Quick and easy way to rate games, e.g. star-based rating system

[JamesFrankel]

Playnite currently lacks a quick and easy way to rate games. The current way to rate a game is to go to the game settings, manually type in a number between 0 and 100 in the "User Score" field, and hit "save". Way too much work for rating a single game.

Instead, it would be better to have a star rating system. The implementation should be in a way that you only need to hover the mouse and click just once to rate a game. There are countless examples in other software on how to implement this. Examples are:

• Windows 10, File Explorer, for every media file (music, videos), in the Details Pane, there is a star based rating system
• Launchbox
• Windows Media Player
• GOG Galaxy 2

The advantages of a star rating system are:

• High ease of use and thus way less resistence to actually rate games
• Limited rating option of 5 different values, making it much easier to make a quick decision, in contrast to having a very granular choice between 100 possible numbers
• In contrast to an even simpler binary rating system (like/dislike, see steam), you actually get a proper way to distiguish ok-ish games from good games to masterpieces

Please consider implementing this. The lack of a star rating system is the only reason why I am even considering switching to Launchbox.

[JosefNemec]

Star system is not a good fit for Playnite because it would be harder to map various ratings from different sources to it. 0-100 system gives more options if the source has custom rating system.

[JamesFrankel]

Isn't it possible to just add another separate rating field other than "User Score"? Like "Star Score" and "User Score"?

Another way would be to have the star rating system act as a simplifying overlay to the "User Score". For example, setting 4 stars would translate to 80, 3 stars to 60, etc. To respect manual numeric ratings, conversely, the numbers would be represented accordingly as stars, i.e. rounding up or down, so that anything 0 to 20 is 1 star, 21 to 40 is 2 stars, etc. It would be then basically just a visual interface to quickly display ratings, and be able to quickly set a rough rating for a game. That would really help people out who want to rate their entire game collection.

[Musiqua]

I actually wrote a quick plugin for this yesterday for my own use. It only adds a context menu to quickly set a user score. I could clean that code up a bit and publish it if you're interested, @JamesFrankel

I don't think the SDK allows to tranform the user score field into stars, but a theme should be able to for the details and grid view.

[JamesFrankel]

I actually wrote a quick plugin for this yesterday for my own use. It only adds a context menu to quickly set a user score. I could clean that code up a bit and publish it if you're interested, @JamesFrankel

@Musiqua I would be quite interested in that! Thanks in advance!

I don't think the SDK allows to tranform the user score field into stars, but a theme should be able to for the details and grid view.

That would be fine, too. Basically, just an additional column in list view or an additional area in detail view that is based on the user score field and 'translates' it into stars. Guess I'll try to look into custom themes, but I doubt I would be able to do much.

[Musiqua]

I've published a version of my plugin that you can test, @JamesFrankel. https://github.com/Musiqua/QuickRatings/releases/tag/1.0

[JamesFrankel]

I've published a version of my plugin that you can test, @JamesFrankel. https://github.com/Musiqua/QuickRatings/releases/tag/1.0

This is amazing! Thanks for sharing! :-)

[Musiqua]

Just a happy coincidence on the timing. I'll put it up on the forums tomorrow to make it official.

In general I don't think it's a bad fit, even though different sources have different systems. Having the score being saved as 0-100 is fine, but adding options to have it display as stars would be nice. Then you could also potentially add setting for what scores map to what stars. Filters would become a bit nicer than the 1x, 2x, 3x-system shown now.

[gonefading]

An elegant solution could probably be the introduction of a new star rating field that cannot be edited by default and simply reads the value of the User Score field and then automatically displays the number of stars it read.

Additionally, an option to enable editing of the new "Star Rating" field for fans of star ratings would then make sense, so they can make direct use of it. When this additional option is disabled, it prevents detailed numerical scores from suddenly turning into, let's say, 70 if 3 1/2 stars is clicked by mistake.

[Musiqua]

For my use, I've updated my plugin to add the star rating as a tag on the game. Then if you're like me and don't use tags for anything else, the tag field will basically become the star rating field. And it'll be shown in all themes automatically, you can sort, etc. If that works for you you can use that. Also added the option to clear a rating.

I've disabled showing the User Score on the details view, and added Tags instead, so I get a nice star rating that works in all themes. Only issue is that when you set a new rating, the view isn't updated right away, but I can live with that personally.

https://github.com/Musiqua/QuickRatings/releases/tag/1.1

[forenta]

I ended up here looking for some order in my library. Are there any plans to adapt this extension for Playnite 9, @Musiqua? Thanks for the work anyway!

[TylerR909]

I concur with this post. Coming over from GOG, my primary view of my games is Group By Personal Rating. I really want to be able to recreate this view in Playnite:

As I was posting this I found the "User Score" game setting. Think I can get what I want from this, but it'd be nice to be able to do it from a Right-click Context Menu.

[terrehbyte]

I ended up creating my own plugin for use in Playnite 9 and have since upgraded to Playnite 10 with no issue. If you want to give it a try, I've made it available in its own repository here: https://github.com/terrehbyte/StarRatings/releases

As with any personal plugin, it's shaped around my use-cases for it, but feel free to file an issue on its repository if you need support or have a suggestion for a feature.

[Musiqua]

Sorry for the late update regarding QuickRatings, but I have personally migrated away from Playnite and have no plans of updating the plugin for newer versions. If the plugin from @terrehbyte solves the use case then great! If not, my plugin is available to fork and update.

[mkalam-alami]

In case someone is looking for a cheap workaround, creating a star system as Categories worked reasonably well for me. After creating the categories with ASCII stars, assigning a game to one of these takes 4 clicks, which is not perfect but not that bad. Grouping features work just like in GOG Galaxy.

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Here's how it looks like with the Stardust theme:

EDIT: Going further into hacking territory, I worked around the lack of #2365 by left-padding labels with spaces: