I was just putting in a rating for the Escalation board by Red Baron. Looking over some of the reviews made me think of other ratings that I've seen on other maps, including a couple of my own.

You'll find remarks like "too complicated", "the map favors offense and I'm a defensive player" and "I didn't enjoy playing the map", "I floundered on this one". Often, a player reviews a map after having only played 1 game on it.

While we want to encourage folks to review maps, I find it patently unfair for a player to give a map a bad rating based on 1 poor performance on their part or if it doesn't fit their play style. 'Fun factor' should be an element, but I don't think it's fair to say a map isn't fun because you didn't win. I would think critique of graphics is a fair point, but that is one that rarely comes up. I know when I review a map, I try to determine if the theme matches the gameplay.

As for being "too complicated", I've always felt a diversity of complexity and themes was a plus. (yeah, I know there are a lot of players out there who only play WGWF)

Just curious what others thought.

Personally I don't mind using the word "complicated" but I try to avoid the word "too". Describing a board as complicated is interesting information, then the reader can determine whether or not that sounds good to him/her.

Reviews such as "I floundered on this one" seems strange to me. I've floundered on several boards on first attempt without wanting to share that to a general audience. Either I try the board again or I don't leave a rating. 

"I didn't enjoy this one" looks more relevant to me. We're only giving our opinions, after all.

One of my all-time "favorite" reviews was for War of the Ring:

5-stars, Fair

"Good bored, but need to play more."

Right - it's as if they're penalizing you for their newness or lack of ability.

So, I guess you're suggesting to increase the requirement to rate a board, like at least 3 games played, for example? Sounds good to me.

Winning/losing definitely has an impact on how much one enjoyed the board, specially on the first tries.

I don't mean at all to discourage discussion, but like every other topic this has been discussed at least once before. ;)

I think my vote was to weight scores based upon # of games played or probably something even more complicated.  I think redshift's solution is probably better because it's nice and simple.

I found a thread from 2011:

http://www.wargear.net/forum/showthread/1305p1/Board_Rating_Question

Lots of interesting discussion there.  It actually starts just like this thread with a recommendation for min 3 games to rate a board.  Then M57 says, "What if a board sucks?  Now I've got to play two more shitty games on it before I can rank it?"  Except M57's too classy a guy to use that sort of language.  So he suggests instead that we only use the middle 80% of reviews to calculate the average & throw out the top and bottom 10%.  Which in retrospect seems like a great idea.  Then I propose weighted reviews which add more complication.  Tom says he already calculates a bayesian weighted score, but it's weighted by # of votes  a map has, not # of games someone has played on it.

To pick up from there - I'm now in favor of M57s suggestion which seems like a fairly simple & fair way to do things.

There's also a bit of discussion of allowing some sort of response & review from the map maker, which I think would be great.  I too get reviews where someone clearly doesn't understand how the board works & it would be nice to respond.

My favorite review of one of my boards:

"vinegar to my eyes balsham to my teeth."  (1 star)

Ozyman wrote:

"vinegar to my eyes balsham to my teeth."  (1 star)

Lol, atleast they put some thought into their verbiage. ;)

Yes, it's almost poetic, although I can't figure out what "balsham to my teeth" means.

I assume it's someone for whom English is not their first language.

It may be a typo. Maybe he meant to say balsam?

Could be.  I also found this line in the bible which is similar:

As vinegar to the teeth and smoke to the eyes, so are sluggards to those who send them.

Assuming it's a non-native English speaker,  maybe it's a saying in their native language.