Review sorting

[Kenneth Gorking]

After reading the reviews of the Torque Game Engine, I found it a bit mysterious how many positive thing were said about it, so I decided to do some investigation.

After checking the personal data on the people who had posted reviews, I found that all but ONE had filled out any of the personal information, and NONE of the no-fillers have ever posted anything else on DevMaster.

The conclusion is unfortunately that ~35/36 of the total 38 posts are from people somehow affiliated with GarageGames, and are only posting good reviews for the purpose of promoting their engine. This type of behavior can clearly not be tolerated, since it could mislead young and/or new developers looking for a engine to create their dream-game, and then to realize that they blew $100 on a piece of crap.

By crap I mean in their opinion, not mine. I will remain neutral on this one

- Kenneth

[Mihail121]

There's nothing bad in such kind of behaviour. In fact, it is standard commercial trick and you definetely shouldn't blame GarageGames for trying to find people to buy their product. I, personally, would do the same if it was my product....

[NomadRock]

Just because many people do something, or it's results are desireable for some, does not make that action right.

The DevMaster engine list should be a mostly unbiased source for information.

It is difficult to screen for these things though, as it is often very hard for one to know the affiliation of a particular poster. Furthermore, sometimes it is very good to have the creator of some engine leave a comment giving a better description of it's intended use. If some are clearly trying to trick people into buying an engine by leaving comments disguised as though they were normal users, then perhaps you could leave a comment saying so.

[anubis]

if an engine gets overly good reviews an objective test could be initiated by devmaster. if the engine is really that good it gets a special review (in a "users choice" section for example) and if it is not so good a warning could be placed on the page of the engine. alternatively the link to the devmaster review could be placed above all other comments so people are more likely to read the objective information first. the only problems is see with this are :

a) how to write reviews about commercial products and
b) who would write the reviews

[Dia Kharrat]

Kenneth, a lot of the 10 top engines right now have biased reviews; so it's not only Torque.

As anubis has stated, we will provide a much better rating system very soon that's based on the objectiveness of the review. We will also seperate "staff" review from "member" reviews. The ranking algorithm will also change. At the moment, there's a lot of (good) engines that aren't reviewed at all and therefore the ranking system is not perfect.