Proper Rating Etiquette

Hello,

With another batch of mods released, I see another pet peeve of mine. A good 5 star worthy mod with a 4.5 overall because someone had to give it 3 stars. There are many reasons to give a lower rating but overwhelmingly it's for something unrelated to the mod itself.

"hey can u add (irrelevant feature no one else wants) to ur mod? my moms ex boyfriend had a car just like this, but it had (irrelevant feature) and i'd like to play with my moms ex boyfriends car in beaming!"
*3 stars*

"car is completely orange with black letters. fix pls"
*1 star* Even though no one else is having the issue, and it's on their end!

Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad thing to give suggestions or report bugs. It also doesn't mean you have to give a lower rating because it's not exactly what you wanted. Believe it or not, it is possible to give a 5 star review and still offer constructive criticism (no way!).

I think it's important to note that the only reward modders get is reviews. Even if they're charging money for mods, it's likely nowhere near worth the time they've spent making the mod. With that in mind, I'd like to suggest a review rubric that's more respectful to our modders. Please feel free to discuss or expand on this.

1 Star : The mod is a poorly made meshslap (not allowed on the repository afaik, but you get the idea)
2 Star : The mod has potential, but has minimal effort invested and likely won't be updated in the future
3 Star : The mod doesn't work as intended, and it's not going to be updated in the future
4 Star : The mod is working, but perhaps it's not optimized or has some obvious jbeam issues.
5 Star : The mod works fine, maybe it has a few bugs that will be easily fixed or is missing something.

Another reason I don't like to see lower reviews for bug reports is because the mod maker will fix them, and the person doesn't come back and change their review.

Obviously that's not an absolute rating guide, but hopefully it will help people create more friendly reviews that aren't overly critical and nit picky. Another thing worth noting is that some mods are in "beta", which means the mod developer will likely continue to improve on their work over time. It's important to give feedback, but unnecessary to leave a low review for having imperfections (it's in beta, after all!)
and no one needs your 1 star "OUTDATED" review either

Thanks for reading,

Yota

 

yes. yes. and thrice yes.

 

Yota that is actually a very good way of putting it and its well worth an effort for some people to consider how hard it is to build a mod and all the effort put into it

 

Couldn't have been putting it better myself

 

>literally claiming that we shouldn't have standards because people are people
>no.png

 

I agree. I spend weeks on a mod and someone leaves a three star every single time about FPS when he runs a shitty computer. I finally broke and went and gave one of his mods a shitty rating. I know im bad but maybe he will know how it feels. Its the same dude all the time.
--- Post updated ---
Also, Beamng doesnt allow users to change their rating which is unhelpful. If someone left a 4 star because of a bug, and the bug was fixed, there is no way for that user to change their rating.

 

Stupid people are inevitable. No use trying to instate some useless "etiquette" system.
This forum is overrun with braindead rednecks and Russian preteens. They're going to rate mods unfairly. That has to be a fact of life.

The people who would see this thread and follow these guidelines already review fairly
tons of people visit the repo but not the forums

 

As for the entire review system, I think there should be a like a "Posting Guidelines" for it like we have above the message box for good posting guidelines there should be some for the ratings system, I mean if you wanna give a 1 star review which I know I would to some mods out there which have no creativity in them, but I would never go out my way to slam a mod for being absolute garbage, I would try and look for the positives in it and provide my view on it and make it known to the modder who created it

 

There is something like that.

I don't look at reviews anymore. Just like people don't read descriptions of mods anymore.
Most reviews are a thank-you-I-like-this message. Others are PLZ add AWD and ESC, others complain about some obvious, listed, bug or the handling while controlling the car with their Ti-84 Plus C Silver edition or because their game is outdated.

I would like to see a return of the discussion tab (you can do this manually now though) and the removal of the message option in the reviews since nobody cares. The only good reviews are by the devs and some members.

If you decide to leave a review, please keep in mind there is another human behind the screen.

 

Then remove reviews entirely. It's not like stupid people can really judge anyway, and star-based ratings are a fairly one-sided type of indication when it comes to quality of a product. If anything, we need an in-depth review system with multiple ratings for all the different aspects of the mod under scrutiny...

 

Removing reviews is just plain stupid.

 

Personally I am much more annoyed by the drive-by bad reviews (complaining about issues then never responding when asked for more details) than by your typical "poor quality" review.

AFAIK most bad reviews related to user side issues (like NO MATERIAL issues that only happen for a specific user), or reviews that are slamming the mod due to choice of the modder when making his mod (like people giving bad reviews to the prerunner because no AWD), will get removed if reported.

At the end of the day pretty much any decent mod will tend towards 4.5 stars overall rating anyway, with a bunch of 5 star reviews and a couple of lower reviews, some constructive, some not.

As Blijo said reviews aren't that interesting to read anyway. Most 5 star reviews essentially just say "best mod evar!!" I get a lot more hapiness from people posting clips and pics of fun thing they did with my mods.

 

I love it when people complain about things in life that have no effect over them whatsoever, you don't even have any mod's yourself yet your "pet peeve" is over low reviews on user made content. Thousands of people play this game if your mod is good it'll stand out, if not it won't simple as that. @OP. Remove (Star Rating) reviews and add laugh react emoji.

 

So are people, according to your analysis. The two would go hand-in-hand...

 

Most people that take the time to review give 5 stars. This isn't a real problem.
A modder should not be so butthurt because their mod got 4.5 stars because of one or two random doofuses.
Move on with your life, and certainly don't try to come up with a guideline system that (somewhat) tries to squash a users' individual preference by laying out a template for any sort of review.
If a mod is high quality but is missing a key feature, I won't hesitate to give it four stars.
Reviews are based on individual users' preferences and experiences. NOT what the modder intends/wants.

 

To be fair, the sort of people who give bullshit reviews aren't gonna care about any etiquette we come up with.

 

1. It isnt a problem, it just skews the average. It is dependent on the "fame" of a user as well. More mods==more better for most people here. I think that the first working mod of any user would give the best reviews.

2. It gets old real quick. We do this for fun and people being a dick to us because our gift to them isn't good enough is not cool. It does average out though. Popular mods get more 1-stars than less popular ones unless someone wants to complain about advertising or that the mod doesn't work (back to post 1 we go). It is just not nice to see, try to be more subtle if you don't like something.

3. A review is a way to rate something. Most good reviews have the following content:
An analysis of the reviewed subject. What is it?
The interpretation of it: How did I view the subject and what is my background etc?
The evaluation, consisting of positive and negative feedback


4. It's not up to you to decide what the key features of a mod will be. If I decide to make a potato and you think that a key feature would be a V8, AWD or ESC, you would be wrong. The key feature would be the fact that it's a potato.

5. Partially (point 3). But if you don't read the description, your interpretation might be disconnected. If you try to use a mod on an old version and rate it 1 star because it doesn't work, it would be stupid and you would only make a fool of yourself.

Modding isn't a service. It's a hobby and people are just kind enough to share it with you.
If you act like a dick to people, they might not want to do things for you anymore

 

Why do people need to be authors of at least one repository mod to be able to express their concerns?

That's incredibly short-sighted. By the same reasoning, why can players without a single repository mod under their belt judge other people's work?

 

Here are my thoughts on this whole review topic.

I think people should be allowed to share their views and experiences with the mod and share their opinions on the mod. By the way, about the bug thing. I've seen plenty of 5 star reviews reporting issues with mods. Heck, I wrote a 5 star review on AR162B's new D-series mod. I reported issues with the mod while also praising it.

Exactly, modding is a hobby. People don't have to make BeamNG.Drive mods. They choose to do so, because they enjoy it. Making BeamNG.Drive mods isn't like making stuff in a factory.

 

I don't have an issue with every low review. I just find it strange that someone would rate a near perfect mod 3 or 4. Here's some examples from an extremely well made mod that has these type of reviews :




A bit strange, yes?

Anyways, I saw your other deleted/removed post (I see you've added it back. Think it may have been removed for a reason? lol) about this community being near 14 years old and I don't have any mods blah blah blah. Well, I started playing Rigs of Rods in 2008, version 0.34 (still have it on my HDD!). I've never uploaded or scratch made a mod, but I've always tinkered with .truck and .jbeam files to make stuff my own. I have a pretty good understanding of how much time and effort goes into making a mod. Just because I don't upload my mods, doesn't mean I don't have some ethos in the matter.

Anyways, this isn't about not hurting peoples feelings. It's just the only reward modders get are reviews, and the human brain is very reward based. I think it would help modders if people left more accurate reviews. Oh, and before you say "it's just a game!", this stuff happens in every review system. I know it's not even really worth talking about, but it's equally aggravating to see someone leave a 3 star review on a diner type restaurant because it's not a "5 star" steakhouse.

To summarize my idea, lower reviews should be reserved for actual issues. I'm not asking for a forum mandated policy that you can't leave lower reviews. Mainly just to spread the word and hopefully less people will leave reviews such as the examples above.