Reviews - MobyGames

JMM (352) on 5/19/2017 12:14 AM · Permalink · Report

One of the things I like to do is to write reviews, when I'm in the mood, but the last 3 have been written by me, and I don't want to be the only one. Looking at numbers, in the last 20 days only 9 reviews have been approved, and e.g. for Windows games only about one fifth of them have user reviews.

I am aware that the priority on MG is documenting games, but reviewing and rating a game is also good to get a feel of how the game was, beyond the description and without having to do research. On the other hand, writing a review can be lengthy, because first you have to play the game (and maybe your memories from 20 years ago aren't enough). But while playing the game for doing the review, you can also take screenshots, that's a plus. Maybe we'd need a bunch more gamers in MG, looking at it from this perspective.

So, what would be your suggestions for this part of MG, often overlooked? Maybe a MobyGoal 'no 1988 game without a review'? Double bonus points with strawberry ice-cream if you submit a review, rate a game, and submit screenshots all at once?

Simon Carless (1834) on 5/19/2017 4:33 AM · Permalink · Report

I've made a spirited pitch in the past for one or two-paragraph reviews so people might post more of them, but this has been somewhat controversial :)

In general, there are plenty of other ways to talk about games nowadays that I think people see reviews as outdated - they also require good command of English, which is historically an issue with many of our contributors who otherwise are giving us great quality data.

So I definitely see reviews as a bit of a 'leftover' from the old days of MobyGames, and it seems contributors see it similarly. But it's nice when people post them!

vileyn0id_8088 (21040) on 5/19/2017 8:27 PM · Permalink · Report

Well, how would you 'talk' about games without requiring good command of some language? Let's Play videos with someone grunting over game footage wouldn't quite do the trick, even if they do somehow make people into youtube celebrities.

I don't really abhor the idea of short reviews (if anything, that would be a throwback to the old days of MobyGames, since the earliest reviews published here tended to be very, very short) -- but they definitely should not be scored the same as "proper" reviews.

I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that people see reviews as outdated. Actually, I'd hazard a guess that they feel less of an incentive to write them, since the return on effort is minimal (point-wise) and the results are buried too far down the main page to be visible. But I'm not a review writer myself, mind you, just watching from the sidelines. :p

Cavalary (11445) on 5/19/2017 10:23 AM · Permalink · Report

Just approved another last night, had been in queue since March 12 (and hadn't checked the queue since, but there was no other last night at least), so now last 3 are no longer just yours :p

And I'll just keep growling at the idea of quick reviews like that approved as actual reviews. Rejected a few that barely had one or two lines per section, and for those that barely have a paragraph per section I frown and mentally swear but grudgingly approve with 1 point and a note that I do it under protest because someone else will approve them if I don't anyway. Gah.

And I'll get back to my previous suggestions for reviews.
1. Make a separate comment or whatever submission category, to show up on the user ratings page, maybe with an upper character limit (say 2000 characters?), that don't go through approval process and are rewarded with half a point, so basically a way for everyone to justify their rating.
2. Overhaul the scoring for the proper reviews to incentivize writing serious ones, simplify the reward choices for approvers, but also not overreward existing poor/too short ones. Three quality options, fair, good and outstanding, good adding 5 points and outstanding 10 (fair not adding anything), plus add a word counter and have the base score as 0.25 points per 50 words (rounded down). Minimum of 200 words (added together in all 3 sections), for 1 point, submitter not being allowed to submit shorter ones as proper reviews and getting a message asking them to decide whether they want to write more or just submit it as a comment. Maximum word count reward, 10 points for 2000+ words, for 50/50 with quality. I'd also strongly argue for the "outstanding" quality option to be disabled at least for reviews under 500 words, if not for those under 1000. (Conversion of current scores: 1-2=fair (0), 3-4=good (5), 5=outstanding (10))
3. This will require time and also code changes, so just to consider for the longer term, but maybe have a "featured MobyGames review" option for each game. Only a single review per platform per game may be picked and only out of those rated as outstanding. Pick may be changed when a new "outstanding" review is approved, but not by the approver. Maybe approver can request and there will be a vote by a group of users who are more invested in the reviews side, whether the featured one should be changed to the new one or not (or, if first proposal, whether it should be selected at all or it's not quite good enough for that after all). I'd say no additional reward for this, so points won't move back and forth if it changes, but have these reviews be displayed proeminently, both on game page and otherwise on site, separate category for them, sort of have it as the official MobyGames review of [game].

As for MobyGoals, heh, you'll get told only X games per platform can be goals :/

JMM (352) on 5/19/2017 12:08 PM · Permalink · Report

Your ideas look nice. Definitely the word counter while writing would be helpful for the reviewer. A reminder of 'if your review is less than XXX word it can't be submitted' or similar, could also be good in the long term.

As for the idea of a featured review per game, it's awesome.

Tracy Poff (2094) on 5/20/2017 9:52 PM · Permalink · Report

For the scoring stuff, I don't really want to rehash here the whole discussion from last time we tried to increase the point value of reviews, but: I agree that it would be good for high-quality reviews to score more points. Perhaps in the future we can work out a better scoring mechanism that will suit everyone, but I'm not interested in putting development time into something like that while there are still so much more substantial work that needs to be done.

Allowing 'comments' as alternatives to reviews could be worthwhile. Perhaps we could simply implement it as a "The Bottom Line"-only review, and have such things be awarded zero points automatically, and tweak the display a bit.

The per-game (or perhaps per-game-platform?) featured review thing is a really neat idea. I don't know if manually picking a review to (at least appear to) represent MobyGames's official opinion of a game is a good idea. I'd like it if we could have some automated solution that could give some better exposure to high quality reviews. We already rate reviews during approval and have the 'Did you find this review helpful?' thing afterward, so perhaps we could use a combination of these to feature reviews, showing the most helpful top-rated review more prominently, or rotating through the top few if there are more than one. Something of this nature could be very nice, I think.

As for the goals: the problem isn't so much that it can be only 'X games per platform' as that it needs to be some statistic that we calculate and cache so that the site doesn't explode when we show it on the front page. Any number (or combination of numbers) you see on the stats page is immediately usable, so by preference we should pick some goal made from those, but that's not to say we couldn't potentially do something else more unusual; it's just more work to implement.

JMM (352) on 5/21/2017 4:57 AM · Permalink · Report

I agree that dev time is valuable and there are more important things to do, but all your ideas sounds nice to me. The 'comments' one sounds great too, the rest look more as something for the future.

In any case, whatever you do will be welcome ^_^ (adulator mode off)

Cavalary (11445) on 5/21/2017 2:01 PM · Permalink · Report

Well, you know what the problem was with increasing points, that it was a straight multiplication for all, (current_score * 5) + 5, so things that probably shouldn't have even been approved as reviews in the first place netted users at least 10 points even retroactively, more than a basic new game entry, and there were also some poor ones awarded with 5 points because approvers didn't want to bother and they ended up at 30 points. A word count for half the score would limit the impact of that, and a 3-tier 0-10 (2-tier, 0 or 5, for shorter ones) quality ranking would simplify matters there too.

As for "bottom line only", removing the mandatory sections and allowing people to just write their reviews in one box would be an improvement anyway.

About the auto featured ones, that'd be nice too, but it'd require more care and responsibility for approvers regarding that top rating, and the database to be scoured for existing top-rated ones that shouldn't have been, and having them moved down a notch.

One more thing about goals though, could they display the actual amount needed to be added (can also still include the resulting end value, of course)? Say you start with 3800 something and the goal is 4000, and it starts at 95% complete, but actually when put up it's 0% complete and the challenge is to add 200.

Tracy Poff (2094) on 5/26/2017 1:17 AM · Permalink · Report

Sorry, I just realized I missed responding to this. Yes, you're right, that's how I should have done it. I'm not sure why I didn't do it that way when I changed the goal, actually. Looking back, we were at 1895/2000 when the goal started, so if we haven't completed it by next time I deploy changes, I'll update the display to reflect that.

Tracy Poff (2094) on 7/9/2017 6:07 PM · Permalink · Report

This is deployed. We're at 60%, now.

jennyj foy on 5/24/2017 10:01 AM · edited · Permalink · Report

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