How the hell do I rate a not popular game?

Okay, so I've been using GameSpot for 10 years or more. It's never been this bad.

I want to rate some game, which doesn't have many votes. In this scenario it's "About Love, Hate and the other ones"

Do you see any place where I can rate it? It's not on the main page, not in reviews. Nowhere.

Same thing happened with Trine 3 (which is a bit more popular) and Supercharged Robot VULKAISER.

For more popular games like Dirt 3 or Sundered, the rating page is just fine.

The only way I can actually rate game like the one above is if I write a review for it.

Well, guess what, I don't feel like writing a review, because either your site has been buggy for months or, which is worse, it's a nonsensical decision by design.

So my question is: what the hell?
Please fix it ASAP.

@MATI9630: Hi there sorry for the late reply on this one. The rating system may have been down at the time of writing, but it seems you have managed to rate the game in question now.

@zanelli: You have not read my post very carefully. I rated it cause I found a loophole on how to rate it - I need to write a review.

It seems it's broken for each game that doesn't have a review, like https://www.gamespot.com/forums/bug-reporting-feedback-1000006/how-can-i-rate-these-games-33499349/

Basically - in order to rate a game it has to have a review.
Believe me, I am not going to write a review for each underground game I want to rate.

If you are still sceptical, try and rate https://www.gamespot.com/games/house-flipper

Also - from the link you can see that this bug has been around FOR MONTHS.
You simply don't care. Just be honest.

@MATI9630: That is working as intended. There has to be at least one review of a game before it can be rated.

Edit: I will pass the feedback onto the development team when I get a chance to see what they think about changing the system.

@zanelli:

are you serious? Why is this working as intended?
How does that make any sense?
What were your thinking processes?

Why would you deny people the ability to rate games? Is Gamespot still too popular and you want to drive it to destruction even more? Because surely you can't be thinking "this will be a good way to encourage people to write reviews!".

Please. I need to know what big brain time came behind it.

Aaaand I'll probably switch to other site for rating, since I feel bad with posting Lorem Ipsum reviews in order to bypass your broken function.

@MATI9630: I am sorry to say that myself and the other moderators have no say real say over how the website functions. We can provide feedback to the people that can make those changes; if they are implemented is not up to us.

I would advise against posting anything considered as spam, as you are likely to get banned either by the anti-spam systems or by another moderator that comes across it. You however could write a short generic review that you can reuse for any game you want to rate and then copy and paste that.

It isn't the most elegant fix for this issue, but it will allow you to bypass writing a review for each game without getting banned.

@zanelli:

Please do share feedback. Also link the thread I linked in the post.

Ok, let's face it - the only reason that you're not getting tons of angry users is lack of users whatsoever. It's obvious if you look at ratings (of the games you can actually rate).

BioShock has 45k ratings, while Doom Eternal, one of the biggest titles of 2020, has only 150 of them. Sure, new Doom's been around only for 8 months while Bioshock - 13 years. But I could bet real money that Bioshock, 8 months after its initial release, had many more votes than mere 150.

"Short and generic review", well, there's also a min. word limit. I could simply copy and paste your post if you're fine with it, this way everyone would know why the review is (but then again, would anyone actually care? these games I've rated aren't that popular).

I don't want to get banned after all, as this is the only site which has a complete collection of my ratings. The fact is I don't see a real alternative to your site. Glitchwave is cool and only slightly less popular now (Doom Eternal - 130 ratings) but their database is poorer.

Metacritic has a terrible userbase, but I suppose if I treated it as 'ratings only' website it might be ok.

Funnily enough, freaking HowLongToBeat has both big game database, the ability to actually rate games without reviewing and it's even more popular than Gamespot.

I used to really like this site, but it's hard not to see it's gone downhill. And sometimes change just for the sake of something being different is not good at all.

@MATI9630: I have passed this thread on to the CM and they are gonna have a look into it.

You may use this text as a placeholder review:

This is a placeholder review that I have permission to post as a review to rate this game. This is a lesser known game that had no reviews before this one and a game needs at least one review to be rated. This permission was given by community moderator zanelli.

@zanelli: thanks, I have actually used it a couple of times.

But I noticed today that when I tried to use it for Super Sanctum TD, Gamespot said to "write more!". Not a big problem, since I could just paste your "review" twice but it didn't happen during previous title last year, I just checked.

Which means the devs did actually take care of the review system.

Not only they didn't fix the bug, but they only made it even worse.

I'm at a loss of words about what's going on inside their brains.

@MATI9630: There was a recent update to the review submission guidelines, which included a increasing the minimum word count to at least 100 words. This was only a minor update to how the system works.

While not the most elegant solution, you are free to copy the provided text twice or to add a little to it to make it up to the new 100 word minimum.

I will bring up the issue with rating games without user reviews again when I get a chance, to see if it can be changed.