Your Average Ratings

[MmzHrrdb]

this makes a lot of sense. the point of using tiers is the even distribution thing. some people's tier 7-10 is 90-100, and when you average these, they become barely distinguishable. its difficult to explain, but i agree that it should be changed.

[theficionado]

This is not really a new feature request. But a request to modify an existing feature.

When we go to the page of any filmmaker (actor, director etc), we see a statistic called "Your average ratings" for that filmmaker - It's derived by averaging our ranking of all the movies by that filmmaker. I think this is a totally meaningless statistic.

For eg. check my values for 2 filmmakers - Clint Eastwood (Director) and Steven Spielberg (Director).

For Clint Eastwood my Rankings
Million Dollar Baby - T10 - 75
Gran Torino - T9 - 74
Mystic River - T8 - 71
Unforgiven - T7 - 70
Changeling - T1 - 15

For Steven Spielberg my Rankings
Minority Report - T9 - 72
Catch Me if you Can - T6 - 68
AI - T5 - 67
Saving Private Ryan - T3 - 64
Raiders of the Lost Ark - T3 - 61
War of the Worlds T1 - 35

So Eastwood has 1 T10, 1 T9, 1 T8, 1 T7 & 1 T1
Spielberg has 1 T9, 1 T6, 1 T5, 2 T3's & 1 T1.

So it's pretty obvious that as far as I am concerned Eastwood is far far ahead of Spielberg. I just about tolerate Spielberg.
However, when I check my average Rating for Eastwood it is 61, whereas of Spielberg it's 61.17!!!

This happens because our Tiers aren't evenly distributed - Average Ratings would work fine if all Tiers are evenly distributed. You know this & that's why you use Tiers rather than ratings for TCI/PCI calculations.

If we used Tiers & changed the feature to average Tier, it would become
Clint Eastwood - 7
Spielberg - 4.5

This better reflects what are my actual liking for these 2 directors.

Similarly, the filmmaker list should also use average Tiers instead of average Rating.

For some, however, using tiers would result in a less accurate depiction of their tastes. I use what is basically a four-star system. Because I've seen fewer "bad" movies (with a few exceptions, I don't seek out movies I think I'll hate), some of my tiers cluster at the end; the half-star and one-star equivalents both are Tier 2. I also lack a Tier 7 and Tier 4. If they switched to your suggested way, my average scores would be quite screwed up.

But, really, this is just a good reason why "average score" is not a great indicator of director quality.

[prowler]

yeah i'm with movieboy on this one

[theficionado]

I am not sure I understand - can you give an example?

I score on a 4-star scale. Each score I use — 100, 88, 75, 63, 50, 37, 25, 13, 0 — corresponds to a half-star. As such, I do not use some tiers. Say you average two films. I have scored one an 50 and one a 25. The average would be 37.5, which corresponds to a * 1/2 average.

If you go by tiers, it would be 5 and 2. The average tier score would be 3.5, which deviates from the actual tier of a 37-scored movie. As such, this would introduce inaccuracy to my averages.

[Ununnilium]

This makes sense to me; honestly, tiers are what this system runs on.

[mistersplice]

Excellent point. This is a good idea.

[Spunkie]

Neat idea, but score corresponding to average tier needs to be involved in addition to average tier.

[mpowell]

Yeah, we agree with this, and it has been added to our list of future enhancements... sorry that we didn't update about that, earlier. The enhancement calls for the filmmaker page to show both average tier and ranking (with the emphasis on tier).

[mpowell]

We've just implemented some changes to address this idea.

The individual filmmaker pages now show both the average tier and the average ranking.

Also, the filmmaker list page uses average tier by default, but you have the option to show/order by ranking if you choose.

Thanks again for the suggestion!

[djross]

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