NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="discosoc" data-source="post: 6985510" data-attributes="member: 6801554">That site is basically useless as far as I'm concerned.  It uses the same crappy layout as rpgnow and crew, and it's really just not a format that scales very well.  I'm sure there are some amazing products, but I'm not about to try and find them in that mess.*edit*One last thing:  people keep bringing up the lack of comments and reviews.  I think that's actually something that speaks to why most industries actually employ people to review products.  Most of us really don't give useful information proactively.  Now, that doesn't have to mean full-time rpg journalists who receive advanced copies before "release" either.  Look at video games like Skyrim, and how the community reviews mods.  Youtubers make a small living doing nothing but reviewing new mods for the game.  Technically amateurs, but they have consistency that builds into reliability for the audience.We don't really have that for RPGs.  Officially-licensed stuff gets reviewed, but the fan created content is the wild west, and seemingly hasn't learned a single lesson from the OGL days.  Part of that is the low bar for entry: basically anyone can put together a crappy product for an OK idea and "publish" it on TDMG, so it's no wonder that there haven't been many (any?) people doing good quality reviews on new stuff that hits the site.I honestly don't see a real great solution to this problem.  The DMG site itself has a crappy UI, but the reality is you aren't going to see positive changes translate into positive experiences for long.  If they start adding a filter to allow people to hide anything without a review, then it will just become standard practice for new authors to make sure each of their products has the minimum reviews to get listed.  It will be an arms race just like SEO is an arms race.The closest I can think of for a possible solution is something in the form of a middle man.  The more "official" the better.  Basically, someone (or some company or group) needs to start a curated list of DMG content that meets a baseline set of standards (concept, originality, presentation, editing, art, something else?).  It would act like a sort of "peer review" for the indie-RPG industry, in that potential authors submit their works to this group to be rated.  If accepted, it gets added to the list with the ability for users to look through, with a link back to the DMG for purchase.Of course, that would take a bit of money in the beginning, but I can't think of another solution.</blockquote>

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