I may not be a scripter but I agree that in any case reviews like that help the one who created the design work in no way. There should be some update to the current system to make reviews more helpful to people downloading and the creator of the work.

thats why a review team is needed!

I don't disagree Auron, an official design team would be great. But,

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That was the date of the last post made in the first topic I listed. You know the one where an official design team was suggested. Check the date on the last post in my second link, it was back in August.

It is obvious something needs done and great as an official design team is we can't dictate or count on that happenning. We can however, as a community decide that we are sick of useless one line reviews and make an effort to give constructive reviews. Perhaps upon seeing us making real reviews people will stop and think before posting one line 5s are 2s.

Personally I would sooner recieve a 2 with recommendations on how I can improve than recieve a dozen ego boosting 5s.

maybe by doing a sort of message that appears after you press the buttom "post Review" that informs people that unconstructive reiviews arent allowed and will be taken off the download section, before the person can create a review.

it is like warning people before they make the review.

Thats a good idea but the problem with that is that it would need to be enforced and right now no one is removing crap reviews, broken downloads or incorrectly placed downloads.

This problem existed on AOKH also. At least there they changed the system to allow full reviews, by either official reviewers or fans, with 'less than full reviews' being relegated to 'Comment' status. But there were a lot of junk 'Comments' and 'homer' type of reviews done (by the script writer under a smurf name or one of his friends). But there has to be a staffer willing to review the reviews, which is a time committment. A staffer is needed also to set up the guidelines, maintain the site, eliminate the recorded games posted by mistake to the RM section, etc.

The biggest problem is the amount of time it took to do good reviews. I was really the only 'official' reviewer doing many RMS reviews for AOK. I was somewhat compulsive, and I would start up the RMS on all sizes at least twice, with varying numbers of players, to be sure the resources and features placed fairly, would play a full game or two on the map (virtually always as single player, as was hard to get others to commit the time to test), would analyze the RMS script in detail to check for errors or innovations, compare the script with the write-up, compare the script with the standard ES maps and with other scripters maps (and while doing active reviewing, I had looked closely at ALL of the maps then made) then do a review according to the established guidelines. Most of the maps I reviewed were good, and received a pretty comprehensive review, a few were garbage and got blasted. Check the AOKH site for some of these reviews, and I think you will appreciate the time put into them.

Unfortunately I no longer have the time to do this for either AOK or AOM. And how many players really want to give up time they could be playing the game instead?

Your reviews at AOKH were always well worth reading and very imformative. You are correct that a lot of things are needed to improve the ratings and they can be time consuming.

But if the ratings are to remain as they are then it would be better not to have them at all.

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A lot of people look only at the composite rating number and won't even click to download a poorly rated or unrated map.

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But if the ratings are to remain as they are then it would be better not to have them at all.
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We cannot give up on reviews. If I gave up because of the commumity response(or lack there of), I would have tried WC3 a long time ago. Reviews seem to be part of almost every game web site. I personally would like to see a standard set of responses people could use when they don't want to spend the time on a full review. A rating followed by one or more of these:

Didn't seem to work like I expected.
I tried it once and didn't like it.
Okay, but seemed like so many of the other maps.
Good effort, had something different.
I added it to my list of favorites.
Etc.

The author(or others) could ask for details. I'm not sure many care.

It would be nice if reviews could be weighted based on the amount of detail but that's asking a lot.

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Muhaha, that is the funniest thing I've ever heard.

I disagree Jugit, if person can't take 10 minutes to write a real review (a truely constructive one will take much longer than that) then they should not rate the download, they can leave there comments and leave it at that.