544 dislikes? It could be people rage-quitting. It could be someone who quit because of a bug. It could be because someone’s computer couldn’t handle the game. While we may be able to nail the majority of potential problems with the game, it’s impossible for us to truly tell how those problems are affecting the playerbase. In Phantom Forces example, if 4,000 of those dislikes came from rage quitters, 500 because of other reasons, and 44 because of performance reasons, it wouldn’t really be worth it for StyLiS to work on performance optimizations. If 4,000 of those dislikes came from people with performance issues, that’s an entirely different story and StyLiS Studios might want to consider performance optimizations. How we get that information aside, why people dislike a game is without a doubt useful.
Regarding the second question, even if only 10% of a playerbase disliked a place, that doesn’t mean they’re the only ones experiencing the problem. 50% of that 10% might have disliked the place because of a bug, but everyone else is still experiencing that bug even if they liked the place. Problems aren’t limited to just the people who disliked the place, so the reason someone disliked a place isn’t unimportant because there aren’t many dislikes.
So, regardless of whether it’s realistic and feasible for us to gather why people dislike/like a place, we’ve determined that it’s useful. Now comes the fun part: determining how to gather this information without penalizing anyone for voting on an asset. We certainly don’t want to add a time limit for reasons stated above, and we don’t want to force people to type out a paragraph of text because it makes voting too difficult. What about adding two more clicks to the voting process? That shouldn’t cause any headaches. And so, we arrive at this:
(alternate style from Cindering):
Why this list of radio buttons would work
- Let's explore common reasons why a place can be downvoted:
- The place is a scam and the voter wants to warn other players
- The creator lied about what the place was to suck in players and the voter wants to warn others
- The voter had high hopes for the place and was disappointed and wants to express their disappointment
- The voter hates the place and wants to punish it / the creator (similar to report abuse)
- The voter didn’t like the place and only cares just enough to downvote it
- The voter hates the creator and wants to harm the asset’s rating
The first three voters will always leave feedback. The first two want to make sure nobody falls for the place’s tricks, so they will make sure to vote it as a scam/misleading. The third will want to write an essay to the place creator(s) using the “Other” option thanks to the weight of emotion. The fourth I’m not sure about, but it likely will result similarly to report abuse. If everyone reports people for the default reason, the fourth type of person wouldn’t likely be very useful at all here. If reports come in mostly categorized correctly, I imagine the fourth type of person would categorize their dislike appropriately here as well. The fifth person will not likely select anything other than the default, but the more mature of us might feel compelled enough to carry out our civic duty and vote appropriately. The votes of the last type of person won’t be useful at all.
At least on the outside, it appears the majority of dislikes would be categorized to where they’d be useful. The first two can be used to automatically hide assets from search results / the front page, and the rest can be used by the asset’s creator(s) to improve what people are having issues with. On the other side of the spectrum, there’s no doubt likes would be categorized appropriately almost entirely since if you’re liking an asset it’s because you’re willing to go the extra mile to show your appreciation for it.
Overall I imagine a list of radio buttons to select from when liking/disliking an asset would prove to be useful and wouldn’t introduce any hardships like time / letter-count prerequisites would.
