Do you rate your own gallery entries?

Just a simple enough question - if and when you submit a gallery entry how many of you rate your own?

Also - do you give an honest appraisal of your own gallery entry, which may well be a 5, or do you give it an automatic 5 without thinking?

Furthermore - if you have multiple blitz accounts do you rate your entry with each one? ;)

I've never put up a gallery entry, myself.

I find the voting system somewhat futile, TBH. You can't tell how good a project is just by looking at a screenie.

If I ever put up a gallery entry I would not rate it, I'd hate to be the first negative rating on my own item...

I've only put up a couple but I have to confess that I did give them a 5 'cos they were magic of course ;)

I agree that the voting system is a waste of time anyway - some of the better screenies are in amongst the lowest ranked - no indication of how playable the game is when on the move.

I'm not sure what the gallery is useful for.

I suspect that most people rate a game based on the quality of its media (which is pretty much all you can go on with a screenshot), so I've never understood why people have posted pictures of a few cubes, a borrowed model on a blitz terrain (or something equally early in development and creaky) for feedback - your idea and might be amazing, the potential breathtaking, but if the screenshot makes peoples eyes bleed, or bores them, then it'll receive a low rating.

Regardless of the feedback you receive, you're still none the wiser about people's reaction to your game, because a numerical value is very imprecise and can mean many things to different people. It is also no use for pointing out particular areas that viewers think need improvement.

I like it, just seeing screenshots of other projects is fine. I'm not convinced by some of the ratings but it doesn't bother me.

The ratings sytem allows us to ensure the better looking screenshots get shown to new visitors of the site. Logged in users see the latest gallery entries by default, new users see the highest rated gallery entries.

I'd say generally the ratings given out are fair - the first few pages of the highest rated screenshots are all very impressive, while the last few pages are - well...

Yeah it's probably good enough for that purpose.

Um, gotta admit any gallery stuff I put up in the past I voted for it myself to get the ball rolling and probably gave it a 5. Why the heck not.

No, I never vote for myself. I'm my own worst critic, so I don't particularly want to get myself off to a bad start with a rating of 1. Besides, if all I wanted was a pat on the back, I'd skip the gallery and pat myself on the back.

I guess Simon's point about the top and bottom end of the scale is broadly true, but I do think there's an awful lot of mid-range pictures which have rather random scores. But ratings are never fair or particularly representative in any field. At the end of the day it's a page full of pretty ( and not so pretty ) pictures, and we probably shouldn't over-analyze.

I rate my own - although not top marks, as it wouldn't be fair...

When I put up my first shot of Tommy Tronic it occurred to me that I might be able to vote for myself and so out of curiosity I did and it worked!... but I would never give myself 5!

Judging by how many people vote for a given picture, voting once for yourself is hardly going to make any difference.

Giving your own submission a rating kind of defeats the point in that you can't really tell what *others* think of it, since your own rating may be skewing the results...

Do politicians vote for themselves? :)

Im sure many people out there do. they just wont admit it.

As for me, i let my girlfriend use my vote (and she can be brutally honest).

I know that I vote for my own entries, and try to give an honest appraisal however I often look at my own stuff through rose coloured glasses.

I always look forward to new gallery entries going up, and can sometimes look through the gallery for ideas or just to look at some (not all) pretty graphics. Often, and this includes my own stuff, the links to demos/games that are posted no longer work.

Agreed... It is actually judging a book by its cover...

I'm a perfectionist. In 99% of the cases, nobody beside reallife people and my GF are seeing my creations at all as I am that critical that I tell myself "such crap is a waste of webspace and traffic" ;-)

so if I rate myself it can only get better after my vote ^^

All voting systems are flawed because all you're doing is seeing a census of what is most popular. It doesn't matter how good your product is if most people can't relate to it and don't value it. It's the same with electing presidents, and the same reason why on most American competitive shows the African Americans tend to get voted off early - they are outnumbered. That doesn't mean they are worse in any way. Like on Americal Idol for instance, most of the best singers have been African Americans but they always get voted off earlier than they should. It's entirely to do with how much representation they have out in the world. If they are outnumbered by white folk who prefer to vote for white folk it doesn't matter how good they sing and they probably would have to sing twice as well as the rest to compensate. Votes are so skewed that way. They don't recognize reasonably or objectively which products have the most merit using a single unified value system, which would recognize where the real value lies, but instead it's a mishmash of all kinds of conflicting opinions and value systems, so you can't hope to get the representation or recognition that you might deserve. I also think most people who vote for gallery pictures (me included) vote based on how good the game looks graphically which has little to do with how it plays. All the top rated gallery images have the best looking graphics. Maybe all we agree to, vaguely, is which images look better than others, but that's about all it means.

There's a gallery? ;)

Perhaps, but if the point is to see what people as whole, without specific reference to yourself, think about it then it isn't skewing any results. Just because you made it doesn't mean you can't have an opinion, though granted some people would rate themselves higher than they really think they deserve.

There was an election thingy at my university recently. People are always suprised that they are able to vote for themselves (or perhaps not, as the case may be) and don't seem to understand why this is fair. Polititions are citizens too!