New Rating System +/-

Because of this stupid, dumbed down rating system, I'm done with thoughtful reviews, and maybe done with this site.

There you go- there's your dumb ass rating- my last. Since it looks pretty, I'll just give it a 3 and go back to eating Cheetos.

Sorry Deschutes.

 

"The old system used to calculate it for you". Precisely my point.

 

It's one thing to offer feedback and ones opinions in a civilized and adult manner (for the most part is what has been occurring in this thread which is awesome), but that's just rude/disrespectful/uncalled for sir.

 

It doesn't really bother me that the 5 numbers are now one, but this system does not encourage thoughtful text-based reviews like the old system. My appreciation of craft beer was encouraged by reading reviews of beers I'm drinking, helping me to detect the components of flavors and appreciate nuances. Seeing that somebody else gave it a 4 and that's that doesn't really carry the same weight.

 

You disrespect me, I disrespect YOU. That's the way the world works. You vote with your feet.

 

Vastly prefer the new single number. I started doing "hads" more often than reviews not because I didn't want to write, but because coming up with five different scores (and trying to figure out if their weighted average accurately reflected how I felt about a beer) felt like a chore. I'd sip a beer and ponder the taste. Sip again and give a score. Repeat for mouthfeel and overall. Suddenly my beer is half gone and I was too busy rating it to enjoy it.

The numbers are all made up anyway, why make up five when you can make up one, describe what you drank, and then relax? If you mean to tell me you can repeatably distinguish between a beer with 4.5 mouthfeel vs. one with 4.25 mouthfeel, then I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.

 

First, a little background on myself. I've been reading BA reviews for about three years, but didn't join and start posting and reviewing/rating beers myself until recently. I felt I needed a lot of beers under my belt, so to speak, before my ratings and judgments should stand beside those of all of the true beer geeks here. So although I've only rated or reviewed about 25 beers, I've read the reviews for hundreds of beers.

I've always gotten the most value out of the reviews, not the ratings, and I rarely pay too much attention to small differences in a beer's overall score. I set the site to show reviews only, and then I read them to find out as much as I can about a beer.

There's no reason that this can't continue. Those of you who write the really thoughtful and interesting reviews should keep doing so. Tell us whether you had the beer on tap, from a can or bottle, or a growler. Tell us what stood out about a beer, plus or minus. If it helps you to give numbers for appearance, aroma, taste, mouthfeel, and overall, hey, keep doing so. Or just tell us your impressions, without numbers. Just because the site has dropped the categories doesn't mean that you have to do so.

I've usually found the prose more persuasive than the numbers anyway. There is often a fair amount of consensus about the character and quality of a beer. But it's also pretty interesting when opinions diverge.

As far as the numbers go, I agree that it's silly to think .01 can make a difference. On the other hand, it will be good to have the ability to give a score in between the .25 increments. In practical terms, most of the ratings seem to fall between 3.5 and 4.25, at least for me, and I think for many others. The overall quality of craft beer is such that few beers are less than a 3.0 (OK), and not too many are just above that. I personally save 4.25 and above for the really remarkable stuff, and I suspect others do also.

So there are going to be a lot of beers in between 3.5 and 4.25. The "precise" option lets you pick more intermediate grades than just two (3.75 and 4.0). I'll use that option, and have overall grades like 3.6 or 3.8 or something like that. That's useful.

It'd be good to see Todd and Jason go back to the old system. But you ace reviewers, keep up your work, regardless of the scoring system options.

 

I didn't lose any of my 5 category ratings. Because of being burned over the years by rapid and sometimes inexplicable changes in sites, I knew that I would have to keep a backup of everything here. I keep mine in an Access database, but started in an Excel spreadsheet. It has involved doing everything on my computer first, then copying it to BA.
I chose this site because of the nicely structured rating system and have done reviews for all the 2,000 + beers I've entered here. I would have been devastated if I lost all that detailed information. I'll stay here and participate, but with great disappointment. I also found the information on drink format to be extremely useful for watching for new beers on the market. Although, as Todd stated, there was a small amount of plain wrong formats, it was easy to scan the reviews and find out if something was bottled, canned or available only on draft.
I will be able to enter my reviews as I wish and as always, will get a calculated value which can be uploaded here, but I will do so with a bit of sense of loss both in my reviews and in reading others; the numerical section gave a quick scan of relative values that would allow me to read further in the review to see the details.
I'm baffled as to how this system will encourage more or better reviews; my reviews are certainly better now than when I started because of the former structure, but hope for the best. I've felt there has been a large increase in non-review entries here, but perhaps that's because I need to continually turn them off now that the choice cookie is time gated.
I'm willing to wait and see, but I'm not optimistic.

 

I can live with calculating the weighted categories myself from now on, but could the review box pop down right when 'precise' is clicked? That would help since I typically don't score a beer before first reviewing it. Just cuts out the middle-man, which would be me writing a review in Word and then copy/pasting it into the review box.

 

Thanks! Haven't done any new reviews yet, but now I can calculate things correctly!

 

Honestly, I like your sentiment here. But here's my issue, why I'm seriously considering just dropping BA from my beer-drinking life: Imagine the site is a bar. You've met a bunch of cool people there, spent lots of time and money there, even become known as someone who can give his two cents about the various available beers. Sounds fine. But the proprietors, short of actually directly confronting you and kicking you out, continuously change the house rules, making the environment increasingly inhospitable to your enjoyment. Gotta say, if the owners don't want me around (and it's becoming clearer and clearer that this is the case, whether it's stated or not), I'm not sure I wanna be around anymore. Call it surrendering if you like, but I don't feel reviewing and discussing beers (things I love to do) should be the apparently undesirable hassle they are becoming.

I hope to continue my reviews, but I'm seeing fewer and fewer reasons to do so here...

 

I was pissed because I just hit the 900 beer mark. You must be even more pissed TMoney, seeing as how you are nearing 4,000 beer reviews. It's a shame they would make such a shitty change.

 

You can still write that in your review. This change does absolutely nothing to diminish anyone's ability to write a review. All it does is remove the Rube-Goldberg score generation and replace it with a number to explain how much you like the beer. The final number is the only one that counted in giving an overall score to a beer anyway.

I don't need a mathematical equation to help me judge how much I enjoyed a beer, I can do that just fine on my own.

 

You can just give it a 1 or a 5 or a 3 and then change it when you're done your review. You usually have an idea of approximately what score you expect to give a beer before you review it anyway due to lots of factors like if it's one of your favorite breweries, one of your favorite styles, what the beer's overall BA score is, etc.

 

Plus, there's no harm in pouring the beer, looking at it, smelling it, tasting it, so you can put a ballpark figure out there before you review it. What puzzles me is the talk about .1 increments. I don't see that option though I wouldn't necessarily use it.

 

There ya go. Way to not be bitter like a lot of the other BAs commenting on this topic, bitterbill! Oh and it's .01 increments so you can give the beer any score within a hundredth of a decimal. Just click in the box and type in the exact score you want to give it.

 

Ahh, you use the precise option. Cool. Thanks for that and...the kind words.

 

No, I meant just go back to the old system and just modify the "rating" function to get the desired two-decimal rating the the BA guys want. Still have 5 categories for those "reviewing", and then just add the precise numbers for those "rating".

 

I met a few high reviewers myself, who used to be more active but have practically just stopped reviewing. They seemed to have stopped right around the time the site start emphasizing quick ratings as opposed to reviews.

 

I'm not stopping. I hope you aren't as well, fellow Poobah.