Good morning. You bring up great points. That said, for obvious reasons we do not state exactly how the top 100 system works (we do not want to aid in people working the system). You can always see how someone rates if a game if they have their personal settings fixed to be seen by everyone...and being a “ratings expert” simply means the person rated a certain number of games...neither of those means their rating necessarily impacted a cumulative top 100 rating (but again, we will not give any details on that point...but know that Robin is pretty smart about how he approaches the top 100 ratings).

As a related aside, you’ll note from another thread recently that robin has been considering some changes to the top 100. I’m super enthusiastic about what he has been talking about and can’t wait to it when he gets a chance to implement it.

Hands down. The rating system may be flawed due to various biases of the people rating it, but once you find a half dozen or so Pinsiders who have similar taste to yours you can tell a lot about a game by how they review a game in their comments. I always enjoy reading the comments from players I know or have interacted with for years on the site.