So I was thinking, is the new rating system really accurate?
Yes, it is accurate. It's just different from the old system, which people who have been around longer than 2014 are used to.
If you ask me, it's more accurate than the old system was, even in theory. If you ever rated a game between a 4 and a 7, you probably didn't really like the game, but you didn't really dislike it either. Those ratings indicate that you thought the game was okay, but they only work if they're relative to the preexisting rating. Ergo, you would be basing your vote off everyone else's opinions instead of your own.
If you're playing a game rated 9/10, for example, and you like it enough to give it 8/10, you've lowered the average rating even though you still like the game. If you then go and play a different game rated 5/10, and you find that you like it equally as much as the previous one, you give it 8/10, and now you've hurt one game's ratings and helped another game's just by giving them the same high rating.
Going back to the 4 and 7 example, if you think that same 9/10 game is "Pretty good" and you give it a 7, the ratings will go down slightly. If you play a 2/10 game and give it a "Meh, not that good" 4/10 rating, the ratings will go up slightly. Now you've given one game a higher rating with "Meh, not that good" and another game a lower rating with "Pretty good". Basically, by thinking a game is better than average, you lowered its rating, and by thinking a game is worse than average, you raised its rating. Even theoretically, this system has some obvious flaws.
With the current system, the only possible ratings you can give are the absolute high and the absolute low, and every average rating on every game is somewhere between those two numbers. With this system, when someone likes a game, the rating goes up. When someone dislikes it, the rating goes down. It works flawlessly in that regard, and it's in no way relative to anyone's opinion except for the person hitting the button. It may not be the system that we're all used to, but it is the most fair way of determining a game's average rating.
If a game has a current rating of 9/10, and somebody goes to rate it who does not think it deserves 9/10, but still likes it. In order to move the rating closer to what he thinks it should be, he must say he dislikes it. I would suggest changing the like/dislike buttons to higher/lower score buttons.
A rating system is put in place to reflect the individual opinions of the people playing the game, not for one person to determine whether or not everyone else's opinions are correct.
Additionally, in order for this system to work, the game would have to start out with a number rating. Someone would have to put that rating in place, and every one of those number ratings would be subjective to whomever placed them there. Essentially, everyone would be basing their opinion off the first person's opinion rather than if they actually liked the game or not.
Liked tells me nothing, just that a person liked the game at one point or another.
All a rating tells you is how many people liked a game relative to the people who disliked it. I don't see how it's in any way a reason not to "trust 'yes' or 'no' rankings".
