User Reviews with Weighted Stars
I'm trying to figure out how Unity awards it's user reviews stars. Because they're not always indicative of the actual reviews.
For example; I see an asset as having 4 out of 5 stars (14 user reviews), so I decide to read the user reviews. What I see is more recently: 5 - 1-star ratings, 2 - 2-star ratings, 2 - 3-star ratings, and from much longer before, 1 - 4-star rating and 3 - 5-star ratings. Now just taking the average of those 13 reviews I get a score of 2.615. Most definitely NOT 4 stars. Even if I give a 5-star rating to the invisible 14th "user review," I only get an average of 3 stars. Once again, not 4 stars.
Now, this doesn't even take into account the Like/Dislike buttons. For this particular asset, the 1-star ratings had a weight of 108 likes vs 8 dislikes, whereas the 5-star review had 9 likes vs 0 dislikes. Further along, the 2-star rating had 18 likes (0 dislikes), the 3-star rating had 24 likes vs 3 dislikes and the 4-star review had 0 likes vs 4 dislikes.
The point I'm trying to bring up here is that the Unity overall star rating can be misleading. Seeing 4 out of 5 stars can indicate a pretty good product, wherein the actual reviews paint a very different story. So can anyone tell me how the overall star rating is awarded?
I assume it's people giving a star rating w/o writing a review. Can they do that? If it works as advertised, there's nothing to write.
As I mentioned in the question, there is
the invisible 14th "user review."
So, to answer your question, even if that is allowed, it would only make the score a "3-star" rating, not "4-star." To get to a 4-star rating they'd need (at a $$anonymous$$imum) 3 more 5-star ratings and 1 more 4-star rating. And since the asset says, "14 user reviews" and only 13 are listed, I doubt this is the case. Otherwise, it would probably say, "18 user reviews."
And I don't know if they can do that. If I did, I wouldn't be asking.
Ah. Review means a written review. $$anonymous$$ouse over to the right of the displayed stars to see how many total ratings it got. That missing 14th review is probably just a bug in counting.
Your answer
![](https://koobas.hobune.stream/wayback/20220612201156im_/https://answers.unity.com/themes/thub/images/avi.jpg)