degaston wrote:No, a zero star rating does not affect your overall average. Otherwise this guy would have an overall rating of 1 instead of 3. Nor does it affect the attribute ratings, or he would have a 0 for those instead of n/a.
But it does affect your overall average,
compared to how people often expect the system to work. If I rate someone a one-star on one category and leave the other ratings blank, I'm effectively giving that person a one-star rating in the overall category. (As you're basically pointing out with krod.) As we've discussed before, the overall rating is an average-of-averages, rather than an average of the sum of all individual ratings. Consequently, if I give someone a one star in one category and not the others, they will have a lower overall rating than if the ratings system were set up so that it only averaged ratings that were actually given.
Nymeria was originally confused because they have 71 3x5 star ratings, one 2x5 star rating, and one 1x1 star rating. Nymeria presumably thought that their rating should be the average of these 216 individual ratings, which would be 4.98. But Nymeria's actual rating is the result of averaging 72x5.0 and 1x1.0, yielding an overall rating of 4.945 which averages down to 4.9.
It is true that, in the ratings system we do have, giving someone a 1 star in one category is the same as giving them a 1 star in every category from the perspective of overall ratings.