How do you rate a game when you completely hate one aspect of the game but really enjoy the other? (example: story/gameplay)

This is a little simplified, but essentially true: I rate games on how much I enjoyed them. If I happen to submit my rating to some mass accumulation of ratings then it'll help to create an overall impression of how much everyone has enjoyed the game on average. If someone comes along who cares a lot about story then they want to read a review of the game, especially of its story. If I write a review for a game then I'll try to include different aspects of the game in the review. At this point it doesn't really matter what my overall rating is so much as it matters what information I reveal about the game. It doesn't even matter much whether I like the story or not so much as it matters to point out to the reader that the game contains outlandish writing and obnoxious voice acting, or something of that nature. If I'm working for a company then I provide an overall rating anyway because that attracts readers which leads to money for my employer which leads to money for me (hopefully).

When I rate how much I like something (almost always purely to myself), it's based on feelings and intuitions. As far as I'm aware there isn't a science to rating personal preferences accurately. If anything, science has shown how inaccurate we can be in assessing what we like. The best I can do is just go with my gut feelings, or maybe keep a journal on the game. If a game has a story I don't like then it'll matter how much I care about story to begin with, how much the story bothered me, to what extent I could compensate for this, and so on. For example if the story is laughable to me then that might be better for my enjoyment than a bland story. If the story is easily ignorable and I don't care about story much then it won't factor in. If the game is filled with unskippable cutscenes and dialogue that I find annoying then it'll detract from my enjoyment of the game.

For me Borderlands 3 was a slight positive with dialogue/voice/story. I found it amusing, and the oddity of campy chipper characters combined with a hellish world only added to my amusement. The gameplay was pretty enjoyable to me but got repetitive after a while, although I really appreciated the level design for a while where I kept feeling like I had to make use of some kind of playground to survive and kill enemies.

Now this is what I mean about my ratings being not quite as simple as how much I enjoy a game. Sometimes I enjoy games less across the board. So sometimes when I rate a game I try to give it a rating based on how much some "standardized version of me" would enjoy the game. For Borderlands 3 it's a 6.5/10 for me, but in absolute terms it was probably more like a 3/10. For that matter Dark Souls is a 1/10 in absolute terms for me right now, even though it's one of my favorite games and I'd give it a 10/10. So rating your preferences can get complicated, as you've alluded to here with dialogue/story vs. gameplay. I would have an overall rating based on how much you liked the game, and then a kind of tree of contingencies branching out from there. And for a review that others read just try to effectively communicate the whys of what you say, so that they can appreciate it even if their preferences differ.

/r/truegaming Thread