Now, I’m sure there’s some legitimacy here (once in a blue moon) where other members actually DO downrate games to get their own game higher, etc. When I had originally posted some of my own games on YYG, they got surprisingly low ratings (around 3 or so) when I thought they deserved more. But as time passed I realized exactly what Yourself said: it evened out. Now a majority of my games are scored around 4. Democracy at work!

Just while typing this, another thought ran through my head. Another reason that people would blame downraters is just because they don’t have the patience to wait a few more weeks or months for the game to get more popular and recieve higher reviews. If a good game is given a bad score, I have no doubt that after some time passes it will right itself and get fairer reviews.

Eh, just felt like ranting. Side note, what does Prohias mean?

Multiple dashes are being munged into single dashes, making cut and pasting of xot’s code into a translater imposiblle.

Having said that, here you go xot.

http://blog.nakedpaultoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/spyvspy_2.jpg

Note the code on the bottom of the upper left panel.

Another problem people have is that they don’t recognise when they are getting good luck. When people are on a good streak you tend to quite naturally not notice it as much and also you think to yourself ‘it’s normal, I’m a good player, I should be winning, I’m owed luck’. Along with people only documenting when they have been unlucky and not mentioning when they have been lucky as much, it’s gives a massive overall negative skew in the poker community (of course rake gives a negative skew anyway).

The most common conspiracy theory that I am seeing at the moment at the site I am on, is the one of the ‘withdrawal curse’. A lot of people, including some that I know are farely good winning players, have got it into their heads that when you make withdrawals from the site that it curses you, probably based upon their conspiracy logic that the poker site doesn’t like you withdrawing and deliberately targets you. As well as the fore mentioned reasons I gave for why people start to believe in these conspiracies, this particular one also has the added boost that it occurs after a particular documented event.

Now whenever people make a withdrawal they will be specifically looking out for contracting the dreaded withdrawal curse, and the few unfortunate that get hit by the negative variance bug will scream out ‘arrrrrrrg I’ve been infected, I‘m never withdrawing from this rigged site ever again!’.

Are those the only 4 ratings you expect to get? Did you consider the psychology of rating games? People never rate objectively. Their decision for the rating is based at least in some part on the rating it currently has. If someone comes along and sees a game that they like with a low rating, they’re more likely to give it a higher rating than they would otherwise. They’ll try to push the rating in the direction they want it to go. Ultimately your game will get the rating that people think it deserves. Welcome to democracy.