I own Moonshine Empire, so I was pokin' around on BGG about it. Looking at the Ratings, there were a lot of 10's and some 1's (quite a spread, I thought). The people that gave it a 1, said they did so because they thought the 10's were fake, so they were gonna "balance things out". I gotta admit, it did seem as if there were an abundance of 10's (23 outta 112 total Ratings). Is this common? Fake Ratings? Others "balancing things out"?
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Is this a common practice on BGG?
Is this a common practice on BGG?
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It's so relative to the person. A 10-star rating may mean one thing to me, but another person would have different criteria to rate a game so high.
I never pay much attention to those ratings on BGG anyway. I dig into a balance of some of the conversations surrounding the game on the forums, YouTube videos, pictures and sometimes the rulebook itself to make my decision on whether I dive into that game or not.
It's not uncommon.
When you look at the rating, you usually see a bell-shaped curve, and in some cases, lots of ratings in 10, and lots of ratings in 1 for "balance".
Ratings of 10 are usually bogus. We already discussed that and I told you my opinion. I don't think the creators make fake accounts, but probably he had some people unfamiliar with BGG play the game at some event, and asked them to rate it on BGG. I really see no necessary malice here, maybe people say: "Hey your game is cool how can I help spreading the word?", to which the creator may have replied, "Well, leave a rating and a comment on BGG", and enthusiastically, they would rate it a 10 to add support, unknowingly doing the game a disservice as this is considered poor practice in the community.
Now there are people who like to "police" the ratings and, when they see this, rate a 1. I don't believe in rating balance, I don't really care if there are bogus 10 (the raw "score" doesn't interest me a lot anyway), I don't care that they put a 1. Not my business. At most it may end up helping the game because, the more ratings there are, the easier they can get a BGG "rank", so that when true ratings start to appear, it becomes relevant.
In the end, my advice is: look at the ratings distribution, as I hinted at first. Ignore the two extreme bars and have a look at the curve. For Moonshine Empire, you see that it peaks at "8" and decreases on both sides. So, it means people who rated it "seriously" really enjoy it apparently. That's the true meaningful rating: the peak of the distribution.
(The spread also, because it would then means that this is a very divisive, hate it/love it game, but I'm not yet familiar enough with the curves to grasp this from one single glance.)