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banana4life

Rating without Playing

posted by pschichtel | 09 October 2024

Our game just passed the 20 rating mark. It's a multiplayer game at its core, but we made sure it's playable alone as well, since we figured that most of the time not enough players are playing to be viable as a multiplayer game during the rating phase.

As part of the multiplayer, since we've set it up as a peer-to-peer game, we also built a master/match making server that also provides somewhat up to date server and player counts, which the game client fetches to show the numbers in the main menu.

Shortly after the game went live we added a log line to the master server when ever the stats are being fetched, which under normal circumstances should always happen at least once when starting the game.

The log currently shows 11 unique clients that fetched the statistics I think we had 2-3 rating when we added the log line, which suggests that ~10 people (about half) never even started the game, but rated it.

Maybe some of these people have restrictive firewalls that blocked outgoing connections, but 10 people seems a little high for that.

Have other people some data on this? I've recently seen a JamBrain issue that briefly mentioned this issue. We never had issues receiving our 20 rating in the past, but we are usually 3-4 people playing, rating and commenting game, but now I'm unsure how many people actually played the games.