Yeah, I can see it too. 4th or 5th review in the list. It's not been removed, it's still there.

Having it displayed for everyone to see doesn't do your image any kind of service, though. One staring a game because you think old games should more or less be free. On GOG. With nothing said about the game itself. Don't be surprised if some Korean spambots get better ratings than your "review".

Actually his and other pricing reviews were not visible before. Basically they aren't reviews strictly since they just complain about the price and don't review the game.

This has happened to me as well a couple of times. Maybe the review has to be of a certain length ?

I wrote a short review of Volgarr the Viking, only rating it 2/5 because I thought the controls were quite bad.
I did not write anything offensive in the review, I mainly wrote that the game was more or less unplayable to me because of the clunky controls, which I think is a valid argument considering it is platforming action game.

Other times I have written negative reviews but they have still gotten through. Its perplexing.

GOG does seem to screen the reviews, which is good for excluding profanity, I certainly don't want the review section on GOG to turn into the same ugly monstrosity we see on Steam and Metacritic. However rejecting reviews that are not offensive is not OK. So if you don't agree with the majority your viewpoint is completely invalid. So much for individualism and freedom of speech. We are just sheep following dogma, ...'just kneel to the cross on the wall'....


Dude, the majority of reviews on GOG are 'vague 22 year old memories and not the GOG release'.

It wasn't even "22 yo vague memories", it was 1 star because a 1993 18mb game is apparently not worth 5.99$, with not one word about the game itself. You can check it on the game page, it's still (or again?) there in all its glorious stupidity...

Bad idea. One, review templates make for intrinsically bad reviews, even made with actual effort. Two, they won't prevent zero-effort "critics". They'll just fill the template with stupid crap.

Bad reviews are a cultural issue. I blame facebook. People do actually think they're entitled to host their personal opinions on any platform; the attitude here is "don't like it, don't read it", and the only restriction is thematic. The concepts of community and audience are lost on them. There was a recent post indicative of this frankly abhorrent trend, something to the tune of "GOG should have separate rating scales for gameplay, plot, graphics, music and such because sometimes you just want to leave a quick review (...)".

So a review template will invite and legitimize these zero-effort posts; it'll suggest that is welcome and even explicitly requested.

(This is the best non-troll review I know of. It is, of course, negative.)

Relevant.

That comic is so terribly wrong. Because non-government institution are still capable of censoring speech, if they become powerful enough. The same way that feminists try to censor media by applying "moral pressure" and try to coerce creative artists or their publishers into censoring their own work because it's "sexist" or whatever.

Under that definition of censorship, a society could be completely dominated by private corporations, these corporations could own everything and prevent any citizen from campaigning politically or handing out pamphlets because there's no public spaces. But under that definition this wouldn't be censorship because ~the government~ isn't doing it.

That is not the argument I was replying to though.

Navagon's complaint was that the OP's review might have been based on "22 yo vague memories", that is what Navagon complained out. And it is this that I replied to, saying that most reviews on GOG are not based on the current GOG game versions.

As the sole programmer in a law firm's office, I would like to file for defense of casuals with the court.

A typical "casual" doesn't care about the release date. While there are popularity trends, the primary causes here are hardware issues and massive advertising of new casual titles through social networks. People play what's popular and compatible with their current device. PC users can and do stick with their Zuma / Bejeweled / Solitaire / Lines for ages.

Second, they don't care about file size (they can grasp download time and the concept of running out of storage space, but different methods of data exchange -- broadband, 3g, wifi, remote drives, cloud storage, flash drives, and streaming movies on top of that -- blur all lines) and might not even know what a file is.

TL;DR he's a "new geek" obsessed with statistics who wouldn't know a normal distribution if it bit him in the ass. Otherwise, agreed.

What's the point of having a review section when it simply becomes a popularity contest ?
We are reviewing a product after all, something to be used, and not some religious or political doctrine.

Its funny how some people on GOG are so protective of freedom of speech when it comes to the whole Gamergate/SJW affair but so nonchalant about it in all other areas.

It seems principles are a matter of convenience.

Maybe it was voted as some sort of spam.

What did you write in your review? Did you give some reasonable reasons for your negative rating? Was it maybe just a few words? Anything inside that could be judged as a mere polemic rant than a proper review? In short: could you re-post the review here maybe?

Not in this context. Here the comic is terribly wrong. GOG should not judge the content of the review in any way. Otherwise they will loose the trust of their customers. This would be a really ugly thing to do. GOG should only judge the form of a review and reject it solely on formal criteria.

Not sure if this is the case here.

If however GOG would arbitrarily manipulate the review section, they better close it right away. It would be totally worthless then.

That's why this here is rather not about free speech but much more about informative reviews. Wait. GOG doesn't check in the end?? If not, the whole review system is open to abuse.
Well this is just a not very helpful review. It should be at the end of the list, maybe even deleted although I would not do it.

Of course the size of a game has nothing directly to do with the content. The correlation to bad quality is only marginal. Now if he would have argued about small playing time, low quality of the game assets, general lack of [you name it], then it would have been useful.

I'm generally against quoting posts in full, but this should be preserved, because you're an intellectually dishonest and hypocritical idiot.

Popularity contests rate people. I'll leave it for better coders to compile stats, but no one gives the slightest fuck about the reviewer's username. But reviews are a community-oriented product. The review section is not your personal facebook wall. The question the site asks in connection with rating reviews is "Is this helpful to you?" Not "do you agree?".

There are no "principles". Principles are for lead paint eaters like you who can't think and use a primitive procedural surrogate. The review section, like everything on the site from the standpoint of the users, should assist videogame buying and playing. "Censorship" is a word for bad limits on speech, much like "discrimination" is a word for bad policies on treating different people differently. Locking murderers in prison is not discrimination against murderers, and deleting spam is not censorship.

Not allowing negative reviews: bad.
Not allowing certain (nonspam) users to post: bad.
Not allowing useless unhelpful shit, as decided by the actual consumers: good.

Freedom of speech is not violated, even if only reviews that end in three consecutive consonants are allowed. The government is not persecuting you for your thoughts, though a group in a privately owned website may be hostile against you. That is the relevance of said comic.