I agree the ratings are near worthless, and that hurts the community. The rankings are supposed to help fellow members make educated decisions about the games they are going to rent or purchase.

The best way to thwart these malignant trolls is to defeat them by locking the feature away where they cannot get to them, and make it harder to exploit. I always recommend waiting periods, minimum participation, revocation of rights, and documentation.

First any poster must have been a member for three months, and have a post count of no less then 100 posts. Being banned immediately revokes the privilege permanently unless returned by a moderator.

Posters should have their votes documented. The time, date, and rating. They hide behind anonymity. Take that away and they are exposed and can be banned. Thus any poster can report captain swab if he is dead panning a consoles titles. Anyone rating a title months before it is released should also be banned. Any poster rating games for a platform they do not own is also easily exposed.

The result its damn near impossible to create extra accounts. Maintain the illusion that they are valid accounts. Ruin the ratings, and not be detected, and have those ratings remedied. Finally the database needs to be cleaned so that games can be given honest appraisals.

Obviously that is a lot of coding, but that is probably the ideal workable system. You just have triggers at certain points, and it allows the community to police itself. The hoops the trolls would have to go through would sap their will for mischief especially since they will be exposed in short order. Otherwise it would be far more effective to just link to official reviewers, because the player rankings on this site are bogus.