100% Only - You only rate with 5 stars if you'd rate with 100%.

95%+ - Mathematical rounding. You realise that when there are ten rating options of stars and half stars, anything rated at 95% or above equates to 10/10 or 5 stars.

Never - the nothing is perfect option. Not sure I've seen anyone here like this, but I have on Rate Your Music.

There is also an Other option just in case, although I'd like to think it won't be needed. 

Personally I use the second option. 

I tend to evaluate albums in rather strictly mathematical way, so I obviously went with B. I'm generally giving 5-star ratings really really seldom.

Agreed. It's easier to convert the other way around. i.e. 79%, 80% and 82% all round to a 4 star. But 85% rounds to a 4.5. Since I use decimal on Heavy Metal Haven, that's how I convert my scores to MMA's system in any case.

It's because of that therefore why I always have raised eyebrows when people score the same release so different on different sites or systems.i.e. write 9.2 in the text and give it five stars when 9.2 is clearly closer to a 4.5.

I work the other way.  Almost always rounding down.  Within the 4.5 area, I range from 89 to 94.  But 88 down to 79 is a 4.  I'd rather not give an album more credit than it really deserves.

 

Same here.

This 

I've never went with percentages, I just go with how I feel about the album and how good it sounds to me. I'll sometimes feel differently about albums and go back and edit or remake reviews, but that doesn't happen very often. 

 

I don't like ratings at all. Readers get lazy and just look at the rating, and writers often prejudge the rating and then write a review to fit it. I reckon if you can't figure out if something is any good or not just from reading the review, then either the reviewer has done a bad job or you're fucking thick. Metal Maniacs magazine used to have ratings free reviews, and it also had the best reviews. Coincidence?

I've been bitching about how bad ratings are for quite some time now, I guess some of our dear forum members may be already fed up with my one-man crusade  seriously though, I'm so glad to see you expressing a similar opinion :) I'd get rid of ratings entirely if I could... even though I admit that my views have evolved quite dramatically throughout the years. I tried to justify their existence but in the end I decided they have very few redeeming qualities.

Still, I don't give too many 5-star ratings. Not because I don't think those albums are perfect - nothing is perfect, after all, and sometime imperfections are what makes an album unique. I just rarely like something that much. 

Having a rating is useful, not so much for individual reviews, but for example, someone who didn't know much about death metal but wanted to explore it can look at the top list which of course is based on ratings.

Yeah, but what's the difference between a 99% album and a 100% album? And if you're going to have fractions, then why not have a 0-10 or 0-100 system? Why not 0-1000? Or 666? I've seen such systems. I tried to simplify things myself with a "Yes/Maybe/No" system (as in "is this worthy of my collection?"), but then found myself trying to justify partial ratings, like "yes, if you're completist, but otherwise, maybe..." or "maybe, but you'll only listen to it once or twice", so I gave up.

I like fucking with the rating system on Amazon. If something has lots of 5 stars and not many 1's, I'll go and give it a 1 on purpose, no matter what I think of it. I haven't done that here, because this is a METAL site.

At the end of the day, I'm a writer, and I want people to read and appreciate my genius at manipulating the English language. All writers ultimately want to be read, and those little rating things mean people stop reading.

Also, we just need a color based rating system where anything brown, yellow and green is bad; purple and pink is awesome and lilac is not bad. 

This.