An imaginary system I invented inside my on mind:

You click on a track, try it, and want to give it some sort of response, so here's what my imagination tells me might happen:
You won't click on an award-button, but instead a "Give feedback"-button. You are now obligated to write an at least 50 characters long message. This is essentially the same as an award, but would make the person grasp the concept of giving feedback easier.

At the end of this, they are also giving the option of rating the track. I don't think any numeral system would work on this, because if we were using 1-5, everyone would assume 1 was a bad rating. You can't argue against that, because it just doesn't feel like a good rating. Instead of this, make the person choose to give a bronze, a silver, or a golden award. I'm not sure what would be the best way to give a rating of this, might not even be a good idea, but I think symbols would be better than numbers. Even if the symbol represent a number, it would still be better I think.

Optionally, we could make giving feedback more complex, by making people rate the different parts of a track: "Scenery: 1-5", "Addicting: 1-5", etc. That would be similar to how people rate tracks in MTC, but integrated into MX.

me like o_O

Space says:
me like o_O

You're not criticizing anyone, get out of this thread
( We are ultimately having a discussion about too little feedback, and you're not really helping )

okay, let's talk some more ^^
in general I like the idea: builders will have "feedback" and "rating+feedback", but not only "rating". so it will be impossible just to "like" the track without giving feedback? or I'm missing smth? I'm not personally against writing some nice words (I'm even trying doing this in all my awards/comments) but other people will:
* just leave the trackpage if they're too lazy
or
* write some sh*t like "fghkjndfigblvfgbdfvhbgfdkjhbgfv" or "like like like +111111111111"
about 2nd point - moderators should take care of that. about 1st - impossible to make smth against that

(is my feedback useful/can I join the discussion? xD)

Basically, I like your idea, eie.

I'm not sure about such a character minimum though. I guess people who don't want to give detailed feedback for some reason will act the way Space described.

And I don't like the idea of splitting the feedback into different sections. This works for the MTC because there, you usually have a theme causing all tracks to have a certain style. So, it's easy to find feedback categories all submitted tracks would fit in. But outside this kind of contest, there are too many different styles that can neither be compared nor split into the same categories.

For a rating system, I'd say everything is fine as long as no average rating is calculated out of all positive feedback. Because this would always make low, but still positive votes appear as negative votes. (And then, we'd have the conflict if you should not rate the tracks you don't like at all or if you should rate them, just rather low.)

Actually, I'm not even sure if we need to have anything like awards or a track rating at all.
There's only one situation in which I look at the number of awards a track has got: When I find an author I like, and want to try his / her 'best' tracks. If we abolish any kind of award / rating system, we could instead let the author make a ranking out of his own tracks.Then, there'd be a search option 'Author's Preferences (Best)', which would show those tracks first that the author regards as his bests.
This would also mean lists like 'BOTW' or 'ATF' could not exist any longer - but to be honest, I don't see any point in these lists anyway.

Space says:
(is my feedback useful/can I join the discussion? xD)

Of course, this is a public forum =)

Ranking your own tracks sounds like a good idea actually, but might be hard to implement. Not sure ^_^

Other than that, you're both probably right, it would still be easy to abuse it, even with a character minimum, but I'm thinking it would be less likely to be abused than the one we're using at the moment. But I'm hoping people will still make the effort to write at least one sentence, maybe "I like this track really much, I had lots of fun driving it"(59) instead of just "Nice track"(10).

And I know it would be hard to implement such a system as the one used in MTC, but it could potentially make it easier for people to give feedback, and as I said, completely optional, so you wouldn't be forced to do it every time you award.

More ideas please, we really need more of them if we want to ensure that a future system would improve and change the way people think of feedback and rating. =)

eie says:
And I know it would be hard to implement such a system as the one used in MTC, but it could potentially make it easier for people to give feedback...

So, maybe a message like:

Please try to give the author detailed feedback, for example about Design, MediaTracker or Scenery.

(For some reason, I just don't like boxes. xD)

My small and unsignificant opinion:

don't remove the awards and don't force users to write feedbacks (especially with a minimum of characters).

Awards are what keeps this site still alive, and awards are the main goal of a lot of users, that are active at MX not only as forum members, but as competitive builders, that try their best to get awards.

In my opinion, a rating sistem in addition to the awards would be much better.

In other words, MX is like a second game, where you have to build and try all the ways to get awards and recognition by the comunity. People here fight for that, (at least the most of them), and removing the award sistem won't encourage more people to submit the maps here.

Ok you can say that not every builder upload here for recognition, but we can speak about groups:
-Massive mini builders, that upload a map everyday
-Users that upload a map every 2 weeks, and work hard on a map.

This last kind of user, have the main goal to get recognition inside the MX comunity.
It's up to the single user to "win" this climbing to the success.

You can say that many users are already famous, and that's not fair, but common, on everygame there are famous people that are more known than others.

eie says "I like this track really much, I had lots of fun driving it"(59) instead of just "Nice track"(10)

this is true but as i am bad in writing good long feedback or awards so sometime i write a short award like nice track i am not so creative in feedback and award

Sriver says: Again, the problem is that those ones who are not sure if they should give an award or not, would lower the rating if they award the track.

say a track has 10 awards and 4.5 in rating and someone rate this track 1 for some reason that won´t lower the rating so much just a little so the track gets a total of rating 4.1 or 4 ant that is not a bad score imo and 5 is a hard score to get (the rating will show the best tracks for sure and a track with 60 award and 4.8 in rating will not going down that fast it will take 10 1 rateing to get 0.2 maybe but an award is still an award its really up to the player to check rating or not

and without the overall rating this is useless imo

and if i test a track i feel the rate i want to give the track almost instant if its a five i will notice this and for you how like giving long award keep doing that its fun to read but as i sad earlier everyone isn´t an artist in writing

so easy with tm2 almost all tracks is fantastic and it take me about 2 minutes to know the score i want to give it if its an easy track ofc or else it take me more time ofc hehe even the fantastic lol track will hit the light some times ^^
i have awarded a few tracks and one of theme had a chance to get a 5 from me
that reminds me maybe even .5 steps in rating.....

btw i remember about games the first game that hit 100 in score was zelda and that is not many perfect game so hit 5 in rating want be easy and we all have diffrent opinion and taste

Motivation for Awarding
Everyone tends to have different motivations. Some people only award tracks which meet their standards for perfection. Some people award nearly every track they try, because they're very liberal about what they like. Others play a lot of maps and even like them, but are too lazy to award... or perhaps they've lost faith in the award system altogether and don't see it as an important thing. As long as they have their favorite authors and the maps to play, they're good to go. They'd rather spend time driving online and having fun than writing an essay about the finer points of track design.

My motivation behind awarding a track has always been very simple. If I had fun on it, I try to award it.

Length of Award Comments
Sometimes I feel like writing a lot. Usually I only feel like writing a few words. Sometimes I feel like only a smiley. In any case, the award itself is my way of giving a thumbs up to the author that they did some good work. After you've played and awarded thousands of tracks like me it's very hard to say something original, and I tend to want to say nothing at all rather than sounding repetitive.

Basking in the Glory of a Long Award
I think we all love to get a long award from time to time, especially from someone who knows track building really well. Some people would die to get even one of them.

I got some really nice long awards from Smok3y on my last Island tracks. I savored reading them because I really valued his opinion. I think it's clear some of us wish everyone wrote awards like that. But face the facts, not everyone will, nor should we expect them to, lest the award system fall into disuse from users who do not want to write lengthy awards, myself included.

Looking To the Future
I like the rating system MrA suggested some posts back in this thread. It could be a very interesting indicator of track quality. Ratings could turn the whole system on its head and give a lot more depth to the massive database of tracks we have already accumulated, and those thousands that are still coming. It would compliment the awards system quite nicely.