I don't understand Udisc course ratings

[Mando]

I honestly don't understand why Udisc ratings are so inflated and why there are such a predominance of 5.0 ratings.

I am baffled. What do you think?

I think that if a person is giving a one hole course on Udisc a 5 star rating, they are part of the problem.

 

[Countchunkula]

The reviewers' opinions mirror those of the app developers', apparently. uDisc claims Chicago is the #2 disc golf metro area, based on "both how many courses each area had in relation to its size and how good the courses were."

https://udisc.com/blog/post/top-disc-golf-cities-usa-2021

I'll add to the chorus. Chicago being #2 is crazy. There have been a lot of really nice courses added since I started playing, but Chicago area dg is still defined by nasty niners.

Our two best courses are at opposite ends of the metro area and traffic's no joke here. Picking a central location between the two leaves you at least a 45 minute ride away from either (in light traffic). Almost all of the quality courses are in the outermost ring of suburbs (easier to find available land, but farther away from where most of us live). I'd almost say it would be best to divide the metro area in two at the traditional mason-dixon line of Madison street.

 

[Mando]

Unlike DGCR, Udisc focuses on finding courses, providing layouts, hole lengths and recording scores. Reviews are an afterthought. The reviews themselves are not rated, there are no trusted reviewers, no option to sort reviews by date or reviewer experience level.

Perhaps it's regional, but most of the folks I play with never heard of DGCR, but everyone uses Udisc. My home course has been in existence for 7 years. During that that it has been reviewed 11 times on DGCR and over 1,500 times on Udisc. Since Udisc asks for nothing more than a simple number rating, lots of folks are happy to comply.

So, in the absence of formal review criteria, how do most players assign that number rating to a course on Udisc? Most, I believe, are rating the course based on the experience they had while playing and not the subtleties of course design. Did they have a great time while playing that day? If yes, then they will more than likely give it a perfect 5.0 in Udisc.

Yes! Rather than launch a crusade against Udisc, wouldn't it be more productive to fix DGCR. It ain't perfect either.

 

[wolfhaley]

Not in theory. I watched it happen on my own course, where 90% are using Udisc.

Just curious, but what layout will be set up in May? There's four different maps on Udisc right now. Or is it a couple different ones?

 

[Mando]

Just curious, but what layout will be set up in May? There's four different maps on Udisc right now. Or is it a couple different ones?

We have a layout just for guys like you... Full Monty Vistarama...all 30 holes.

 

[wolfhaley]

We have a layout just for guys like you... Full Monty Vistarama...all 30 holes.

Well that's what I like to hear

 

[Mando]

Well that's what I like to hear

We keep it out of public view cuz there is a big chance of visual overload. Only for folks who are in "too much is just enough" camp.

 

[Three Putt]

I'll add to the chorus. Chicago being #2 is crazy. There have been a lot of really nice courses added since I started playing, but Chicago area dg is still defined by nasty niners.

Our two best courses are at opposite ends of the metro area and traffic's no joke here. Picking a central location between the two leaves you at least a 45 minute ride away from either (in light traffic). Almost all of the quality courses are in the outermost ring of suburbs (easier to find available land, but farther away from where most of us live). I'd almost say it would be best to divide the metro area in two at the traditional mason-dixon line of Madison street.

When I lived up there early on I lived in Elgin and worked in Wauconda; a guy I met at Shady Oaks lived in Naperville and always wanted me to go to West Park and Channy. When I'd suggest that we go to Crystal Lake or Round Lake he'd go "Are those up by the Dells?" He had no idea where anything in Lake or McHenry County was. He didn't know what anything North of O'Hare was. Shady Oaks was pretty much the Northern limit of his idea of Chicago.

 

[Countchunkula]

When I lived up there early on I lived in Elgin and worked in Wauconda; a guy I met at Shady Oaks lived in Naperville and always wanted me to go to West Park and Channy. When I'd suggest that we go to Crystal Lake or Round Lake he'd go "Are those up by the Dells?" He had no idea where anything in Lake or McHenry County was. He didn't know what anything North of O'Hare was. Shady Oaks was pretty much the Northern limit of his idea of Chicago.

This pretty much describes me prior to disc golf. The northern half of the suburbs might as well have been Wisco as far as I was concerned. The desire to find new places to hit trees with golf discs gave me the shove needed to go explore up there.



I'd go so far as to say that Chicago isn't the best dg metro area in Illinois. I think Peoria is probably more deserving, just based on the ratio of quality courses to players. Depending on how you consider the Quad Cities (IL/IA border), that metro area should be in the conversation too.

Also, with the growing popularity of dg, it's near impossible to get a round in at the Canyons on a weekend without way more waiting than I'm willing to put up with. If I wanted tourney pace of play, I'd sign up for a tourney. So, it's been a couple of years since I've played the best course in my area.

 

[aphilso1]

Depending on how you consider the Quad Cities (IL/IA border), that metro area should be in the conversation too.

I once had a 2 week long business trip to the Quad Cities. It was 4 months before I started disc golfing. I still regret the unfortunate timing of that. Lots of good courses in the area and I didn't even know what disc golf was yet. Would have made that trip way more tolerable.

 

[Monocacy]

I once had a 2 week long business trip to the Quad Cities. It was 4 months before I started disc golfing. I still regret the unfortunate timing of that. Lots of good courses in the area and I didn't even know what disc golf was yet. Would have made that trip way more tolerable.

I feel the same way about water polo trips to Toronto and North Carolina in the pre-bagging era. I could have been an international disc golfer by now!

 

[Cgkdisc]

I'll add to the chorus. Chicago being #2 is crazy. There have been a lot of really nice courses added since I started playing, but Chicago area dg is still defined by nasty niners.

Our two best courses are at opposite ends of the metro area and traffic's no joke here. Picking a central location between the two leaves you at least a 45 minute ride away from either (in light traffic). Almost all of the quality courses are in the outermost ring of suburbs (easier to find available land, but farther away from where most of us live). I'd almost say it would be best to divide the metro area in two at the traditional mason-dixon line of Madison street.

I think even Crown Point is included in the Chicago SMSA which boosts the average. Although it would be tougher to calculate, maybe SMSA areas with greater than say 2 million population should be broken up into smaller chunks for this ranking calculation. Chicago MSA is just short of 10 million and could be broken into 3 or 4 geographically contiguous areas. If you made two horizontal slices for a North, Middle and South areas, it's possible only the south and north areas might make the top 25 with both likely ranking below Peoria. The problem with the current Chicago ranking is it gives Park & Rec people in that SMSA the idea few if any improvements are needed in numbers and quality of courses.

 

[nothinbuttree]

We took a day and half trip to Chicago last year, played Red Fox (extreme southern WI), Fairfield, The Canyons, and finished at the Oaks. It seemed like a 2 hour drive from north to south. Most of our driving was non-rush hour to boot.

To compare, 2 hours from where I live near Dayton gets me to Indy, anywhere in Cincy or Columbus, even the south side of Toledo. That's a pretty good area of courses if the drive time radius is gonna be that large!

 

[Three Putt]

This pretty much describes me prior to disc golf. The northern half of the suburbs might as well have been Wisco as far as I was concerned. The desire to find new places to hit trees with golf discs gave me the shove needed to go explore up there.



I'd go so far as to say that Chicago isn't the best dg metro area in Illinois. I think Peoria is probably more deserving, just based on the ratio of quality courses to players. Depending on how you consider the Quad Cities (IL/IA border), that metro area should be in the conversation too.

Also, with the growing popularity of dg, it's near impossible to get a round in at the Canyons on a weekend without way more waiting than I'm willing to put up with. If I wanted tourney pace of play, I'd sign up for a tourney. So, it's been a couple of years since I've played the best course in my area.

If you drag the East Side out to Centralia, the Illinois side of St. Louis has got some good golf going these days as well. Even if you say Centralia is too far out to count it's good, but Foundation is the jewel.

 

[Mando]

I understand the bias towards Udisc ratings, given the incredible amount of time reviewers have invested in this site, but the Udiscs ratings do have value in determining what appeals to the masses, rather than just DG's most upper echelon reviewers.

Is it just me, or are TR's really doing over half the reviews these days on DGCR ? If so, of course they are going to look down at UDisc.

 

[wolfhaley]

If you drag the East Side out to Centralia, the Illinois side of St. Louis has got some good golf going these days as well. Even if you say Centralia is too far out to count it's good, but Foundation is the jewel.

Foundation was indeed a jewel. Both courses actually, not just the top rated one. Great complex if that's what we're calling that nowadays. I liked it better than Fairfield, but less than The Canyons, Megiddo and Northwoods Gold. I've been to the quad cities twice now. Been rained out of Camden II twice now. :|

Just curious, but have you played New Melle or the new one at Jefferson Barracks? The Bunker I think it's called. We played it right after it was opened and it had tons of potential, very raw yet though.

 

[NDABRUSH]

One reason that Udisc ratings are higher than DGCR's for the same course, is that signage and navigation are no longer a reason to downgrade a course.

I have noticed, at least from the examples on here, that the udisc reviews might mention that a course is hard to navigate. Yet I have not seen an example of one that actually gives the reader navigational hints to save them some time. Like "to find the tee pad for hole 9, walk into the woods down the obvious trail for about 3 minutes and then you will find 9's tee pad." stuff that helps save other golfers time. I know that any time that I played somewhere and came across a hard to find next tee pad, I would always try to save others the long search in which I had to endure.:|

 

[Three Putt]

Foundation was indeed a jewel. Both courses actually, not just the top rated one. Great complex if that's what we're calling that nowadays. I liked it better than Fairfield, but less than The Canyons, Megiddo and Northwoods Gold. I've been to the quad cities twice now. Been rained out of Camden II twice now. :|

Just curious, but have you played New Melle or the new one at Jefferson Barracks? The Bunker I think it's called. We played it right after it was opened and it had tons of potential, very raw yet though.

I haven't played New Melle since before the pandemic; at the time the Parks Department was going on Facebook groups all butthurt that people (like me) were shooting down the idea that it was better than Harmony Bends so that was weird. There were also these comments that "the course is not done yet" so I assumed they had a multi-year project going and maybe they were going to modify the design some. If things clear up this summer it's on my list to go back to.

As it was when I played it, I thought it was one of those J.D. Drew things: it was really good but you looked around at the land and thought "It could have been great". So do you appreciate that it's really good or do you put it on full blast for not being great? Personally I think they should have hired an actual course designer with the potential that they had, but according to their Facebook whining the fact that they installed it for so much less than Columbia paid for Harmony Bends is a source of pride for the park department. You get what you pay for sometimes, and they didn't pay for a great course.

The Bunker is the Dude's course. The Dude and I go way back and we come from the same scene so I think I "get" what is going on there. The "unfinished" part of the Bunker to those of us that were Ozark Mountain devotees is no big deal. I just have this pandemic thing so I dropped in once right after it opened and didn't have time to finish the round. I know they replaced the basket tops this week with new Titan chain assemblies, and the Dude is always out there working on it, digging out stump, etc. I think it will always have a rough vibe to it because "rough" is a feature, not a bug. The area the course is in (despite being a heavily wooded park space) was an unofficial trash dump for all those apartments on Kingston for decades so that course will forever have a "WTF is THAT!" factor as more and more buried junk works its way to the surface; creepy or cool is all in the eye of the beholder.

 

[Three Putt]

Is it just me, or are TR's really doing over half the reviews these days on DGCR ? If so, of course they are going to look down at UDisc.

To me, DGCR goes in cycles.

When the thumb thing first showed up, I used to get PM's from people with the "Hey, I just thumbed up all your reviews, how about you do that for mine?" thing. I think the unique voter requirement came from that. Anyway, people were voting on a lot of reviews and a lot of people were hitting TR status. You had people who were averaging 8-10 votes/review, and that's a lot of activity.

The backlash was that idea that people were buying votes and the TR system was just a popularity contest, so TR's stopped voting on reviews like they had been. There was this "only vote if you have played the course" idea so even if I read and liked your review of a course in NC, I wouldn't vote on it since I've never been to NC. The voting slowed way down, and the number of people hitting TR status slowed way down.

Then after a bit we got a new generation of reviewers and they started asking why nobody was voting on these reviews. Nobody had a good answer, so they started voting again. A review that would have gotten 2 or 3 votes in 2015 will get 10 or 12 votes todays. More voting, more people reach TR status, more reviews written by TR's.

 

[aclay]

The problem is a much larger issue. In the vast majority of situations, people don't use anywhere near the entire range of scores/ratings, so DGCR is an exception in that regard. My family has a property we rent out through several sites; the rating scale is 1-5, but any rating below 4 is deemed a disaster, so in practice, the rating score is really 4-5 or perhaps 3-5. Completely different scenario (but sports related): Boxing judging uses a 10-point must system where the winner of a round receives 10 points and the loser gets less; in theory, rounds could be 10-1 or 10-2; in practice, 10-8 is considered a thrashing where the loser barely avoided being knocked out, and I've never seen a score as lopsided as 10-7. The same idea exists in gymnastics and figure skating. When was the last time you heard or saw a score below 9 (no matter the number of mistakes or falls) on a 10-point scale?