New Rating System +/-

The rating/scoring attributes of this site were becoming less and less valuable to me as I gained my own beer experiences. I haven't looked at the Top Beers lists in a couple of years and the new rating system --- the one instituted prior to this latest one --- was totally useless to me because I had no idea how the user conducted the numerical rating. The most valuable beer features of use to me are the written reviews and I tend to click on the Top Reviewers to get those reviews. And I usually only read their take on smell, taste, and overall impression. As long as this site's Top Reviewers continue to write actual reviews that including their take on smell, taste, and overall impressions of the beer, I'll continue to read those and continue to ignore the numerical ratings/scores.

So, the long and short of this new change is that I couldn't care less.

 

Actually, you can put a place holder number in your review, do the review, whip out your calculator and then change the placeholder number to reflect the mathematical calculation the site used to do for us. Don't complain....it will sharpen your math skills.

 

You mean assigning an arbitrary number, then doing the review and upon completion changing your number?

 

Yes. A few extra steps but it works.

 

Now there would be near endless score editting (basically whenever someone is writing a review of a beer), which I thought was frowned upon.

 

I thought it was Appearance 5%, Smell 20%, Taste 40%, Mouthfeel 15%, Overall 20%. Am I wrong?

 

Sorry to answer my own question but I just used the formula @Treyliff used but with my values for two beers I had reviewed in my notes on my phone and it seems my values are correct. Good thing the site was down a couple weeks ago and I had to review beers in my phone's notepad because otherwise I wouldn't have known what points I gave for each category since all of them have been erased from the database. It is a royal pain in the ass though that I now have to calculate the scores myself.

 

One of us is wrong. The numbers from one of ours is the old way the values were calculated, and the other's numbers are the latest percentages.

 

I guess we can now use whatever percentages we choose - I like 10-20-40-10-20 because it is easy to remember.

 

Categories don't make sense, but asking people to judge beer on a scale of 1-500 makes sense?

The scale of 1-500 is essentially that. With the option to rate 1.00, 1.01, 1.02, 1.03- 5.00 offers a range of 500 scores.

Makes perfect sense to me.

 

No Sir I don't like it......
I like having the categories weighted for me and automatically calculating my final rating based on that. Half the fun of rating is seeing what score gets pumped out after I decide what aspects of the beer I liked the most.
That being said I suppose I can think for myself and calculate a final score on my own.
That being said I'm sure it will just change again after I get used to the new system and give me something new too complain about.

 

@Todd set me straight in the help forum:

For Beers:

• appearance 5%
• aroma 20%
• taste 45%
• mouthfeel 10%
• overall 20%

 

Saw that, thank you! Now to adjust my latest review.

 

I'm going to complain about this new rating system. It expects you to rate the beer before you review it. Whatever happened to thoughtful reviews that evolve as the beer is sipped? This new system essentially requires me to anticipate the score I'm going to give it, so I can simply access the "notes" portion, and actually commence the damn review! By admission, the purpose of the change is to make it easier for lazy reviewers. Another example of the dumbing down of America....

 

I came to the forums initially because I couldn't add a categorized review. I honestly thought something was wrong with my account. I could hardly believe BeerAdvocate changed their totally decent rating system to one that had no value or worth.

An advocate of beer clearly cares about different aspects of a brew. Look, Aroma, Taste, and Feel are all important parts that contribute to a beer. The new rating system is incredibly dumbed down and disappointing. With the increase of "ticker ratings" - which lets be honest were already dominating the reviews and are probably going to be 95% of all the reviews now BeerAdvocate's reviews have literally become useless to me. I don't care about or want someone's opinion who couldn't spend 5 minutes breaking down a beer. It's a shame because I really enjoyed putting beer reviews on here. Until the system changes back I am done reviewing and done reading reviews.

From what I've read though the old ratings are gone FOREVER which is honestly a smack in the face to everyone who has ever posted a review on this site. I would have appreciated some notification so I could have at least gone back and recorded the scores for beers I reviewed. I can't imagine how upset people who have rated hundreds of beers must be. I think it's pretty arrogant too just delete these ratings as if they have no value on a site that's value comes entirely from user generated content. Maybe you (BeerAdvocate) thought the scores were worthless but they meant quite a bit to me.

 

This is supposed to be better?! Talk about overcomplicating things! I suspect the pernicious influence of IT people who never actually use the system they design.

 

A few times I actually changed my ratings as it warmed with character, not the influence of someone else's numerical designation. I would check others reviews as it changed and sometimes see my numerical rating coming closer to theirs, not a "copy cat" but a realization of what was being consumed.

IT IS EASIER TO COPYCAT A WHOLE SINGLE NUMBER AND SIT BACK AND SMILE TO ONE'S SELF. The new system offers such a response encouraging lemmings to follow each other towards the shore and into the sea.

 

It's not overcomplicating things. Those values closely represent how beers are judged in competitions, which is why they worked (and how they make sense). The math behind how our scores were done was always hidden from us the reviewers. Numbers have been adjusted before but for the most part its always been something in that ballpark (and would be occasionally posted in forum threads).

Again, those numbers you think are 'overcomplicating' was the base math behind all reviews. They need to be like that, and when you've got a bunch of reviews knowing the numbers so one can keep on doing things the same is imperative. I'm glad Todd clarified.

 

This is how the rating used to be calculated, before this change. Those who wish to keep the same weighted average as all of their other reviews prior to the change, will have to calculate their own scores manually, based on these percentages. The old system used to calculate it for you.