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No worries all opinions are valid! Thankfully it’s a big website so there’s plenty of other jams that do have closed voting (I was just in one recently and it was interesting how it changed the dynamic). We’ll be here if you ever want to join in! We do these about every other month. 

I appreciate your feedback, that said, if you look at the past RPG Maker Horror Jams, you can see jams where the 1st place game has 7 ratings, while the game with 25 ratings is in the lower half ranking wise. And that's nothing unusual for that jam. Even if you look at the RPG Maker Themed Jams, if a game with most ratings wins, it's not too far from the Median amount of ratings. And even in another jam I run where there were more than twenty submissions, the 1st place game had 4 ratings, while some other games had around 10 ratings.

I have thought about this system in the past and out of all the options, this one works best. If someone wants to cheat, they can do that even with Submission Queue and my experiences with submission queue led me to determine that it led to lower jam engagement overall, which is ultimately what I care about the most. This jam doesn't even have any prizes anyway.

What I'm trying to say is, please don't let this discourage you from joining the jam, if you want to :)