Rating Games And Leaving Comments

Rating things is pretty simple business. In a nutshell:

• don't bin everything into ratings of 1 and 8, please
• base your rating mostly on the story
• keep your weird personal biases out of the rating
• give a little credit for polish (easy to read, high word counts, good branching, etc.)

Here's some side advice about rating stories:

• mention what you liked. Readers want to know why it's good and authors want to know what works.
• mention what you didn't like, what was weird, etc. There's no need to sugarcoat. This is invaluable to authors.
• nobody cares if you skipped a whole page because it mentioned rugs and you just hate rugs. So don't point out your weird biases.
• The weight of your review varies wildly depending on how many points you have.  If you are doing a drive-by comment without being logged in, your review counts very little indeed.  If you are brand new to the site, your review counts a smidge more towards the overall score.

Hope that helps.