Another exciting Letters From The Engine Room. This week I’m going to give you more insight into something that has already been released on the site. Normally I would talk about up and coming features but this feature crept out between this letter and the last. You may have noticed that we’ve revamped the reviews on our game pages. Go have a look on the any game page you like and scroll to the bottom.
You looked yet? Good! Here’s how we made these changes work even better for you:
You can now rate a game without even having to write a full review. So, once you’ve scrolled to the bottom of the game page you can select a star rating 1 – 5 (obviously 5 is the best) and then click ‘Submit’. This will show up on the page within a few minutes. And if you want to share your review with the Green Man Gaming community and show you know what you’re talking about after playing the game, then you can still add a text review by clicking ‘Add a review now’. So, if we have a new game out like Mass Effect: Andromeda and everyone is busy playing the game, very little effort is needed to add the rating so the community can benefit immediately.
Rating details
Star ratings are now out of 5 and not 100. We felt it was difficult to rate out of a 100, I mean is there a great deal of difference between 75 and 80 for a game review? Studies also suggest that ratings of 1 to 5 works better. We also added some text next to the star rating to help you understand what that rating means.
The total game rating is out of 10. Hang on a sec, you just said I rate a game between 1 and 5, yet the total shows overall out of 10. What wizardry is this? Here’s how we work it out: We multiply the user’s star rating by 2, add together the current total number of ratings and then divide this figure by the total number of customers that have already left a rating.
Calculation example below:
Person 1 rating – 5 star
Person 2 rating – 4 star
Person 3 rating – 3 star
Person 4 rating – 5 star
Multiply each user’s rating by 2, which then gives you the following:
Person 1 rating – 10
Person 2 rating – 8
Person 3 rating – 6
Person 4 rating – 10
Add these new figures together to get 34. In this example, 4 people have left a review on this product. So you now divide 34 by 4 to get the aggregated figure of 8.5.
Because you’re now looking at an average of potentially thousands of reviews, this gives you a more accurate idea of the rating.
What do you think of our new reviews? Have you used it yet? Let us know below.
See you in 2 weeks time!