Character Ratings?

[baratron]

Please, for the love of Akatosh, can you make the "ratings" system for characters optional?

I hate it. I hate that other people get to anonymously rate my characters out of 5 based on... I don't know what. Their name? Their overall level? The amount of effort I've put into their profile? Physical attractiveness? I don't know, and nor does anyone else who's voting!

Speaking as an oversensitive player, who might be a little in love with her own characters, I personally want to use the site as a way of tracking my characters' growth, and perhaps to write about them. I don't want people I don't know randomly rating my characters out of 5 based on some arbitrary score!

It actually hurt me when my Oblivion character got rated 1 out of 5. Yes, I'm oversensitive, I already said that - but mostly because I had no idea why? Was it because she's an orc, and the users were unable to see the unique beauty of the female Orsimer? Was it because she was level 5, and hadn't had the chance to grow yet? Was it because the users didn't believe her stats (despite my statement about her use of efficient levelling), but rather than downvote her on "Legit"imacy of stats, they downvoted her in general? I have no clue.

My preferences for improving the rating system would be as follows:
1) Ratings linked to username, so you could see who had rated your character. No more anonymous downvoting!
2) Rating MUST be accompanied by a comment, so you could see why the other users voted the way they did.
3) Timestamped ratings, stamped with both the real-life date and also the level of your character at the time.
4) Automatic pings for users who've rated your character in the past, e.g. once they've levelled a certain amount (e.g. 10 levels) and/or two months of real-time had passed, so they could see if they liked your character better now that they'd developed.

But most of all, I'd like (5) - the ability to sign your character out of the "rating" system altogether. If it's possible for me to disable my characters' appearance in the league tables, and to turn off my ability to post photos and journal entries for them - why can't I turn off their ratings?

[Tom]

Hi baratron,

Thanks for posting your feedback! It is much appreciated.

The character ratings system currently in place on character profiles was just meant to be a simple way for people passing by to give some quick and simple feedback on the character profile that they are viewing. In retrospect, nothing really concrete is actually being voted on using this system; however, it's meant to offer a simple way for viewers of characters to express how they perceive the character. I suppose it can mean different things to different people, and that's kind of the point of it. Note that a character's rating has absolutely no impact on any other aspect of that character's stats (i.e., the auto-calculated Score is not influenced by a character's rating, and it has no impact on how characters are ranked in the leaderboards).

Since the system was meant to be very simple, I feel that the best option to address your concern would be to simply allow character authors to turn off ratings for each character they've created on the site. That would solve the problem of people feeling unjustly voted down on the rating system, while allowing it to be available for others who don't find it to be a problem for them. Come to think of it, maybe it's about time that we also allow character authors to choose whether or not they wish to allow viewers to rate the "legitimacy" of their characters, as well, as that has been quite the issue with many members in the past (however, disabling legitimacy ratings for a character would have to also remove that character from the leaderboards, as that was basically the purpose of this system in the first place).

Anyway, thanks for your input, and I will see to it that an option to disable ratings on a per-character basis is implemented soon.

[baratron]

Hmm. I really should have come back to say thank you for allowing both Legitimacy Voting and Ratings to be made optional. I thought I had, but there isn't another post in this thread, so maybe I just suck? Anyway, it is lovely to be able to enjoy the site without seeing stupidly low Rating scores on my characters, so thank you very much for making the change!

[C0RteZ48]

I really like option 2 and 3. I'd love to see these being enabled/updated for the rating system anytime soon.