| Sullla said: I think this is a cool feature in theory, but it's just not working out in practice. The game rankings system has sadly degenerated into rampant fanboyism, making it impossible to draw any kind of reasonable information from it. For the past week, all of the top games were Nintendo ones (and pretty much exclusively Mario/Zelda), a poor representation of historic top titles. Now today all of the top titles all Playstation ones, including some laughers. Ninja Gaiden Sigma hasn't even been released yet, and it's in the top 5. Fanboys are handing out nothing but 1s and 10s left and right, deliberately trying to manipulate the system to support games on their system of choice. It's a broken system. ioi, I don't want to tell you how to run your website, but I think this needs to be addressed in some way. |
yeah... with more sophisticated methodology it can be smoothed out somewhat. say, if you want to automatically categorize "nintendo fanboy" and "sony fanboy" and you can reduce how much their vote counts. so for a start, you can use a clustering algorithm (which is comparatively easy) to determine if a certain voter belongs to a certain voting pattern. you can then run statistically tests to test out your hypothesis. this voter then would have the weight of his votes reduced by some amount.
there're lots of methods to figure out "fanboys", but truthfully, none are "automatic". you'll need to run tests and actually study the results and adjust parameters or alrogithms, which is definitely much, much, much more work than it is worth, with no guarantee that results would be much better. what's worse is that people can accuse the person who implemented such a system of favoritism.
so, when machines fail, humans step in. as vgcharts is a community, not some dead immutable numbers some statistician gather, one can enforce fair and unbiased rules to improve the quality of votes. that to me is the most promising route in eliminating extreme votes.
since there ARE more nintendo fans than any other, those games will be rated higher. since we want to leave out statistical methods (which could draw accusation of favoritism), this is just a systematic issue that would be very hard to address.
instead of giving SCORES, voters can be asked to RANK the games they want to play. i don't really like this but it is an alternative way...
the Wii is an epidemic.
