Hey Askvillers,
We've been reading everyone's feedback regarding the new voting system and appreciate all the suggestions and we feel your frustrations. We have been working around the clock making some changes to the voting system based on everyone's feedback, which we hope will make it more clear for everyone on how voting works and what each rating represents.
The specific changes we have made are as follows:
- When people vote they will now see descriptive text that explains what each star represents as well as a postive/negative gold indicator for each rating. An example of how this will look is below:
We believe this will eliminate confusion on what each star rating represents and it will also indicate that 1 star and 2 star ratings will likely result in negative gold. - We've also changed the descriptive text of some of the ratings (yep, we've changed them again), which we believe will help educate newbies on what each star rating represents. The new descriptive text and corresponding star ratings are as follows:
5 stars = Great
4 stars = Good
3 stars = Average
2 stars = Below Average
1 stars = Bad
Below is how a 2 star rating will look like when someone is voting on an answer:
We believe the combination of the descriptive text being shown next to each star rating, the negative/positive gold indicator, and the wording changes of each rating will make it very clear to the voter what each star rating represents. - There has been confusion on how votes are being calculated. To clarify, for each submitted answer, we will initially calculate an answer's “raw score”. We will calculate an answer’s “raw score” by averaging out all
the votes and will round up or round down to two decimal points by ½
star increments to get to your final rating (e.g. Answer that had a
“raw score” of 3.25 will be rounded up to 3.5
stars. Conversely, an answer that had a "raw score" of 3.74 will be rounded down to 3.5 stars.)
We know that some people do not like having their "raw scores" rounded down. Unfortunately, if we rounded up everyone's raw score to the nearest 1/2 star (e.g. 3.51 "raw score" would be rounded up to 4 stars), it will become too easy to get high ratings (it would be even easier than the original scoring system), which we believe makes high ratings less meaningful and noteworthy. That said, we also realize that getting a 5 star is now more difficult. Although we don't necessarily think that is necessarily bad (remember, you can still get a Best Answer badge without having to get 5 stars), we also realize that the extra gold and experience points you get for a 5 star isn't high enough. Moreover, we also realize that users who get 2.5 stars are being unfairly penalized. Consequently, we've changed the payout of quest gold and experience points as follows:
So even though getting a 5 star rating is harder, we've now increased the 5 star payout to be more than double what you would get if you received a 4.5 star rating. In addition, if you get a final rating of 2.5 stars, you will receive 0 quest gold and experience points, whereas previously you would have lost 3 quest gold and 3 experience points.
To summarize the all the changes related to scoring, below is a chart which should help visualize these changes:
- We've lowered the bar necessary for you to qualify for Best Answer Badge from 4.0 stars to 3.5 stars, which means if you get a "raw score" of 3.25 (slightly higher than Average), than your answer now qualifies for the Best Answer badge. Furthermore, you now only need 3.5 stars (previously 4.0 stars) to qualify for additional Quest Gold bonuses that are tied to experience point levels.
- We have now increased the number of answers you can appeal at one time from one to three. Even after all of these changes, there will still be instances where you feel that you got an unfair rating or if there was no Best Answer badge given due to a tie. After testing the appeal process for the past week, we are comfortable increasing the number of appeals you can make at a time. So please appeal the final rating if you feel you've been unfairly rated and/or there was a tie for Best Answer badge and let more Askvillers participate in the voting process. To find out the outcome of all your appeals, just go to My History and there is a new filter under Status that will say "Appeals Completed". We also have changed the groupings of ratings to incorporate the new 1/2 star rating system.
We hope all of these modifications will make the new voting system more intuitive for all users. No voting system is perfect, and we are willing to make changes if it is in the best interest of the entire community. The ultimate goal for ratings is to fairly reward the individuals that provide high quality answers to a question and distinguish their answers from other answers that were not as good (i.e. if everyone got 5 stars, whether you submitted a great answers or a bad answer, the value of 5 star rated answer would drop significantly). We hope these changes will help us achieve that goal. We will continue to read feedback and make modifications, if we see it is necessary. Thanks for everyone's patience as we make these adjustments. It will take time to get used to, but we believe in the long run, this will make Askville a n even better place to ask... answer... meet... play!
Thanks,
The Askville Team
