I posted about this in another thread some time ago, but since this thread is continuing the discussion about the rating system, I thought I'd bring up my suggestion once again.
Now, this isn't a finalized system of rating that I'm suggesting, but rather just an idea about what the rating system could move towards.
I suggested a mutually exclusive system of ratings.
One system would be for the machinima-based ratings, where people who actually care about the video as a machinima would rate it for quality, editing, and these kinds of values.
The other system would give a few rating choices for the player's PvP prowess and such.
Now, I am well aware that at present WCM indeed has a skill point system alongside the machinima rating system, BUT...
What I was suggesting would make the rating systems mutually exclusive.
What this would mean would be that people would have to choose which way to vote...whether to give the author ratings for PvP skill etc, or whether be shown to the community as a machinima critic.
This way you couldn't give a video 5/5/5/5 (in machinima scores) and a skill point just because it's Niar. Or some similar situation.
Also, taking this idea further, we could have two "tabs" of comments. Perhaps give the "e-peen" community the topmost tab, the one with the PvP and skill related scores and comments, and then underneath that the actual ratings for the video itself, with it's own comment area.
Whether that's possible to do without going to extremes codewise, I don't know. My web knowledge stops at XHTML and CSS2.
The idea still remains though. Reading through the comments of the videos I download, which are quite often PvP videos, although I'm more of a storyline buff, I see so so SO many 5's and 1's with completely asinine comments which have absolutely nothing to do with the what the rating system is all about.
One reason why I believe people DO downrate and uprate is either to feel better about themselves and put down the other person in any way possible, OR they're acting a bit like fanbois. Not the ONLY reasons for downrating/uprating but I'm sure one of the biggest one.
Maybe with 2 separate and mutually exclusive rating systems these upraters and downraters would stick to the PvP side, and thus the value of the machinima scores would be a bit higher.
After all you can never get rid of all the people who take part in this downrating/uprating of videos, and even with a dedicated LEGION of people removing most of the 1's and 5's, there'd STILL be quite a few ratings which were given for nonsensical reasons having nothing to do with content and quality etc.
Anyway, that's an idea, and maybe it could spark something even better.
- Nova