Want to remove the score system from FuwaReviews?

[starlessn1ght]

30 minutes ago, Kaguya said:

Then say there comes a game like, Erect, which I'd give an 8.7 to. 

Well, normally, I'd just leave it be... But I can't do that. And so I'd usually end up taking it to an 8.5 - that's reasonable, right? 

Why you cant leave it at that? It would solve all the problems. 

[Kaguya]

1 minute ago, starlessn1ght said:

Why you cant leave it at that? It would solve all the problems. 

Because the way we're working doesn't allow it. I can only give it +0,5 or -0,5  

[sanahtlig]

38 minutes ago, Kaguya said:

Half the people probably only check the score and glance through the review, so of course I care about it. 

It's also why I'd rather have no scores at all.

Do you think such users will start reading reviews thoroughly just because you take away scores?  No, they just won't visit the reviews they didn't intend to read--or stop visiting the site entirely.  In general, seeking to exclude users because they won't use your site as you intended is not a good strategy.  You should seek to broaden your audience, not constrict it.

Trying to get users to change their browsing behavior is futile.  You can provide features that make intended behavior easier and therefore more common.  Or you can directly address the demand for meaningful scoring, as I've proposed.

[starlessn1ght]

26 minutes ago, Decay said:

If you want to be able to get across the subtleties of the differences between one game and another with the same rating, then you have to do so in the text of your review. 

What if comparing it to other work doesn't fit in the review, but at the same time when readers see the two they will assume they are equal in quality? 

I mean, people who've read lots of VNs also won't be comparing every single game they've previously played to the reviewed VN. 

1 minute ago, Kaguya said:

Because the way we're working doesn't allow it. I can only give it +0,5 or -0,5  

Yeah, that's a problem.

(Hey, what is this salt thing? It's been here for quite some time, but I never understood it since the beginning).

[Darklord Rooke]

37 minutes ago, starlessn1ght said:

(Hey, what is this salt thing? It's been here for quite some time, but I never understood it since the beginning).

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=salty

People use it whenever they are feeling those emotions. Needless to say, it can be included in almost every one of Bats' posts, he just omits it because it's implied  

[solidbatman]

1 minute ago, Rooke said:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=salty

People use it whenever they are feeling those emotions. Needless to say, it can be included in almost every one of Bats' posts, he just omits it because it's implied  

Basically. Someone is always pissed off by something I say, or I'm pissed off. 

[sanahtlig]

1 hour ago, Rooke said:

In a perfect world all reviewers buy their own copy of the game, but that's definitely unrealistic. As in, costs way too much money along with other problems. For some reason, I get a creepy, insincere feeling when developers hand out free keys to be reviewed. Maybe I'm just far too cynical.

Solution: All reviewers pirate the game--for science.

Developers and publishers would lose that particular influence over the review process (although they could still withhold advertising deals).

[solidbatman]

20 minutes ago, sanahtlig said:

Solution: All reviewers pirate the game--for science.

Developers and publishers would lose that particular influence over the review process (although they could still withhold advertising deals).

I can assure you, we are not influenced by publishers (for example, Sakura Santa was a key given to us by Winged Cloud) 

[sanahtlig]

16 minutes ago, solidbatman said:

I can assure you, we are not influenced by publishers (for example, Sakura Santa was a key given to us by Winged Cloud) 

Winged Cloud is a special case because they rely on viral reviews that trash the game for attention.  FuwaReviews deals with small-time publishers who probably want all the attention they can get.  Dealing with companies like NISA is different.  They have real leverage to suppress reviews they don't like--and they use it.

[solidbatman]

Just now, sanahtlig said:

Winged Cloud is a special case because they rely on viral reviews that trash the game for attention.  FuwaReviews deals with small-time publishers who probably want all the attention they can get.  It's different when dealing with companies like NISA.  They have real leverage to suppress bad reviews.

Whenever one of us can afford a NISA or IFI game, we'll find out

[LiquidShu]

I vote for the removal of the point/star system. The way it is now I personally can't help but think anything lower than a 7 is absolute trash, and a 7 is barely passing (applies to all industries). When reviewers do things like "Buy, Rent, Pass, etc" kind of things I think it is a much better way to approach. That way you can just give your honest opinions, along side facts, with out the need for scoring (which fucks with the way I buy things). 

[Fiddle]

22 minutes ago, LiquidShu said:

I vote for the removal of the point/star system. The way it is now I personally can't help but think anything lower than a 7 is absolute trash, and a 7 is barely passing (applies to all industries). When reviewers do things like "Buy, Rent, Pass, etc" kind of things I think it is a much better way to approach. That way you can just give your honest opinions, along side facts, with out the need for scoring (which fucks with the way I buy things). 

But "Buy, Rent, Pass" is basically a three-star system!

[LiquidShu]

1 minute ago, Fiddle said:

But "Buy, Rent, Pass" is basically a three-star system!

I suppose so.. but it doesn't fuck with my mind the same way. When something is given a score/stars it goes to the % based thinking, anything under 70% is shit. "Buy, Rent, Pass" for me let's me make a better personal judgement. 

[Eclipsed]

This thread is five stars

and I support 5-star rating system

[Valmore]

I don't mind a 1-10 system, per say, but I think it would be a good idea to break reviews on a publisher basis when doing it. As we have it, we kind of lump all visual novels together in the 1-10 rating system, which kind of hurts in giving a higher number to a promising indie developer, whose game may be a bit rough but shows a lot of promise and is worth giving a higher number to. After all, it feels a bit funny to give an 8.5 to an indie game that has merit, but clearly isn't as polished as an established company's visual novel that also scored an 8.5. But then that lower number may seem a tad discouraging.

Of course, that does bring up the question of how do we classify the publisher, but I think we could work something out.

[wraithseeker]

The review number is very important and should be put at the top of the page for users to have a rough idea of how the review's been written.

Anybody who feels discouraged/lazy to read through the entry wouldn't just change their mind because the number was omitted. People are lazy and hiding the number won't change anything.

To fix the indie / publisher / company issues. You can use tags! Add a big noticeable tag at the top of the review to show that it's a review at a specific category, i.e indie/etc etc 

[Guest]

Dunno, stats tell us that with a good amount of ratings you get a very fair evaluation of the popularity of the review.

With less numbers you can get lucky or unlucky though.

[Decay]

10 hours ago, Kaguya said:

To expand upon it a bit further, I ended up giving Haruka an 8.5, even though I wanted to give it an 8.3

So, the next time I review a nukige, I need to keep in mind that I gave Beat Blades Haruka an 8.5. 

Then say there comes a game like, Erect, which I'd give an 8.7 to. 

Well, normally, I'd just leave it be... But I can't do that. And so I'd usually end up taking it to an 8.5 - that's reasonable, right? 

However, I gave Haruka an 8.5, and I'm reviewing Erect as a game I believe to be significantly better (closer to excellent than it is to pretty good.)

So I'd either have to settle it with the same score as Haruka (which I really wouldn't want to do) or I'd have to give it a 9. 

Giving it a 9 would temporarily solve the problem, and it'd be more or less in line with the differences between the scores I'd give for those games... 

But the next time I review a nukige, I'd have to keep in mind that I gave Erect a 9. 

This is already unsatisfactory to me, so I'd pretty much commit sudoku with a star system instead  

But the whole reason I propose a star system is because theoretically, people are more inclined to read the text of the review instead of relying solely on the score, thus solving that problem. 

I read your complaints and to be perfectly honest, all I can say is "Great!" I understand everything you're trying to say, and simply disagree on a very basic level. Games can be of slightly different quality and share the same writing, that's okay. 

[babiker]

Well, I'm not sure what else there is to say, Batman already seems to realize the problem with the score system, although I am curious as to what would suitably replace them. For the reviews themselves, a summary at the end will probably do the job. I'd say a summary is much better than a bunch of numbers. When you try to think of the suitable number to summarize your opinion of a VN, you end up either having to give every aspect of the VN a suitable numerical weight, such as giving the story, characters, music and art 25%, if you want to be all professional. Or you just go with what number feels right. Both methods vary a lot from one person to another, which makes the top rated thing on the sidebar feel extremely inconsistent.

Speaking of the sidebar, I think we should either implement our own community scoring system that everyone can vote on, as to more accurately represent the opinions of the forums, or simply borrow the numbers from VNDB. You could ofc just do both. I kinda like that since it does give a relatively consistent and accurate evaluation of the VN in question, and would in no way affect the opinion of any review since the reviewer himself has nothing to do with the score. One would look and see Clannad, for example, on the top and think "Huh, that's rated pretty high on the list, I wonder what a review would say about it." The review would serve as a more in-depth look at the VN, one that does not necessarily support the score but at least justify it's opinion smartly and wittingly, like a review should.

I suppose the main con to such a system would be that OELVNs would probably get shitty scores and have a harder time getting seen, but I'm afraid someone has to be at the bottom. Work hard, OELVN devs, and prove yourself worthy of this community's praise 

[Kaguya]

5 hours ago, Decay said:

But the whole reason I propose a star system is because theoretically, people are more inclined to read the text of the review instead of relying solely on the score, thus solving that problem. 

I read your complaints and to be perfectly honest, all I can say is "Great!" I understand everything you're trying to say, and simply disagree on a very basic level. Games can be of slightly different quality and share the same writing, that's okay. 

I dunno. I'm not sure whether or not he'd make this point, but taking what Sanah said, I highly doubt changing it to a star system will make people who glanced through the reviews read them. At most, it'll scare them off. It's an absolute no-no for me. 

And sure, it's ok. The earth isn't going to explode from that, but to me it's just a system tends towards innacuracy for no reason. It's not even like it'd change our format, we can do the scores the exact same way while going on a 1/100 scale. We just don't. I don't have expectations of changing it to a 1/100 scale, though, so I'm just voting to keep it.  

Most other places I see with similar score systems do 1/100. I think it's the better approach looking in the long-term. Eventually we'll find ourselves with a cluster of reviews with scores that make no sense (well, we already do, because every reviewer who's not me has shit taste and puts out awful scores )

Well, I guess it doesn't really matter. It'll just make scoring a bit harder and I'll tell people who talk to me my scores are shit because y'all are evil - I just don't see a reason not to use the freedom we have when we're already using this format. 

I will, of course, compromise for whatever we end up going for in the end, though. That'd just be my prefered scoring system. 

[Valmore]

3 hours ago, Kaguya said:

Eventually we'll find ourselves with a cluster of reviews with scores that make no sense (well, we already do, because every reviewer who's not me has shit taste and puts out awful scores )

He says this with love. Really. OK, not really. And that's okay, he's entitled to his opinion no matter how factually incorrect it may be, because opinions aren't based on facts, they're based on Donald Trump's coif.

[Tyrael]

If any of you are familiar with GRArkada's anime review channel, I vastly prefer the method he uses right now over his old numerical scores.

He has a list of pros and cons and a certain tag now, the tags are:

- F** It

- Stream It

-Buy It

- Certified Frosty (legendary show or whatever)

 

Dunno if we could implement a similar method but I thought it was interesting at least

[Yuuko]

3 minutes ago, Tyrael said:

If any of you are familiar with GRArkada's anime review channel, I vastly prefer the method he uses right now over his old numerical scores.

He has a list of pros and cons and a certain tag now, the tags are:

- F** It

- Stream It

-Buy It

- Certified Frosty (legendary show or whatever)

 

Dunno if we could implement a similar method but I thought it was interesting at least

-Kiri level

-"Something"

-"Something"

-Kaguya level

 

[Darklord Rooke]

6 hours ago, Kaguya said:

And sure, it's ok. The earth isn't going to explode from that, but to me it's just a system tends towards innacuracy for no reason. It's not even like it'd change our format, we can do the scores the exact same way while going on a 1/100 scale. We just don't. I don't have expectations of changing it to a 1/100 scale, though, so I'm just voting to keep it.  

All scoring systems are inaccurate and/or silly to some degree, I haven't seen one to buck the trend. It just acts as a TL;DR summary for people who don't want to read, and tbh if people don't want to read and get a better indication of the game, then meh it's their problem.

"Oh wow! 4/5, must be good" Billy-Bob said, and he raced to his local gamery merchant, cash in hand, zeal in his eyes. Too bad he didn't see the qualification "only if you're a teenage girl," which was placed just under the spot where he stopped reading. Tsk tsk.

[Kaguya]

9 minutes ago, Rooke said:

All scoring systems are inaccurate and/or silly to some degree, I haven't seen one to buck the trend. It just acts as a TL;DR summary for people who don't want to read, and tbh if people don't want to read and get a better indication of the game, then meh it's their problem.

"Oh wow! 4/5, must be good" Billy-Bob said, and he raced to his local gamery merchant, cash in hand, zeal in his eyes. Too bad he didn't see the qualification "only if you're a teenage girl," which was placed just under the spot where he stopped reading. Tsk tsk.

Sure, but where's the harm in making it as accurate as possible when we already use the 1/100 format? :/