The star system for rating mods needs to change. Desperately

This really irks me. I have a mod, with 5 ratings. The first was a 3 star, but on later versions, I have three 5 stars, and one unknown, but I’m pretty sure it is either 4 or 5 stars. However, the mod browser rounds the average down it seems. This is infuriating, because one early review seems to mean that I can no longer have my mod appear as a 5 star, which decreases the chances of downloads. This needs to be changed, so that now it takes the average, and at least rounds it normally, or better yet, rounds up. This increases the chances of downloads, which is a good thing for creators who have spent many many hours on their mod. This has been irritating me for a while now, but the thing that really sparked it was the fact that my mod got translated into Chinese by someone else, and within 3 days, they now have 160+ downloads, and two 5 star reviews. All they did was change the language. They may have credited me in the description, but putting my name there doesn’t change the fact that they are getting reviews for content I spent hours building. It took me weeks to get my first rating, and weeks to even reach 160 DLs. When someone does it using my work in three days, it really frustrates me. What do people think about this?

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You raised two issues.

The first is the case of an overall rating being dragged down by one 3-star out of five reviews. When the sample size is as small as we have for most entries in the AOE workshop, and without differently-weighed reviewers, it is hard to have a fair rating system that also prevents abuse. Though I guess if we can assume good intentions from reviewers, your suggestion to round up may work.

The second issue seems more indicative of two things: 1) there’s a decently large Chinese community of scenario players, who are more active than other language users; 2) however, their engagement is limited by a language barrier, AND the mod system doesn’t support multi-lingual scenarios, which lead to the creation of separate translated mod entries, not always with the original authors’ consent. Ideally perhaps the mod workshop can benefit from a collaboration system like Youtube used to have for subtitles, to enable volunteer participation & communication, keep translated versions under the same mod entry, and give credit to multiple creators.

The collaboration system is unlikely at this moment. Perhaps we should advocate for the other part - multilingual scenario support.

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I think it does support it, but it’s a headache to set up, and not many people know how to do it. I think I might have seen something about it though. I think it has something to do with the string IDs of messages, and then you need a whole extra file with all the lines, and translations into each language, which then get linked to it.

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@DodoNotDoDo, is it possible to have you guys look into changing how the numbers are rounded? It would be great if they at least rounded in a normal manner, if not rounding up, so that it isn’t impossible to never have 5 stars if you get a rating less than 5 stars?

Thanks for pointing this out. There was an error in the rounding, which I’ve now fixed.

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