User Reviews and Ratings. VERSION 2.0 IS LIVE

Well...as long as they're listening...and they are...there is hope... I just never knew that something so simple could turn into such a complex mess.

@mariorocks9999, @derek3143

Ok so my hypothesis was inaccurate. We are indeed aggregating platforms correctly. What is happening, specifically with the Rayman Legends is that its only showing full-bodied reviews and filtering ratings only reviews BUT its including all ratings in the Score Breakdown. There are no full-bodied reviews for for PC in RML and in that case we put up the 'Sorry, no reviews" message and don't display the Score Breakdown. There are 2432 ratings only reviews.

So there is no bug per-se but there's some stuff we need to rethink.

There are multiple releases on a single platform usually or different regions. I though that maybe we weren't properly aggregating the all the data for multiple releases on a single platform. but we are and that's not the problem. See above ^^^

What you're describing doesn't seem to mesh with what I'm seeing. I can give you examples, but what I've found is that for multi-platform games, when you filter by platform, the number of ratings for each platform is far smaller than it was before the site revision. That would make sense if the Score Breakdown was NOT including all the ratings - in other words, if the Score Breakdown is just including ratings from full-bodied reviews and not all the ratings. But maybe that IS what you're saying...? Well, as long as you're working on whatever it is that is making the numbers inaccurate.

Presently, is the Average Player Score for a given platform's version of the game an average of all the ratings for that version, or just the ratings found in full-bodied reviews for that version? If the latter, I do hope that gets reconsidered.

What I'm also curious about is how exactly the Average Player Score is computed. For example, take Banjo Tooie for N64, which isn't a multi-platform game. Here's the breakdown of ratings:

2,450 ratings of 10

1,084 ratings of 9

205 ratings of 8

43 ratings of 7

8 ratings of 6

10 ratings of 5

2 ratings of 4

2 ratings of 3

6 ratings of 2

22 ratings of 22

Now, if I take a straight average of these numbers, I get 9.48. Yet the site tells me that the Average Player Score is a 9.3. Where does that disparity come from? Is it because the Score Breakdown doesn't show tenths? I could see that resulting in some seemingly mathematically inaccurate Average Player Scores. Or is it that some user scores are weighted more heavily than others?

@derek3143: we're rounding up for the score breakdown but not rounding at all for the overall average. Put away the calculator! :)

I like what is in those links. Very good

However, stacks remain in a state that prevents more than one hundred items in them. This first occurred and I reported it last month.

@edgework:

Lol. Yes, that totally makes sense. And c'mon, this is 2013. I'm all about Excel.

(and putting it away now...)

@derek3143: So if I look up, as just one example, the User Ratings for Frogger on 2600, I get nothing but those three hearts that tell me Gamespot is doing... something... but nothing ever happens. It's not limited to Frogger - I'm guessing this happens to any game that doesn't have written reviews. Y'all know about this issue, right...?

First of all i want to say thank you for everything you have already incorporated it has been a huge help. However i do have one problem i wish to address. What has happened to multi-platform ratings?

For example i had rated 'Harry Potter and The Philosophers Stone' on PC, GBA, PS1 and PS2 however the only rating that appears in my ratings list is for PS1. When trying to add back the ratings for the other platforms i noticed there is no way (that i can see) to make a rating for a specific platform without giving it a full review. Secondly if i wish to make a new rating, for example 'The Saboteur' the site automatically makes my rating for the platform which is first in the platforms list when you make a full review, in the case that is BB.

I noticed somebody had already mentioned that many of their ratings where appearing as a different platform to the one they made the rating for on the old site, this doesn't bother me that much however it is impossible to fix them as i can't seem to be able to make a rating for the correct platform.

lastly kudos for fixing the Japanese titles issue, no longer getting any of those.

No that's a bug. Its an old game with db records that are a bit wonky. I fixed it but it probably won't go live until Monday. No releases this week since no one wants an ops call over Thanksgiving.

Yeah I know. We've discussed this internally and its something we want to do at some point.

Okay. Oh, by the way... when I try to look up user scores for Assassin's Creed II, all I seem to be able to access are the Mobile reviews. So, yeah, the user review platform breakdown feature is pretty buggy. But thanks, as always, for your efforts, and have a good Thanksgiving!

We need to create another forum just for bad game pages. It seems the only release we have for Assassin's Creed II is on the nebulous "Mobile" platform.

This website is a complete joke. You really have to go out of your way to break everything this much. It's taking forever to fix everything and now part of me will always doubt the accuracy of the scores. Everything was fine before. All you had to do was create a "sort by user score" option. How did you do it? How did you make Assassin's Creed II only have the mobile version? That's not a bug. That's not even a mistake. Something like that can't happen by accident.

Yeah, we're totally trying to ruin your gaming life... Its a conspiracy.

Is this still actively developed?

- User ratings are nowhere to be found on site, except for a drop-down filter in Reviews and hardwired links - maybe a nice button in the user dashboard? There's plenty of space, really.

- Rating listing has improved, however I'm still seeing some ratings (on multi-platform games) being attributed to the wrong platform - any chance of being able to edit that?

- Default stacks are still irremovable as far as I can see - will this ever change? Why does my profile have to bear these ugly empty things if they are unused and they offer no extra functionality to something I can create myself? Why MUST I have a "games I'm playing| stack if it doesn't offer any extra functionality?

- Speaking of stacks and extra functionality - the default stacks just uselessly take up space (even if you use stacks at all) - why not make them update dynamically based on user actions? - "Games I've played" could be equivalent to the games that appear in "ratings". Ideally, I'd see this feature in this page - http://www.gamespot.com/profile/reviews/?show=ratings - create a filter, create an automated stack - see it update by itself over time with games I've rated on site - great.

Again, please see some of the Gamespot staff and their stacks - they're mostly useless right now.

There is space now but its reserved for other things.

How do you know the ratings are attributed to the wrong platform?

Stacks still need work. They'll get a lot better in early 2014.

It's been 2 months. And you still haven't fixed multiplatform ratings. Obviously, you're not getting it done now because of Christmas which will lead us to 2.5 months at best.

I don't know how the website is written now (by the looks of it, the code's barely holding up :P) but is it really so difficult?

Sorry to bump this thread up, but are there still no solutions on this?

I lost all my rated games. I lost the track of all my gamelist like everyone else.

I can't believe that Gamespot did this to acquire new users, but didn't think about the old ones.

You can't see the difference anymore between an experienced reviewer and a new one. No discrimination to the new guys, but this is horrible.

Bug report: the "Genre(s)" search box doesn't seem to function. First off all, the pop-up menu that appears when I'm typing into it doesn't list game genres but game and company names. If I ignore to select any item from the pop-up menu, the resulting page doesn't seem to have anything to do with the word typed in the "Genre(s)" search box.

For example, the search for:

"Sort by"="Gamespot score high to low"

"Genre(s)"="rpg"

"Platform"="pc"

"Minimum score"="7"

"Region"="north america"

(all other criteria being left un-modified)

Resulted in a list with the first items being: Grand theft auto iii, g.t.a. vice city, unreal tournament, dragon age origins, crysis, gone home, half-life, chessmaster 5500, freespace 2,nascar racing 3, etc.

The link of the results page is this:

http://www.gamespot.com/new-games/?sort=score&___game_filter_type%5Bgenres%5D=rpg&game_filter_type%5Bplatform%5D=19&game_filter_type%5BminRating%5D=7&game_filter_type%5Btheme%5D=&game_filter_type%5Bregion%5D=1&game_filter_type%5BfromYear%5D=&game_filter_type%5BtoYear%5D=&___game_filter_type%5Bdevelopers%5D=&___game_filter_type%5Bpublishers%5D=&game_filter_type%5Bletter%5D=

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@edgework OK so. For platforms and genres. Do you guys want to sort by them or filter results to only show those matching a given platform or genre?

In my opinion, the correct behavior would be to only show the results matching the requested platform and/or genre. I don't even understand the other suggestion: if I choose to look for real-time strategy games for pc, I certainly don't want to get results outside my selection, like racing simulators for playstation.