A big potential problem i can see is that people just wont use it properly. If people disagree with a reviewers final score, for whatever reason they will vote down. Thats just how it is I'm afraid.
like it or not adam does have a very good point all you little hooligans.
i wouldnt go to the extent of being able to 'rate' the review, but something as little as like imdb.com 's "did you find this comment useful or not" system is very effecting. if quite a few people write 10 star reviews for a movie yet more than half of the readers found them "not helpful", i might not bother watching the movie.
and clubby, although liji WAS provoking, he wasnt completely off topic.
I like cecil's idea. However, anything involving human input can be abused.
Personally, I think after reading a couple reviews, you can tell who you can trust and who you can't. Take Shroomlock for example, I trust every word that he writes.
The "did you find this review useful?" thing is a good idea. And then the amount of yes and no's to this question could be added up and displayed next to each person's names when they post new reviews. If a review by Joe Bloggs scores 1/10 and his review rating is yes=1 no=100, it is quite clear that alot of people disagree with his reviews.
How would that stop people from posting comments like these on joke-reviews (See Adam's links)?
"zomg this is so funny
User Rated: "
or
"Haha this game is lame
User Rated: "
I said it before, there's no bug fix for human stupidity.
You're trying to fix something that is impossible to balance. There's no review or rating system that can accurately measure the quality of anything based on people opinions. Overrating and underrating are matters of opinion, and giving people power to "correct" what they see as an unfair tilt on the scale in either direction is a bad idea. Of course there will be extreme examples, but leaving reviews of bad reviews won't make them go away. If someone wants to cause trouble, they won't be intimidated by the possibility that you may leave a negative comment about their bogus review. You could make a system of dictating who gets to review and who doesn't, but there would be just as much controversy about that system too, and that system would be open to just as much personal opinion as the reviews themselves. Any system of reviewing can be abused, even professional ones. Ebay has gone through major changes lately because their review system was being used to blackmail people.
Leaving reviews of reviews may sound like it would work But what will you do when you write a good review or read a review you completely agree with, then someone gives that review a thumbs down or rates the review as 0 stars? Will you start another thread to review the reviews of reviews? The bottom line is that if everyone had their way, they would tweak the review system so that the final outcome would reflect their own opinion perfectly.
All the admins can do is weed out the ridiculous, which they do. Anything else is just opinion, even if it's biased (which all opinions are to some degree). It hurts, but people need to realize that their opinion always equals 1, no matter how right they think they are, and no matter how wrong they thinks everyone else is. You want to change the system so that "reasonable people"'s opinions can equal 1.5 or 2 in order to bring balance to the DC. But in doing that, you'll upgrade the power of everyone else as well, which puts everyone back to 1.
Liji, yeah i agree it wouldn't be able to stop people writing crap like the (good) examples you made, but atleast we wouldn't have to waste our time reading these rubbish types of reviews if loads of people gave it thumbs down. Then maybe these people might get bored and stop posting them. And people won't be put off with good games with bad reviews because they can see how inaccurate the reviews have been.
Originally Posted by Mark Radon Liji, yeah i agree it wouldn't be able to stop people writing crap like the (good) examples you made, but atleast we wouldn't have to waste our time reading these rubbish types of reviews if loads of people gave it thumbs down. Then maybe these people might get bored and stop posting them. And people won't be put off with good games with bad reviews because they can see how inaccurate the reviews have been.
People hardly comment on downloads and hardly rate them (Unless very popular), I don't think many people will actually rate reviews...
Well, the best way is getting more reviews, so the quality reviews outweigh the bad ones, but that's hard with a limited userbase (how many downloads does an average game get here? And of those, how many bothers leaving a rating let alone write a review?)
Maybe just drop the reviews altogether, except for specific nominated reviewers. Problem is we would get much less reviews that way.
- Ok, you must admit that was the most creative cussing this site have ever seen -
I think there is a good chance that people on this site, who care about good games in the download section, will go out of there way to giv thumbs-down to stupid or biased reviews that are unfair to hard-working Klikers. And i believe this because of the number of people on this thread requesting such a feature.