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Message: <blockquote data-quote="enrious" data-source="post: 5743843" data-attributes="member: 2126">I sort of think part of it was there was a lot of "new and exciting" (cough) things coming out - to be sure there was a lot of junk, but there were things coming out by the big d20 publishers, which focused things (at least here).[qoute]I found it very, very useful to read reviews here during the time period of, say 2002-2007.  I wonder if the decline in quality of reviews is due to the edition split, and the edition war (someone posting positive reviews because they like a system moreso than a product?).</blockquote>I also wonder if this was caused by the base-shift, but for a different reason.  I can only speak for myself, but with the launch of 4e and subsequent heavy promotion of it here, I lost interest in this site.   No doubt Morrus would rightly say that ENWorld was just as committed to supporting 3.x players as the new 4e game and that if there was a reduction in 3.x content (say on the News page), it would have been due to a lack of actual 3.x news.   However, ENWorld simply lost a lot of relevance with me at that point and I have to wonder if I wasn't the only one.Even when I moved from 3.5 to Pathfinder, I found few reasons to return here, instead finding more of what I wanted/needed over at the Paizo boards - although there the quality of reviews is dreadful.  I suspect it's because of the way their review system is tied into the store, being product-based, but for whatever reason I've seen very few quality ones. Possibly.  Or to take the 3.x/Pathfinder example, I already have more products than I could ever use, so the odds of me going out of my way to acquire a new one are slim.  10 years of products means a smaller list of products that will interest me.  If I'm not unique, then less interest in buying = less interest in reviews. Interesting idea.  Oh, without a doubt.  I tend to think of it more in terms of reviewers as opposed to reviews.  I think back to the staff ENWorld reviewers and while I may not have agreed with every review, I valued their opinion.With one or two exceptions, their reviews were knowledgeable (in terms of mechanics, but also from the standpoint of actually using the product - that means a lot to me in a review), and for whatever reason, the ones I'm thinking of seemed to be writing to me gamer to gamer.Most of the reviewers I've read today seem to simply do nothing more than serve as an extended table of contents, with nothing more substantive than "Oh, I liked this" or "This is really neat" followed by a listing of how many pages per section.  (Yes, I am exaggerating for effect)So yeah, Morrus, there were bad reviews.  I probably wrote some.  But there were also good/great reviews by some recurring reviewers (here and elsewhere) and it seems like they've stopped reviewing (for any number of reasons).The problem from my (limited) perspective is that there haven't been that many reviewers of the same quality to replace them.  Of course, the 64 thousand dollar question is - are there really that many people who miss good reviews?Sadly, I'm not sure there are.PS - Oh hey Morrus, fwiw, the D&D 4e and Pathfinder news/reviews I see up on the front page are the sort of reviews that I think are quality.  Kudos to the two reviewers - I don't play 4e but I read the 4e news because it becomes interesting to me when it is so written.[/QUOTE]

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