playdg.com

Joined: 09 Sep 2007 Posts: 5 Location: Minnesota

As you may know playdg uses 14 attributes to rank a course. It is stated that "if this cousre does not have something, that attribute should get a ranking of 1." So 1 is low and 10 is high. So for some things like tees, baskets, signs, variety, scenery, maintenance, and layout a 10 for a rating would be a good thing, because the course has good ones of these things. However, for things like woodness and traffic a 10 would be more of them, and more of them would not necessarily be better. Also I belive many of the items are not exactly clear enough, as for whether to give a 1 or a 10 (like for distance someone might like longer or shorter). Here is a example of why I believe these ratings are flawed (let's just consider a couple of ratings in extremes to make it simpler):

Ranking 10:
You give a couse 10 for tees, baskets, woods, and traffic. The baskets and tees are nice, however, it is too wooded and too many people use it.

Rating 5.5
You give a course 10 for tees and baskets, and 1 for woods and traffic. It is the perfect couse: nice tees and baskets, not too wooded and almost always empty.

Rating 5.5
You give a course 1 for tees and baskets, and 10 for woods and traffic. This is the worst possible couse. Horrible equipment, too wooded, and it is always busy.

Rating 1
You give a course 1 for tees, baskets, woods, and traffic. This course is ok. The tees and baskets are bad, but not too many poeple go there and it is open.

As you can see by this example, the best course was rated 5.5, second best courses 1 and 10, and worst course 5.5, Wow, that is messed up.

There is a solution that is not too difficult: make the ratings clearer and 10 is always better. However, if a user likes more of something that someone doesn't (like I don't like a lot of woodiness but someone else might want a challenge) simply give them the ability to invert which is better. Like if someone likes woodiness, but I don't so I gave it a 1, they could click invert, which the site could then simply subtract the rating from 11 and recalculate the total rating, so for this example the wood liker would get a 10 for a wooded course while I could still use the 1 for my rating. If you wanted to make it really fancy, make it so when you log in your preferences are automatically loaded for which extreme you consider better. Now back to how to make it clearer. Simply define each value. For an example, I will use the four attributes I used above.
(tees are not well defined) 1 . . . . . . . . 10 (tees are of high quality, and are easy to distinguish where the tee's edge is)
(baskets are low quality and do not catch discs well) 1 . . . . . . . . 10 (baskets are well made and are excellent at catching discs)
(course in excessively wooded) 1 . . . . . . . . 10 (course is completely open)
(I barely ever see anyone else at this course) 1 . . . . . . . . 10 (traffic is annoyingly high and you can not play a smooth game)

Just something for you all to consider. As for now, I will never look at or use the ratings, just the pictures.

Joined: 13 Nov 2003 Posts: 173 Location: Minneapolis, MN

Yes, with any method of rating, systems are inherently flawed, because people have different opinions about things. Like you say, one person could really like wooded courses, while another person completely despises them. So, who's right? Well, that depends on the person viewing the rating. So why sould we tell someone they're wrong by labeling the rating? If I label a 1 as an excessively wooded course, then someone's going to feel wronged because they think excessively wooded courses are great.
Look at a site like gamespot.com. They have a slider there for users to rate games they view. They don't tell people what is good or bad, they just let people rate it how they feel they like the game.

The idea is that if enough people vote, the abnormalities will be overcome and the rating will be accurate to the community as a whole. So if 20 people rate a 10 on woodedness, and one person rates a 1, the score will average to 9.5, not too far off from what everyone as a whole, thinks of the course. You have to keep in mind when looking at any rating, being it disc golf, video games, product reviews, etc, the difference between your opinion and what most other people think. If you find that most other people like tons of distance on a hole and would rate it high, but you like pitch-n-putts the most, then that rating is not accurate for you.

I respect our viewers opinions, but I'm not convinced that this needs to change in any way.