ProtonDB now has separate tabs for easier browsing of Steam Deck or PC reports. You can also view a combined tab that includes reports from both.
Both categories can be pretty useful, but some game fixes can only be found in the PC section. A lot of the PC report creators are more experienced Linux users and know of fixes that may not show up in the Steam Deck section.
From the very beginning, I have always believed that the design of protondb has been consistently and unequivocally terrible. Despite acknowledging the ingenuity of its idea, I cannot shy away from emphasizing the consistent shortcomings of its design.
The overall design isn’t terrible imo, but the previous system of having Deck reports stacked on top of PC reports was really poor.
Even the owner of the site has admitted he wouldn’t use that rating system if he did it all over again. It’s terrible. “Gold” is wildly variable. Check out Grand Theft Auto V. Hundreds of people having often game breaking issues, yet it’s rated “Gold.” Even “Platinum” games frequently require tweaks and experience issues. Whoever is in charge of rating, or whatever the algorithm, is misleadingly optimistic.
The rating is calculated by the report of the users, there is no manual rating done. GTAV works for most people, but some, so it ends up being Gold.
However, these Medal ratings are carried over from the WineHQ rating, when ProtonDB was nothing more than a spreadsheet on Google Docs and was also used when Ratings were considered by the reporters itself. But this turned out to be a bad idea, as people tend to give platinum ratings, despite naming issues in their reports.
So the attempt was to remove the manual rating and instead ask the users about their experience with several talking points and consider by that a rating. This would still use the old medal system, which of course does not work well for such system. That’s why a new tier system, which is more a representation between very good and very bad, was created, and you can see it on the dashboard (Change the Rating System to ProtonDB Click Play). However, this was considered as an internal test, but then the main developer was pulled away from ProtonDB for other work and all went basically to a hold.
Now the developer is back at work on ProtonDB and this will hopefully lead to a new and better rating system.
I hope this will shed some light on why it is what it is, and that no one is really happy about it.
Source: I’m one of the administrators on the ProtonDB discord.
I actually don’t care about the gold / silver ranking system. That’s not even my concern. During the rise of proton, all I wanted was the required version of proton, any command arguments, possible game folder alterations required to play the game and a pinned version number of the game it worked for. I found fixes for multiple games early on and tried posting multiple times and I think maybe one went through. People were posting incorrect and dangerous fixes. It was a mess. It is a mess.