We at Hardstyle Mag are always thinking of new ways to improve our content, to make it more readable, find new ways to present it and use different media. If you go back into the history of our articles, you’ll find that we once had a rating for events. The rating used for the event review consisted of three categories with a rating from 0 – 100% and an overall rating. We found, this rating was inaccurate the more events we visited. With Qlimax we introduced a completely new rating – read, all about our new rating-system for events. We’ll explain how it works, what the categories are, how we differ events and how you should interpret the valuation.
How it works
As a first step, we needed so separate the different events and put them into categories. A party within a nightclub is definitely not comparable with a party in a huge venue. The most obvious step is, to separate events by their size (Amount of Visitors). We know, that you could probably find way more ways to split events. You could categorize them into outdoor and indoor, one-stage-events or multi-stage etc.
But to give a quick overview about the event and its facilities a separation by size should be fine. Our new Rating system therefore differs between four sizes: Grand Events, Medium Sized Events, Small Events and Club Events. For each size, we thought of different rating categories. Again, we can give a percentage from 0% – 100%. The average of all rated categories is the final and overall rating.
To point out really good aspects, to boost really good events, the reporter and therefore the writer can give extra points. Up to three times he is allowed to give an additional 100% rating for everything he has in mind or he thinks is worth 100%. There are no limits. The reason is, to underline great aspects an event offered, to visualize the greatness of one specific set or to point out aspects we cannot cover with all other categories. The additional (max.) 3 x 100% are added to the average.
In all cases, our rating will never fully display the experience of an event. You should always understand it, as a supportive role to our main review text. Also, always keep an eye on previous editions, events of the same size and organizer, or if it’s outdoor or indoor!
Club Events
Visitors: doesn’t matter
Rating Categories:
- Overall Rating
Club Events mark the first instance. It doesn’t really matter how many people visited the event, as long as it took place within a club. The possibilities are limited and a stage is not comparable with a one you could realize in a big venue. The overall feeling is the focus, therefore we decided to give Club Events just an overall rating.
Small Events
Visitors: up to 7.500
Rating Categories:
- Line Up
- Show
- Service
The next step are Small Events. Either indoor or outdoor, these events are categorized as Small Events with an amount of visitors up to 5.000. To rate the event, we took the three original categories from the past.
Medium Sized Events
Visitors: Up to 20.000
Rating Categories:
- Line Up
- Show
- Organization
- Ticket-Price/Performance Ratio
- Service/Extras/Prices
The next stage mark Medium Sized Events. It was actually quite hard to draw a line between Grand Events and Medium Sized Events, especially related to the visitors. We didn’t want to compare Qlimax (which obviously marks a Grand Event) with Supremacy for example. On the other side, we wanted to include really special Events and Events which are the biggest in its music genre, like Master of Hardcore, to count to Grand Events.
Grand Events
Visitors: > 20.000
Rating Categories:
- Line Up
- Show
- Stage
- Decoration
- Sound
- Organization
- Ticket-Price/Performance Ratio
- Services/Extras/Prices
Grand Events mark the biggest events we have in the scene. Just think of Qlimax, Defqon.1, Dominator, Hard Bass, Decibel, Intents Festival etc. These events probably offer the most opportunities to differ between several categories such as stage & decoration. Of course, organizer have more capacity for these events, which means they can possibly offer more to the visitors. With ticket prices up to 120€ it just makes sense to dig a little deeper when rating the event.
So, that’s our new rating system! We hope the categories are self-explaining! The new rating will be applied to all upcoming events. You can filter the reviews in the section “Reviews” by these ratings, as well as follow the Tags to get a full list of similar events.