On the Dragon Star Award Official Website, after paying to read an entry, you got one chance to rate it.
Ten was the highest score, and one was the lowest.
But then again, because the Dragon Star Award hid entries' places of origin from fans when they rated them, fans from other provinces tended to give more measured scores.
Generally speaking, if a work scored below six, it was all but certain to end up at the bottom of the rankings among the hundred-plus entries.
If it scored between six and seven, it was more or less in the middle of the pack.
Seven to eight meant it was excellent.
And based on past years' experience, works that scored between eight and nine were strong contenders to make it through the first round.
As for scores above nine...
There had even been years when no work at all scored that highly in the Dragon Star Award.
Even Blazing Feather, which had already scored 9.0, still had a whole month of judging ahead of it. With more people rating it later on, whether it could maintain a score above 9.0 remained to be seen.
But this work...
Rurouni Kenshin: Trust and Betrayal.
A score of 9.8...
The rating nearly blinded Li Xing. The Dragon Star Award had been running for years, and if he remembered correctly, the highest final score ever given to a work by fans across all the provinces was only 9.4.
What kind of monstrous manga was this? 9.8?
Had the company behind it hired people to inflate its score?
It had happened before, but such cases had become rare in recent years. You could even say they had almost disappeared.
With the website requiring users to register under their real names and provide detailed information to link