Hehe, that’s a loaded issue and I am happy that this gets discussed (finally…)
One thing is important to understand: Many people shy away from long stories and multipart series. Short, single part stories get much more hits and ratings than individual stories of a series.
And also, people tend to vote if they see a story as exceptionally good or bad. I guess that’s just natural.
I’ve implemented the ratings because I was missing them from the old NCMC, there you had a single 1 to 10 rating and a single ‘the story made me cum’ checkbox.
But in NCMC the current rating average of each story was visible to everyone, and that’s something I didn’t like, because I didn’t want this to become a competition. That’s why at first, I’ve implemented the ratings on GSS so that only the author himself can see the ratings for his own stories.
That worked well enough, but it was a bit lacking. And we only got very few ratings (compared to the hits), because a normal reader would never see any effect of his ratings.
The idea behind those 5 categories was, that a badly written story can still be exceptionally hot and inventive. And even if you don’t see that effect on your own stories so much, since you tend to have a certain level of quality on all your stories, I see the effect quite well, as I see the detailed stats on all stories. People tend to honor hot, inventive or well told stories quite differently in general.
That I now show those rating icons was added to give people a reason to rate. Unfortunately, this also kinda betrays my intention not to create a competition, but it’s the only compromise I came up with. Still no numbers and no defined order of
stories, but you can see some indication how well a story is doing.
If you tend to get high marks in all categories, it might be blurred a bit, as people tend to give all-5ers if they really liked it, but I think the general direction is still visible.
Suggestions are always welcome. If you have an idea how to make the rating categories more transparent to the user without making the process any more difficult, then tell me about it!
One idea might to also take the number of ratings relatively to the numbef of hits into account for each rating. That would reflect that some people only rate those categories they found outstanding and leave the rest unrated.