New 'Best' Formula
The old formula for ordering the games based on 'Best' was votes * rating. The new formula is:
(rating-5)*(votes/10)
You can see the results of the new order here:
https://www.vizzed.com/p/?sort=best
It's pretty similar on the first few pages but further pages it changes up a bit. I think this orders things better because there were some average rated games that had a lot of votes that were being ranked high and now this pushes them further down. Having the rating - 5 (where max rating is 10) makes any rating above a 5 considered a positive rating and any rating below a 5 a negative rating which places more emphasis on positive scores (before a bad score would have still been given weight).

The reason having things order by just rating isn't good enough is because a game could have just a few votes where the users all voted the game a 10 but that doesn't mean the game deserves that high of a rank. The idea behind this formula is that the more votes a game has, the more accurate the overall rating and also the more popular the game probably is.

While I was at it, I also updated my script so that the mysql query doesn't have to do the calculation each time. Basically the numbers are updated only once a day rather than with every page view (which helped speed up the RGR search which contributes to what I talk about below).

On the other end of the spectrum are the bad rated games. For fun, you can see what ended up being considered the "worst" games on Vizzed:
https://www.vizzed.com/p/?page=3286&noHacks=true&sort=best#searchresults
Amazingly, the 5 worst rated games that appear on that page are also considered to be in the top 10 worst games of all time (according to experts and pretty much everyone) so that strengthens my confidence that this new formula is a great new measure of what's considered the "best" and "worst" games of all time.

I'll probably put together a similar formula for other pages of the site where things are ordered by "best" (such as the index page of the Video Game Music Room).


Site Optimized Again
I've optimized portions of the retro game room, did some database optimization and altered some settings on the server and also updated a few things on the server. The result:
Vizzed.com index = 1.5 x faster
RGR Index = 2 x faster
Game Pages = 1.5 x faster
RGR Search = 1.5-2 x faster

I've got a few more things that I plan to do within the next few days which will increase site speeds even more.

This is an awesome new feature. Great work as always, David!!

Also, Action 52 is currently the worst game on Vizzed.

Davideo7 : could this have been the cause of the sites view counter to reset?

Wow, the view counter did reset. I wouldn't have noticed it.

I hadn't noticed the site getting slow, but then I only started being active again last month.

The rating update is a good change. I never really look at the game ratings, but indeed having it the old way probably did or could have thrown people off about just how good or bad a game was.