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[more likely]

But you have the rating system. So that is some information. What you are saying is that the system can be manipulated. However, how will sorting on that basis increase or decrease the ability of the system to be manipulated?

If the list can be sorted based on rating, then people are more likely to attempt to manipulate their rating. At the moment, people are unlikely to bother trying to boost their game's rating because it's not really going to make any difference, except maybe get a couple of extra interested players who happen to see it.

But if the game list is sortable by rating, then people have an incentive to try and bump their game to the top of the list as a marketing ploy to get more players; this in turn means we have to have heavier moderation of the page to spot any troublemakers, which eats into peoples time, and so on.

However, as Progz has mentioned there is a review underway of the games page and we have a team of people giving each game an "official" rating which will be sortable.

A rating is not the only piece of information that one uses to decide on playing the game. There are other pieces e.g. no of votes, the comments in game page. A rating is only the starting point. If one sees a game with a high rating but with poor reviews, a downloader is savvy enough to disregard that rating. but at least the information must be available in a good form.

There are two diametrically opposite ways to design rating systems.

The first would be an open system where everybody can rate and there is only rudimentary IP checking to check for duplicate ratings. This system is very scalable and can be used for large systems. It depends on the fact that it is very user friendly to rate and so a large number of people will rate the games and manipulating the ratings will take too much effort for anybody. The best examples of this type of system are digg and wikipedia.

The second is a closed system, which is suited for smaller communities. This system requires registration to rate and cannot be scaled to larger communities. It depends on authentication to prevent duplicate ratings.

The administrators must decide which one of the two methods they should use. From what i gather there is a fear about manipulating the vote and a trend towards the second method.

Still in this (second) method, I would offer a suggestion. Use a weighted system. In this the people who have submitted at least one game (submitters) get a larger weight than people who have not submitted any game. Say, each vote of the submitters counts as 10 votes of any other members. This will almost eliminate duplicate voting.

Well, it would provide more motivation for people to falsely boost their own scores.

That would be a problem.

Actually, if the rating system is made more user friendly there will be more and more people like myself who will rate games after playing them and will swamp out any malicious voting.

There are ~3800 members at current count. Even the best games have at most 100 votes. If the system is improved there will be a large improvement in the total votes and it will take too large an effort to game the system.

You don't understand something and therefore you assume that it cannot make sense. Really now.

Why don't you answer the question I posed in post #11.

Do you have to be a dedicated follower to just look at a forum? You can sort by number of replies, by the way. This would take care of the age problem. I'm not trying to refute all your arguments, just pointing out a practical possibility that you seem to have overlooked. I don't give a damn about the ideology behind all this.

Yes that is a method that will work. Many forums do not allow sorting by replies and I guess I did not know about that feature until you told me about it. (and thanks for that)

However i still do not understand why a sort on the rankings are not provided. All I have got are convoluted arguments that really do not make sense.

Here's the latest rankings: http://ssh.me.uk/ranking200712.html

Thank you very much.

Edit: I already found a game that I want to download using this. I'll be playing the Earl Bobby games tonight. This is incredibly useful.

But still, it's better than no rating at all.

Also false. No information is better than misleading information.

But you have the rating system. So that is some information. What you are saying is that the system can be manipulated. However, how will sorting on that basis increase or decrease the ability of the system to be manipulated?

What makes you think so, especially as this "savvy" downloader is apparently unable to read the Finished Games forum?

You must diferentiate between an active user of this forum and somebody who is just browsing to play some games. Also as was pointed out the finished games fourm is not useful for older games that are popular.

And no, if a system is too easily gamed, that is a reason for not installing it, because an easily abused rating system gives no meaningful information.

Even if the system can be gamed, it should not come in the way of improving the user experience. As of now the system is hardly useful. Some rating is better than nothing at all. And as I mentioned, there are other ways that a user can tell if a game is good or the rating is just gamed.

Sorting by current ratings wouldn't work, as those ratings are highly arbitrary.

Sorting by number of downloads would be counterproductive, because then some authors would start artificially boosting their download rating (which actually they already do).

Just because a system can be gamed, is no reason for the system not to be in place. Today's downloader is very savvy and gets his information from multiple sources. The ratings would be just one. Others would include total number of votes, and the user comments on the games page. But if the games are not sorted, he would likely not see the other information at all.

You can try Completed Game Announcement board. Popular games are on top all the time, because they get many comments.

This is only an option for a dedicated follower of the forum. And it does not give any idea of older games which are popular.

I am not a game developer. I just like to play adventure games.  The AGS site is a very good repository of adventure games.

However, it is very difficult to find the good games on the site. There is a rating system but there is no way to sort by rating or total number of downloads.

It will add a lot of functionality to the user experience if such sorting is added. Please add it.