Star buckets on the play canvas
16 October 2026 · protocol · 3 min read
Every card on the 16 October 2026 pass prints one star average and, further down, five bucket counts. This note is about keeping both, and about not forcing the buckets to add up to the rounded total in the header.
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Step 1. Copy the header average as the figure the rank card uses
Mindustry is 4.5 from 139K reviews. Shattered Pixel Dungeon is 4.8 from 173K reviews. Brawl Stars is 4.2 from 26.1M reviews. Subway Surfers is 4.5 from 41.5M reviews on the header, with a separate control that says 4.6. The bars on the homepage use 4.5, 4.8, 4.2, and 4.5 because those are the header averages. The bar length is that average divided by five. A 4.8 bar is longer than a 4.2 bar. That drawing is arithmetic, not a recommendation.
Review totals are rounded on the card (139K, 173K, 26.1M, 41.5M). The easel does not expand them into exact integers.
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Step 2. File the buckets as a second instrument
Mindustry’s buckets read 101,755 / 9,420 / 4,769 / 4,173 / 8,824 from five stars down to one. Shattered Pixel Dungeon’s read 144,002 / 10,510 / 2,304 / 2,135 / 3,669. Brawl Stars’ read 16,039,533 / 1,657,386 / 724,959 / 555,221 / 3,596,621. Subway Surfers’ read 29,511,113 / 3,747,406 / 1,268,920 / 556,133 / 2,134,069. Each of those integers comes from an aria label on the ratings block the day we looked.
Adding a row does not always land on the rounded header total. The easel does not “fix” the header, and it does not hide the buckets. A reader who wants one number uses the header. A reader who wants the shape of the ratings uses the buckets. Both are dated 16 October 2026.
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Step 3. Do not turn a bucket into a quality story
A tall one-star bucket on a very large game is still a count of reviews Play displayed. It is not a measurement of sessions, crashes, or whether purchases felt fair. The content-rating lines already say different things — Fantasy Violence alone, mild blood, crude humor, random items — and those lines are the place for content, not the star row.
If a later check finds a new average, the bar moves in a new note. This note keeps the buckets from being rounded away just because they are inconvenient next to “139K”.
Subway Surfers is the awkward case because the page showed 4.5 in the header and 4.6 in another control. The chart does not average those into 4.55. It uses the header. The other figure lives only in that app’s own check, where the conflict was visible.
What to expect in each app check is one header average used on the rank card and one unedited bucket line in the first step. The homepage chart uses only the averages.