since the comp is explicitly about shaking down a limited subset of games, most-liked to least-liked, there's an emphasis on rating them that is not present when given a list of all works of IF ever -- indeed in the grander scheme of things a game is likely only to stand out enough for someone to bother giving it a rating at all if it's exceptional, that is if it warrants being recommended or rewarded or similarly to warn people that it's unredeemable. No one ever logs in just to give a middle-of-the-road game a 5/10.

That said, the games in a given comp are only calibrated to weigh against each other, so eg. a game that places #3 in one year might actually have an overall higher score than a game placing #1 in a different year. Is a game that places 25th out of 25 games actually better than one that places 31st out of 31?

It might be interesting or useful to count the comp votes -- either the overall numbers or the comp ranking -- as a rating source in the IFdb itself. Mobygames did all sorts of interesting things with scoring sources (including, for a time, SPAG), so you could see what the critics thought and also what the site users thought, though it's true that with a niche such as ours, the two groups have a lot of overlap... and if the site incorporated comp votes it would be a pain to prevent doctoring such as someone who voted once in the comp voting again as a site member. (This is not an insurmountable problem, if the comp website were to be integrated with the IFDB.)