By not rating at all, scold with words instead. It's very easy to make someone understand that you didn't like the game with words, it's used very effective very often on this site. And you can't abuse words! Cause if you do, we have admins! But you can abuse the 0 rating, cause the admins understandably won't moderate ratings. And seriously, if a person makes a bad game on purpose, do you think he/she will be bothered by a 0 rating? There really isn't a single reason why you should vote 0, but please try and come up with one, it only makes it more evident.
I said it before in the other thread about the ratings. The zero star should not exist. There is no problem with the system using the mean, but the zero holds the same equivalent as a 2.5 stars. Meaning one zero could break a 5 star rating in half. No game deserved a 0. To me a zero star is the same as not rating the game or playing it.
I gotta say i do still feel that zero stars have their place. Look at it this way, if someone sat an exam and instead of trying to pass it by revising hard and answering the questions, they you just wrote "f**k all exams!", are you saying then that you would award them 20% (the equivelant of 1 star) because you felt they needed encouraging?
It is for people who have that kind of attitude that 0 stars is designed for, just as it is for people who put offensive/pornographic/non-games on TDC.
Seriously, play Smash Bros. Awesome if you think it deserves 20% - i felt that as a game it deserved a big fat zero! (though in hindsight i do think the whole affair was kinda comical, what with the 10/10 reviews it got!)
I believe the zero star rating should remain, just make a criteria before someone can rate a game, or post an article for that matter. Like they have to submit a game first, just an idea
downvoters will always exist. you can't tell people what to think, or all our games would have nothing but 5 votes. And since you can't separate the ass turds from the normal people, all you can do is live with it and appreciate that if your game gets a lot of downloads, it will get a lot of votes, and that small impact of downvoters becomes minimized.
If you get rid of the 0 stars, people will just vote 1 stars. Now if you wanted to get rid of the thumbs-down vote, thats actually viable, given that thumbs up / total downloads would be a useful statistic.
Xhunterko: Oh I didn't mean for you to take it so seriously, it was just a joke! Sorry!
Mark Radon: Firstly, I said don't rate stupid games at all! Scold the person with words, tell an admin that the game is offensive/pornographic/non-game and they'd probably remove it, making an even better point than a 0-rating.
Urban Monk: The criteria idea would weed out down-voters indeed, but also like 90% of the rest of the community since many people hasn't submitted a game even after many years in the community. I think it's just hard to find a criteria that would work and be fair.
AndyUK: Isn't a 0 rating equivalent 0%-16.6%? If the system was 1-5 stars each star would be worth 20%, so it's not a hugh difference.
And lastly, why rate the offensive/pornographic/non-games at all? Think about people new to the site checking out the download section, if a game has a rating at all it will automatically draw attention to it over games that just hasn't got a rating yet. So if every offensive/pornographic/non-game has a crap rating, good games may go unnoticed because of it. Do you know what I mean? So I still say we don't need the 0 rating.
Exactly! If we would start to decide who are worthy of voting you can only imagine the flame wars that'd follow!
Instead I think we should just remove the tool that is very rarely used by serious clickers but often abused by a**es. As a vulcan ( seriously, Star Trek?) would say it, it is the logical thing to do.