Quality Ratings and Difficulty

[glum_hippo]

I have noticed that 1-star difficulty puzzles tend to be rated much lower on the quality spectrum than 5-star difficulty puzzles. Looking through the first 10 pages of puzzles the highest rating I saw was 90%

Do people have a favorability bias toward harder puzzles? I don't imagine there's much to be done about it, nor do I see it as a great problem — but I'm curious whether there are other theories to explain this clear correlation.

[Realshaggy]

The rating system has some serious flaws. We have this discussion again and again in the last 12 years, but it's hard to come up with something better. Some people hate it so much, they write their own browser extensions to hide the rating when they visit the portal. Don't worry, every puzzle has it's audience and most of the regular users know that ratings for nice easy puzzles are a bit lower.

[Dandelo]

You should see the ratings for 5-star-puzzles and for 1-star-puzzles as completely different things. The number of solvers differs, the group of solvers also, the time people invest in the puzzle is completely different and often in 1-star-puzzles there are some messages in the grid or symmetries or ..., which are also rated by many solvers.

[CHalb]

I think in general the harder puzzles are more fun to solve. (Of course there ar many exceptions.) They might include special steps, that are rewarding to find and can't be put into an easy puzzle.

I myself have also an approach to his from my view as author: Sometimes I suppose, the author had explicitly have a clear idea, what puzzle he wanted to create. E.g. a very easy puzzle in an unsual grid. And then sometimes maybe already during the solving process I think: Wow, this task could have hardly be done better! Then I have a candidate for a "very good" rating.