It's ironic that we all wanted to stop the down-rate bombings, and now by voting any creation up, we're helping to commit it.

In other words, the rating system is FUBAR. I went to a friend's page and looked at one of his creatures. It had a blue smiley face, and my SporeScope FireFox add-on said it had a user rating of 4.29 or something like that. I rated it up and suddenly it's a yellow smiley face and the rating is 2.5. Now I have to be the one to tell him, "Oops! Somehow I down-rated your creature by RATING IT UP." Am I piffed? Yes! He works hard at his creatures, they're certainly one of a kind, and he doesn't deserve this. He's been trying to get featured for a long time now and with no success, and apparently with no help from me!

Now I've been away for a few weeks but I noticed this happening with the rating system even before then, and had hoped someone would have had the decency to fix it by now or at least take the rating system offline until it is fixed.

Edit: Missed a word.

It's called "rating decay" and it happens to everybody.

hattrickster wrote:It's called "rating decay" and it happens to everybody.

The creation was only made less than two weeks ago, and whether or not it's old or new, rating decay shouldn't even occur, there's no reason for it as far as I can tell.

The decay thing is weird. I caused two creations to drop to blue today after I uprated them.

The guilt is horrible.

This is another issue that has been drilled into Maxis' collective skull. They know about the problem, and they know we all want it fixed, and you see how far it concerns them...
I agree that there is no good reason for decay, nor downrate IMO, but we'll just have to wait for a response, which probably wont come anyway.

opfinistic wrote:The decay thing is weird. I caused two creations to drop to blue today after I uprated them.

The guilt is horrible.

It's worse than just having a vote that doesn't matter, because our vote matters, but not in the way we intend. Today I unintentionally voted down a great creation by voting it up... and unintentionally voted up a little an inappropriate and perverse monster that I had voted down. Rate decay is so ridiculous, it makes you wonder why we should even vote at all.

Edit: Had to think of another word that wouldn't turn into SPORE.

Simple answer to get rid of it is to suggest practical alternatives. Rating decay is there for a reason. To have old creations slowly go down in ratings to allow newer creations to be seen. Simply getting rid of it would mean most "old" creations would always be ranked at the top with no chance for new items to be visible unless you go through loads of old creations after sorting.

Eekwotsthat wrote:Simple answer to get rid of it is to suggest practical alternatives. Rating decay is there for a reason. To have old creations slowly go down in ratings to allow newer creations to be seen. Simply getting rid of it would mean most "old" creations would always be ranked at the top with no chance for new items to be visible unless you go through loads of old creations after sorting.

Yes, but doing it like that means there is no chance of an overlooked artist with really good but older creations to be featured unless he is constantly coming out with new designs and going 'HEY HEY, LOOK OVER HERE, LOOK AT ME!' and hoping that these new creations don't become overlooked older creations like the rest of them. It just means that the lesser known artists have to constantly keep trying while the established ones will continuously see their new creations get featured.

Aka. all creations should be given a chance.

Eekwotsthat wrote:Simple answer to get rid of it is to suggest practical alternatives. Rating decay is there for a reason. To have old creations slowly go down in ratings to allow newer creations to be seen. Simply getting rid of it would mean most "old" creations would always be ranked at the top with no chance for new items to be visible unless you go through loads of old creations after sorting.

There's a most popular creations and a most popular new creations which differentiates between some current creations as well as Hall Of Fame material.....I understand the spirit of the decay, and the reasoning behind it. The whole process seems a little broken however.

TwilightRealm wrote:Aka. all creations should be given a chance.

So suggest alternatives... At the moment yes, those people creating things "new" get a very slight advantage. These are also the people who are more likely to be those looking at their creations and paying attention to the ratings. What is wrong with that ?

opfinistic wrote:

Eekwotsthat wrote:Simple answer to get rid of it is to suggest practical alternatives. Rating decay is there for a reason. To have old creations slowly go down in ratings to allow newer creations to be seen. Simply getting rid of it would mean most "old" creations would always be ranked at the top with no chance for new items to be visible unless you go through loads of old creations after sorting.

There's a most popular creations and a most popular new creations which differentiates between some current creations as well as Hall Of Fame material.....I understand the spirit of the decay, and the reasoning behind it. The whole process seems a little broken however.

As well as unpredictable. I went and rated up a good creation someone had created in early November and it let me rate it up. SporeScope said it only went up like .3 points or so, but the point is, it was rated up, even if by a little bit. So please, Maxis, enlighten me as to why I can rate up a nearly 2-month old creation, even if by a little, but a 2-week old creation is rated downwards when you rate up? I'd really love to know.

opfinistic wrote:There's a most popular creations and a most popular new creations which differentiates between some current creations as well as Hall Of Fame material.....

And those are unlikely to really allow "new" creators to be shown. Successful creators will always magnify their success as people will look for their new "work" having buddied them or whatever. New people don't really get seen a lot as too many creations are created and I challenge anyone to look at every creation on the sporepedia. It is a problem but one I can't think of a practical solution for.

Eekwotsthat wrote:

TwilightRealm wrote:Aka. all creations should be given a chance.

So suggest alternatives... At the moment yes, those people creating things "new" get a very slight advantage. These are also the people who are more likely to be those looking at their creations and paying attention to the ratings. What is wrong with that ?

Slight advantage? Try a big advantage, because when you rate up an older creation, it either goes up a tiny bit or heads back into the negatives. As for the rest of what you said, no offense, but it makes no sense. People creating new creations are looking at their own creations and paying attention to their ratings? ..Okay? What does that have to do with anything?

As for alternatives... let's say a single vote equals a number, we'll say 1. Then if you really want new creations to have more of an advantage, then make older creations get a vote of less than 1 but MORE than 0. Because that was the whole problem to begin with, that when you rate UP an older creation, it's mostly getting rated DOWN. Obviously it wasn't intended, and it appears Maxis would rather we stop voting on older creations, period, because we're only doing more harm than good.

Now I can imagine what Maxis will say. "The creation was already rated down more than what its rating currently says, due to rating decay, but it took a new vote for the rating to actual update visibly." Then Maxis, how about writing a script that keeps track of when a creation turns a month old that will change all future votes from 1 to, let's say, .5. That way people who vote later won't think it's their fault that the rating went down drastically, and new creations will still have a slight advantage.

While people still won't like the idea of rating decay, it won't make things an issue when it appears as if you've given a negative vote with the rate up feature.

TwilightRealm wrote:As for the rest of what you said, no offense, but it makes no sense. People creating new creations are looking at their own creations and paying attention to their ratings? ..Okay? What does that have to do with anything?

Who should we pay attention to and who needs to have a sense of achievement. Those who actually log on or those who left and never even look at their creations ?

TwilightRealm wrote:
As for alternatives... let's say a single vote equals a number, we'll say 1. Then if you really want new creations to have more of an advantage, then make older creations get a vote of less than 1 but MORE than 0. Because that was the whole problem to begin with, that when you rate UP an older creation, it's mostly getting rated DOWN. Obviously it wasn't intended, and it appears Maxis would rather we stop voting on older creations, period, because we're only doing more harm than good.

If a creation keeps getting constant ratings rating decay does not show up. It's only if you rate something which hasn't had any rating for a long time. Your alternative whilst it may lessen the problem slightly still continues the problem of older = shown. You still get old creations always at the top and these will not be the "new" people. Remember top rating = more ratings as they are seen more.

Maxis could implement something where rating is updated at a set time without the apparent side effect of rating up = rating down. The result would be a massive slowdown of the sporepedia at that particular time which would also cause loads of complaints. The whole goal of the sporepedia is about access and an awful lot of people don't know anything about ratings or care anyway. A lot of people are more concerned with comments. After all you can't rate in game. Rating says nothing about animation and practicality in-game, simply the fact that the image looks good.

TwilightRealm wrote:While people still won't like the idea of rating decay, it won't make things an issue when it appears as if you've given a negative vote with the rate up feature.

This is the core thing and needs a practical solution. The problem is not rating decay in general.

Eekwotsthat wrote:Who should we pay attention to and who needs to have a sense of achievement. Those who actually log on or those who left and never even look at their creations ?

How about those who made really great creations, and are casual players, or do play often, but still wish acknowledgment for their greater works? Because not every work is equal, and sometimes a person can come out with a really great one that they know they won't be able to top in a while.

Eekwotsthat wrote:If a creation keeps getting constant ratings rating decay does not show up. It's only if you rate something which hasn't had any rating for a long time. Your alternative whilst it may lessen the problem slightly still continues the problem of older = shown. You still get old creations always at the top and these will not be the "new" people. Remember top rating = more ratings as they are seen more.

Maxis could implement something where rating is updated at a set time without the apparent side effect of rating up = rating down. The result would be a massive slowdown of the sporepedia at that particular time which would also cause loads of complaints. The whole goal of the sporepedia is about access and an awful lot of people don't know anything about ratings or care anyway. A lot of people are more concerned with comments. After all you can't rate in game. Rating says nothing about animation and practicality in-game, simply the fact that the image looks good.

As I said, how is a creation going to get constant ratings if the artist is overlooked to begin with? The point is, a creation could be a diamond in the rough, and take a while to be noticed. To be honest, I don't care if an older creation is shown, because then it at least has as much of a chance as a newer creation. What you're saying is that in order to be noticed a person has to constantly come out with a creature, and not just any, but a great creature, but at times we find it hard to top previous creations, and it would be nice if they still got noticed.

As for wanting to prevent lag, I'm sure Maxis can think of something, like using a separate server to handle the database request.

Eekwotsthat wrote:

TwilightRealm wrote:While people still won't like the idea of rating decay, it won't make things an issue when it appears as if you've given a negative vote with the rate up feature.

This is the core thing and needs a practical solution. The problem is not rating decay in general.

I agree, it is the core thing and it does need a practical solution.