Only way to fix this is to restrict rankings to buyers and professional critics, and even then, the ratings will be skewed higher than normal, since those in the former group will tend to overrate anything they have bought, as a way to justify and feel good about the purchase.

I agree. I give this suggestion 5 stars.

Edit: Someone beat me to it :(.

The reviews section is a forsaken land. Between the three-words reviews, the links to websites with awesome deals on fucking shoes and the lack of filtering tools, I personnaly stopped to give a damn about reviews.

Now considering ratings (what people think about a game and what they think about other's thoughts), I abandonned that ship looong ago :
When I first joined here, I got my hands on fallout : tactics and decided it was worth a review. In my memories, I did my review on the multiplayer aspect of the game mainly and just said I agreed with most of the other reviews regarding the campaign and rpg side (or lack of ) of things. Last time I checked, a throng or so of guys found my review not helpful, I decided to stop giving my insight on the under aopreciated aspect of games I like.

On the other hand GOGmix are great.

I mentioned another alternative before but it wasn't really getting any attention: comparing two similar games and saying which is better or worse.

This way you have an automatic normalization because for every game that get's an uptick, another gets a downtick. So nobody can overrate anything. Also I think comparing games (maybe within categories like: gameplay, effects (music, graphics), technical stability) is the smartest thing to do if you want to find out which games are the best and which games are the worst.

Implicitly we do it already when giving 4 stars to game X and 5 stars to game Y.

They still exist?

Because of the same reason this thread was created, I'm actually more interested in games that get less than four stars, such as the two linked above. I have Isuka, but not played it yet. How many games on GOG are there that are three-and-a-half-stars or less, anyway?

I've gotten quite a few responses like this and I certainly agree, to a point. It is very much common knowledge that you shouldn't base your purchases just on the user reviews. Certainly not. I find a game I'm interested in and I look it up on Google and YouTube, then I make a choice. Simple enough.

But think about this for a second. First off, this kind of screws anyone new to the site who is looking at a page for the first time. They'll think the game they just randomly clicked on is the best thing ever, I mean, look at all the love. Secondly, it's a little sad. I wanna hear about game features from actual gamers who actually played that game not just "WOO!" or "Boooo!". Y'know?

Lastly I'd just like to say that I know I'm not gonna get what I want here. I'm really just trying to bring it up and maybe discuss it with others who feel the same way. I think people should say when they love something and everyone has the right just blast away about how much they enjoy their games. I'm not a pro game reviewer either but I can still point out good and bad features when I see them, I dunno.

(sorry if it seems like I'm picking on you specifically, uchristensen. I used your comment because it brought up some good points :)

Yup. You can make them through this link, and you can see the GOGmixes of other people while browsing games that you can buy.

Make your GOGmix!


Total Biscuit's definitive list of strategy games

Trilarion, I see two problems with that approach:

The first is that someone (or several someones) have to go through the entire catalog and figure out which games are 'similar' to which other games (and subsequently keep that list maintained), which is a judgement call in many cases and will be difficult to do with niche games or those that cross game types or genres enough to be 'similar to' a range of otherwise not-very-similar ones.

The second is that some games/series/companies have large, established fanbases who will up-vote those things (at the expense of everything else), turning the system into a better measure of player numbers than game quality.

I see the points. Possible ways to make them less severe could be:

Let users compare every game with every other game, but only count the comparison that most of the users make, like displaying the 10 most made comparison sorted by number of times they were compared and only calculate the ranking based on the three most often made comparisons. So the staff doesn't have to do anything and the users make all the work and as a byproduct you get a list of similar games. The reason is that I hope that most users don't want to compare apples with peaches in their freetime.

Sure some games have large fan bases. It's in the nature of an open rating system that these fan bases can influence 'their game' heavily. But my feeling is that this would always be the case. But maybe there would be a way to count negative votes less, like giving them a lower weight and still come up with a useful ranking. But if these hyped games are on top of the ranking than I would say that the result is as expected. Maybe it would be useful to restrict ranking to genres or only make local rankings, a la: based on user comparisons we can rank this game and five similar games and three similar games the second generation (similar games of similar games) which is in total about 21 games, but don't ask us to rank all the games because this ranking would be meaningless.

The GOG version has worked perfectly fine on my two Windows 7 systems. Yeah, but whatever. <.<

And seriously, what's wrong with you? "Oh my God, people are giving 5 stars out of nostalgia!" "Oh my God, people aren't behaving like professional reviewers when writing a user review!" "Oh my God, someone wrote an extensive review and explained why he loves that game but I DON'T AGREE SO HE'S WRONG! NO COMPATIBILITY!!!!1111"

You're not gonna change how everyone rates and reviews game, it's YOUR job to understand how to interpret reviews.

This.

There's a lot of troll-ware getting spat out nowadays.

Out of 140 games GOG has had only three flunkies with me...one recently with Wizardry 6 & 7.

A lot of other shops out there however are selling crap that either has one permanently set resolution, broken game pad compatibility and many other complacency's.

The developers pick up and run and we're just left to reviews to avoid getting screwed yet again.

But i haven't found many overglorified reviews for crap...I just haven't been finding any reviews at all as if entirely everyone else is one step smarter than me and didn't even bother to access the store page for the game in question.

Owners of the game should post reviews since they bought them. We don't need professional critics since they rarely have to buy the game in order to review it.