DIASKEAUS'S PROFILE

To provide a fuller vision of what I was imagining, I would have needed to edit the tileset.

It's more like Venice in my head. Tileset is a bit limiting though.

It's a map concept that worked in my head but didn't work so well the way I put it together.

Just imagine a city in the valley, with tall white walls rising into the sky as big as cities themselves (like arcologies), and on the top of those arcologies are homes and buildings, while inside the arcologies are towers which rise even higher. The doors are in-game entrances to the various arcologies.

The picture takes a bit of adjustment for your eyes, but when it does it's a pretty wicked image.

I'm intrigued by the concept of winning real world prizes for writing reviews - I expect you'll see a lot of more quality reviews come in. It's apparent you've worked pretty hard to get a review system functioning properly so people can find what they want. This would be something interesting to experiment, if there was a quarterly prize of sorts for the best rated reviews (a double take, as it were). Currently there is only a way to view reviews but not agree or disagree with the reviewers take, besides commenting and making a snide remark or a glowing praise of the review itself.

Being recognized would likely present incentive to people who normally would stay quiet to become intrepid reviewers, much like Amazon's system. And while maker score does go up with added reviews, when you are dealing with veterans with maker scores in the thousands, it's hard to get recognition if you are new to the community and don't really want to invent a persona which leaves people aghast or amazed.

Perhaps even just rewarding a top rated reviewer with a special banner next to their name or putting a special section on their profile for special achievements earned in the community. I think I've also said this before, but being able to receive additional maker score points by reviewing an unreviewed game, where reviewing reviewed games does earn maker points but not nearly as much as a game with much less reviews.

author=halibabica
I'd like to point out one slight logical fallacy in Ciel's argument there.

It assumes we have 500 people to up-vote/down-vote every game.

You might see 48254392846928 Thumbs Up and 3 Thumbs Down on a game like, say, Hero's Realm, but for the vast majority of them? It's gonna be like:

2 Thumbs Up
1 Thumbs Down

Oh wow I feel my decision being influenced already.

Then again, assuming we did have enough people using it for a thumbs up/down system to work, then it would be more like he suggested. And it's not like it would hurt to try. But I still wanted to point that out.

This deals with the concept of incentive, and whether people browsing the site have incentive to actually post whether or not they liked the game. In other words, is it possible to keep track of these things on a user profile? So by checking so and so's profile, I can see which games they liked and which they didn't? Requiring a one-line critique obviously will help quell issues of spamming as well as issues of trustworthiness.

The other ideas mentioned all sound super fantastic:
-lists of favorite games (with auto-links,
-and when searching being able to find out which games were favorited the most),
-setting up a rubric for reviewers by using words and descriptions of what a number score means to indicate a more solid foundation during the writing of the review,
-helpful/unhelpful checks of reviews (especially in regards to scathing reviews, which does mar the chance the developer needs to attract much needed criticism),
-one-line reviews which award commentators with maker points (maybe 1?),

and really, props to Kentona and folk for really sprucing and improving this site over the years, while staying true to its roots as a site for people of all levels to participate in. I remember from years ago, and your constant effort in improving the site continually is inspiring. While there seem to be some sour grapes and elitists wandering the halls, thankfully this is still a wonderful and easy to navigate site that offers great gaming experiences without most of the tension that other RM-groups have devolved to.

More to the point about the issues presented here so far; even the above argument presented by Hali, while yes it's an issue for any site which has lower than desired numbers, but like Pokemaniac said, it's better than nothing, and over time will grow, especially if site users are given incentive to go back to older games and give them a try. The sad fact is that RM makers are a needle in a haystack (especially good ones) and in the indie world, pretty much given no cred for the vast amounts of work they do outside of the various communities.

I argued fruitlessly on Tigsource for months for more recognition to be given to RM users, but to little end. While they did add A Blurred Line and Sunset Over Imdahl, those two games only garnered aggregated reviews of 3.6 and 3.5 respectively (both only having been rated 14 and 13 times), whereas games on the top 10 list (such as Cave Story) have been rated 50-100 (on average).

I've probably gone off topic a bit, but a slight reform in particular areas would likely be helpful, but definitely not an overhaul.

Not sure. Care to elaborate?