I already stated how this is regulated in my original post. It's in the 4th paragraph starting with "What I suggest is..."

As I already stated in at least two of my previous comments here, those people who 'reviewed' the games clearly stated they never bought game because of the price and only rated it based on the file size.

I cared enough to post it. You're not GoG, so I don't care if you don't care. ^_~

well this thread was unexpected.

I thought that you were going to harp on the nostalgia-filled 5 star review. honestly, even if the reviews which you are taking issue with are being unreasonable, I just think it's a nice counterbalance, given what's going on in a lot of other, usually higher rated reviews.

Reviews that only focus on the price are pretty clearly unhelpful, inasmuch as 1) I can see the damn price, it's right there on the store page, and 2) what if I'm trying to decide whether to buy the game on sale?

That being said, I think you're proposing a somewhat elaborate solution to a fairly minor problem; most games have enough reviews that noise like that shouldn't have much influence.

I agree with what you and the other member who posted about the same thing are saying. Actually, my feedback here will apply to that as well.

How this works is that if 'reviews' have vast amounts of unhelpful down votes, then the rating for that 'review' gets discounted towards the overall score of the game.
Yes that's true, but my suggestion on how to mitigate my minor issue helps against other sorts of unhelpful reviews as well. What my suggestion means is that unhelpful review scores discount toward the overall score of the game.

You're getting worked up over nothing. There's no such thing on GOG as an average review score, only the average user score. You can rate the game without posting a public review. As such, reviews, including those many people would rather not see ("i liek it" or "best gaem evar nuff said" or "too expensive"), don't matter where the score is concerned.

Low-quality review content is a separate issue. However--

--setting the helpfulness cutoff high enough that one-line reviews disappear also censors, for example, detailed negative reviews for fan-favorite games (such as Baldur's Gate and To The Moon).

Should there be more quality control? Yes. Should it have anything to do with the score of the review in question or the helpfulness rating? No and... yes, but it should only count the raw number of "helpful" votes to fight blatant spam.

The only thing I'd add is a way to separate reviews of people who bought the game on GOG from those who haven't, and possibly the score for them.

The game reviews are completely gameable. In order for reviews to be even remotely accurate they need to be moderated by someone unbiased for starters and not just computer software allowing anyone to post anything they want. Then people need to actually PLAY the games, preferably for a significant amount of time and then preferably write a reasonable well balanced professional review about it being as unbiased as possible. That just doesn't jive well with the average gamer or consumer however. Anyone-can-post-anything without being accountable reviews are open to abuse of many forms, and that includes someone badmouthing a game simply because they dislike the company that made it or something even if they've never played it before, or the reverse, someone praising the game endlessly who has never played it. There's no way to know. Someone might own the game on GOG or on Steam or elsewhere and write a review that is legitimate and software can confirm they own it, or they might have it in their account and never installed it before. So there is no way to automatically confirm they even own it and played it that is accurate.

Not only do you need unbiased honest reviews from people who have actually played a game, but you need a certain number of such people to do so in order to get accurate statistically useful results, and a way of preventing abuse either completely or at least to minimize it to a small percentage. The day someone figures out how to code that into computer software or even for a human moderator to figure out if someone is being completely legitimate or not is the day they'll cure all known diseases and end world hunger at the same time.

Online game and other product reviews are just not reliable indicators of product quality, and most of them are highly subjective. We are all individuals with tastes that vary wildly, and what one person hates another loves. I've found both star ratings and written writeups to be of generally crap quality all around when it comes to games, movies and just about everything else on every website. One can debate ways to improve it via better software or other mechanisms (such as moderation) but it absolutely is impossible to really tackle the root problem whichi s that people are highly biased and intentionally try to push their agendas out there to either popularize something they like or to crush something they dislike by using all manners of covert dishonest means and there isn't really anything anyone can do about it other than to not put much weight into what reviews and ratings say or at least not allow them to be a sole deciding factor in decision making.

It's nice if the software for such review/rating systems gets smarter to avoid spam and obvious crap posts, but the end result is a system that is ultimately gameable with fake commentary/ratings and always will be. Look at Jack Keane 2 for example. People flooded it with good reviews who never even played the game before just in hopes that people would read the good reviews and it would help the game sell faster to end the grueling 7 hour Insomnia sale on the game which was dragging on forever due to slow sales. Some of those reviews are obvious fakes, but others appear to the average person as a completely legitimate review and we only know it is fake because the people that posted them admitted to it largely in the forums.

Summary: Onine reviews and ratings are bogus, treat them with a grain of salt, ignore and do your own research with friends/contacts and google instead to widen the dataset. Even then there's never a guarantee our own personal opinions on a given game/product after owning it will match the results of our research into whether or not to buy something. There's always the dud factor looming out there... :)

Voted for all of these, thanks for the links. It's surprising that such a crucial feature has so few votes.

It valid point to make that a game is too expensive and didn't worth the money.

If you want more meat on the review it would be a good idea to set a minimum amount of characters for a review.

^^^ The thread should be over with this post. I never realised the user score is unrelated to the written user reviews!

I seldom read game reviews on here, but if I see more than a few articulate three-star reviews, something is very wrong with that game. I can learn more about the quality of the game by quickly scanning the first few pages of that game's subforum. For great games there will usually be many pages in that subforum, with a high number of "gushing praise/review" threads.

On the other hand, many indie/great games have had very little activity in their respective forums.