Your Game Review is Bad

[M$hot]

I mean, I could understand having a banner like the one for modder or dev or moderator that says 'trusted reviewer' or w/e and based on thumbs up their reviews have received. Can even have several ranks like 'liked reviewer' < 'trusted reviewer' < 'elite reviewer' or w/e all with their own requirements.

That said, this assumes people won't cheese it or figure out what gets likes, or only reviewing the most popular games to get most views on their reviews etc. Now you can balance that (If you are 1 out of 5 reviews your likes count for more than if you are 1 out of 1200 reviews or something) but that seems quite complex.

IMO, expectations tend to kill a lot of potential reviews. You expect an average game, hope it's not below average, appreciate if it's above average, but arguably 2-4 stars are expected experiences. So only when it is mindblowing or downright terrible is it worth reviewing. So I look at the tags, the images and the rating and if they don't match (The tags sound good, the renders are great, but the game is rated 2.8? Why?) I will check reviews. But if the rating is mostly in line I tend to roll the dice.

Earlier in my life I was a music reviewer, but as I got older I got both less patient and more longwinded, so I do like the 200 character minimum, some games simply can't inspire multiple paragraphs. And a lot of people have English as 2nd, 3rd or 4th+ language and I don't think it's fair to expect eloquent and well reasoned reviews from them even if they might have been capable in their native tongue.


TL;DR: There are ways to fix this but that still leaves the inherent problem that a lot of more reasoned reviews aren't written because they fall within the bellcurve of expectations.

 

[Bondage Queen]

Why are you even reading 0.1 reviews? Just try it out yourself?
What where you expecting from a 0.1 review? There is not enough content to rate it on anything other than if it has promise or not, it's missing almost all it's content because it's 0.1.

Because later on when the game is actually done or close to it, you have these reviews of the v0.1 version which have basically nothing to do with the game it actually became. And yet they affect the overall rating quite a bit.

 

[Deleted member 440241]

That said, this assumes people won't cheese it or figure out what gets likes, or only reviewing the most popular games to get most views on their reviews etc. Now you can balance that (If you are 1 out of 5 reviews your likes count for more than if you are 1 out of 1200 reviews or something) but that seems quite complex.

Another potential problem is mods deleting reviews. If you've got the banner and a mod deletes a review with 50+ likes do you lose the banner? Will having reviews deleted have an overall impact on how many likes you need to get the banner since it supposedly indicates you aren't following review rules? There are already issues with mods making up their own rules and deleting negative reviews for minor infractions that they'll just edit out of positive reviews. If this cost someone their reviewer rank people would be pissed enough to actually leave the site.

 

[morphnet]

That would be because downloading 0.1 is rarely worth it.

To at least inform me about how the inside of the game looks like.
Though 0.1's ain't even worth releasing, most of the time.

I agree with you 90%, you can kinda see what the game looks like from screenshots but OP said he'll flip out if he reads one more 0.1 that says it has promise, so why read them and do that to himself? Why not just not read it and download it and see for himself?

 

[jamdan]

Reviews by likes aren't a good metric. The large majority (if not almost all) of the big like count reviews are rants or distinctly negative. A lot of people like reviews they agree with, not if they're actually useful or not.

A reviewer rank should be given by the staff, not based on something like review stats. Maybe users can apply for it like they do uploader/mod roles.

We need better ways to sort reviews too. A lot of the .1 reviews are useless. So there should be a way to sort reviews by date and see the rating by date too. Also a way to view only reviews of a certain rating. I figure the average 2-4 star review are much better quality than the average 1 or 5 star review.

 

[checkker]

For me it makes the sort function by weighted ratings or by stars almost useless.

Games under development get so much more attention and reviews, just because updates are released frequently. Their rating is obviously inflated by the fan crowd. Thankfully we have a tag for "completed" and can search for completed games in the past x days.

Then, so many games get a high rating and have no real gameplay. Then, once a game has some gameplay, it gets downrated because, well, there is something to rate and it's not AAA gameplay.

Same for example real-time 2D/3D vs 2DCG/3DCG. The former is such a bigger undertaking, yet it gets downrated just because it's visually impossible to polish as much as with a static image. Thankfully we have tags.

I don't like VN, but many people do. So I use the exclude tag. But then, many remaining games still feel like VN. We should have a "wall of text" tag. If you make me read for more than 2-3 minutes without interactivity you get the tag. I prefer reading in full a short story to smashing the skip button, then trying to figure out WTF is happening.

 

[NeonSelf]

I don't like VN, but many people do. So I use the exclude tag. But then, many remaining games still feel like VN. We should have a "wall of text" tag. If you make me read for more than 2-3 minutes without interactivity you get the tag. I prefer reading in full a short story to smashing the skip button, then trying to figure out WTF is happening.

Any game, where most clicks are used to skip text instead of making actions should be labelled as VN.
In good games story is a reward for playing, not the other way around. For example, in resident evil I had to fight with zombies to get a few pages of some diary or short cutscene, that explains what's going on.

 

[j1mmy9999]

Excellent thread with some good ideas.

Some reviews are excellent and informative, but too many others don't understand - or can't judge objectively - where their review sits on the sliding scale between 1 star 'abysmal beyond redemption' and 5 star 'perfect, can't be improved'. I frequently see five stars awarded for games where the reviewer then goes on to list a load of problems or suggest improvements. Surely if the game has issues or can be improved then it can't be worth a maximum score; you can't score 100% on a test if you get some questions wrong. Also it leaves no way to recognise progress - say for argument's sake those improvements are made and the game is re-reviewed, what rating does it get now? 6/5?

Same for reviews where five stars is awarded solely to balance out older negative reviews the reviewer didn't like, that's just gaming the weighting system and is equally unhelpful to those of us wanting guidance on whether or not to give the game a try.

Don't mean to rant, but as someone professionally involved in QA, this gets me every time

 

[Atemsiel]

Excellent thread with some good ideas.

Some reviews are excellent and informative, but too many others don't understand - or can't judge objectively - where their review sits on the sliding scale between 1 star 'abysmal beyond redemption' and 5 star 'perfect, can't be improved'. I frequently see five stars awarded for games where the reviewer then goes on to list a load of problems or suggest improvements. Surely if the game has issues or can be improved then it can't be worth a maximum score; you can't score 100% on a test if you get some questions wrong. Also it leaves no way to recognise progress - say for argument's sake those improvements are made and the game is re-reviewed, what rating does it get now? 6/5?

Same for reviews where five stars is awarded solely to balance out older negative reviews the reviewer didn't like, that's just gaming the weighting system and is equally unhelpful to those of us wanting guidance on whether or not to give the game a try.

Don't mean to rant, but as someone professionally involved in QA, this gets me every time

Heh, I have some reviews like this. It's literally like "5 stars, but here's a list of everything I don't like about it."

I don't get it, but it's great from my perspective since high ratings are nice. It is odd though. I think what it comes down to is that some people don't leave reviews for the benefit of other potential players, but to encourage the dev to keep going. I think the unfortunate thing about any change to the review system that would affect the ratings people give is that unless it was somehow applied to existing games as well, it would really just make it even harder for newer games to compete with established titles with shitloads of existing high ratings.

That said, if the actual metric for 5 stars was "Cannot be improved" it would be a bit of a joke to give any game 5 stars really. I'd welcome 1- 10 scale instead, though I have no particular problems with the current review system. (Which definitely isn't because people keep giving me 5 stars for no reason xD No no, definitely not because of that.)

 

[j1mmy9999]

That said, if the actual metric for 5 stars was "Cannot be improved" it would be a bit of a joke to give any game 5 stars really. I'd welcome 1- 10 scale instead, though I have no particular problems with the current review system.

Yeah that's a fair point, the system would need to be much finer-grained to meaningfully distinguish between degrees of perfect (or anything else for that matter). It also wasn't really fair of me to make a comparison between something that can be objectively judged like a test, and something as subjective as personal taste. I stand by my comments about rating != review in some cases though. The star system ought to be an at-a-glance guide to quality, but because it's so inconsistently applied I tend these days to just ignore it and rely on the review content instead.

 

[HarveyD]

Why are you even reading 0.1 reviews? Just try it out yourself?
What where you expecting from a 0.1 review? There is not enough content to rate it on anything other than if it has promise or not, it's missing almost all it's content because it's 0.1.

If there isn't enough content to judge its quality how can anyone say it has promise?

5 Star "It has promise" reviews just inflate the game's rating and are useless. For the reader and the dev. I'd recommend not reviewing V0.1s at all but if people are going to there's still plenty they could say.

 

[Gabaw]

This thread sucks. 0 score out of a possible 0 score. Well done, max score!

 

[Grubb Raines]

Preform multiple choice reviews would likely result in more accurate averages. User reviews on any platform are so often skewed that relying on averages is largely defunct.

I'd rather see a timeline of download stats, closest thing to accurate would be a count on link clicks I suppose.