#1: Kit E. Katz (hello) on Jun 22, 2011

I was just curious if any of the puzzle makers have ever given a rating to any or all of their own creations. To me it almost seems like that would be taboo, but maybe I'm just being silly. Curious to hear opinions about this subject and reasons for those opinions.

I've rated about half of my own puzzles, and I try to be fair with the rating. I never give myself a 5 for quality, and I usually put a 3 for difficulty in the larger puzzles.

I don't ever rate my own puzzles.

A few people have written comments previously who said they rate their own puzzles in order to give others an idea of what quality to expect, and that they are usually close to what the rating ends up after time anyway.

In the beginning, I rated some of my own puzzles. I quit doing this, because I really could not be unbiased. It really didn't make much difference in the long run. :-)

I give some of mine a "warning" difficulty rating if they're significantly different than my normal (i.e. easy or extremely hard.) I leave these ratings to see how they compare with the consensus. Of the ones I've rated about 90% are within 1/2 point of where they ended up.

Of my ~150 puzzles, I've given probably six temporary "booster" quality ratings when the first rater gave them a 1. None of these ratings stayed a 1. (For instance, #11063: Bubblegum started with a 1. Now, with only six other raters, it's a solid 3.)
I always remove my quality rating in a day or two when enough raters have voted to give a reasonable tally. (You can remove a rating by choosing "please rate this puzzle".)

Two people posted while I was writing this! Granted, I got distracted by a concrete guy coming to look at our basement, but still...

I can see Gator's point of view. I didn't rate any of mine to begin with. When I saw some get bad ratings due to them being perceived as "unsolvable", I wrestled my ethics to the ground and started putting up the warning ratings (and a while later the booster ratings).

The warning rating to scare off undeveloped solvers, and a booster to mellow initial bad raters (even when eventually removed) do tend to raise the end score.

But I haven't done either since the beginning of the year. As Teresa said, it really doesn't matter (in the philosophical sense).

Thanks for the responses! So it would be safe to say that probably most of you avoid doing so. That helps a lot, at least I know that my view wasn't as odd as I'd thought. ;)

I only rated one of my puzzles because after I changed a handful of pixels to clean up the image the rating had dissappeared; however, I still felt odd about doing so. It's good to know that I can remove that rating if I choose to do so, thanks infrapinklizzard.

When i first started making puzzles i never rated my own and i still don't,however i have to admit that early in my puzzle making career(lol)i placed importance on the quality rating and got pissed a couple of times when i felt my puzzle was unfairly rated,so i bumped up the quality rating.I never felt good about it,and never did it again.I've learned to relax and just have fun and enjoy the comments.

I could easily have made it impossible to rate your own puzzles, but I didn't really see any reason to do so. Why should your opinion be any less biased than, say, your mom's opinion, and isn't she allowed to rate your puzzles? So I declined to make any rules about this and left it up to people's own judgement. Theoretically it all comes out in the wash in the end.

I can't actually remember if I ever rated any of my own puzzles. Probably, in the name of testing if nothing else.

Goto next topic

You must register and log in to be able to participate in this discussion.