Should mod ratings be removed?

Personally I find them utterly useless because most people will 5-star any mod regardless of quality because they are afraid to offend the mod maker, and if one provides honest feedback it's common to get scolded. So the ratings system has really lost its purpose. Maybe an anonymous up / down vote would be better so that finding good mods is easier, much like on the Steam workshop.

 

We definitely don't want a minimum word count. I'd want as many people as possible to give honest feedback, and one way is with an anonymous up/down vote or even an anonymous 1-5 star rating system, and if people want they can leave a comment too but it would be separate from the rating.

 

There isn't much that can be done with it, its the same for every site that has ratings even places like Amazon. Just an example from here is that every full detail scratch made car is a 4/5 while the random engine mods are 5/5 simply because only 3-4 people rate one and 300 rate the other, thats just the limitation of ratings.

However it works fine when you sort by rating because it takes into account the number of ratings vs the overall rating, so if you get 200 5 stars you are still going to top the list of highest rated even it it averages to only 4/5 overall. In that sense it works just fine.

 

@VeyronEB I think this kind of ratings system works for Amazon because there it's a large market place where people don't know each other and people are paying money to get stuff, so they will have certain expectations and are more likely to leave honest feedback. But here we are dealing with mod makers who make stuff for free (and for the 5-star ratings) and they expect a certain level of praise from the community and many people are happy to oblige, so the ratings get biased toward 5 stars regardless of quality. So I would think if the ratings system was anonymous it would have a better chance of being honest & useful.

 

I personally prefer the upvote/downvote system (or even upvote only), but the current system isn’t too bad. The only thing I don’t like is that people will sometimes rate like one star because of a problem on their end, but there’s really not much that can be changed about that and it’s pretty rare. But generally, I think the star system works well enough for what it is.

 

It is not what reviewer writes, it is how reviewer writes, that is actually quite difficult.

Friendly supportive tone even if pointing out bad points is what works, but it takes lot of effort and especially if mod has something really annoying flaws etc. it can be very difficult to see your own text by eyes of mod maker and that would be important to see in order to write criticism that provides information about the issue, but would still appear as supporting modders efforts.

I do write quite little of reviews as I fail terrible bad at that, I'm always too direct and blunt, then people get all weird and not understanding at all what my intention was, so I just lack skills and don't write much of such reviews at all even I know what is needed etc.

Reviews often do provide some insight about what people like from mod for example, even if they rate mod too highly, so they do add value, but instead of taking stars as absolute definition of quality, it might be better to try to see them as indication of how people like from something.

There really is not very much good 3 star mods, so stars show what are certainly not to try, even they don't tell average from awesome so well.

Also one thing to remember is that many players don't have insight of mod making or even what is realistic and what is not etc. There are some mods for example that I have been quite disappointment, but have been rated highly as people have not really seen much beyond the surface.

Excepting stars to represent absolute quality of the mod would require all reviewers to be enough skilled to be able to tell how mod is made, it is all appearances and illusions that many people rate as anything beyond that is not what they known about.

So ratings are never going to be absolute indication and I think understanding this is greatest thing in figuring out how ratings can be useful to you.

I guess there could be expert reviews that would show up bit differently, which would be made by experienced modders for example, but none of them have time for making such reviews, so there is no point I guess.

 

You don't need to know how to make a mod to review or rate a mod. I don't know about others but when I rate a mod I compare it to other mods or the game's official content.

 

I feel the point of a review should be to point out good things and not-so-good things about a mod. Not so much of the "Wow nice job *5 stars*" kinda stuff. That kinda stuff shouldnt be aloud, its not a review, its a comment, put that kinda shit in the discussion thread. The reviews should be for telling what could be improved and what is already a good detail/feature, etc. I agree, the reviews right now is mostly just spam of, "OMG NICE MOD WOO *5 stars*", which shouldnt be aloud. Reviews should be actual reviews, not comments.
Anyways, thats my view point on that.