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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SiderisAnon" data-source="post: 5744490" data-attributes="member: 44949">When I look at reviews for products, I find three problems that make it impossible to trust many reviews.1) Somewhere along the line, a three-star "average" turned into a three-star "you suck" with five star minimum.  I'm not sure when this happened, but it's there.  Companies on sites like E-Bay and Amazon get really upset when someone gives them anything less than five star; I've seen reports of people being contacted by companies to find out what they did so terribly wrong that they only got three or four stars.2) Reviews for many products are tainted with fake reviews, both for and against.  I don't see this as much with gaming material, but anyone who has ever shopped for technology and pays attention to the reviews will certainly have seen this.  3) Writing a good review should mean you took the time to at least finish reading the product.  If it's bad, you probably won't finish it.  Even worse for the chances of getting an honestly negative review is that so many products are weeded out because the product is so awful looking in the first place.  A great example of this is RPGNow, where there are numerous really bad looking products with no reviews; the people who would write bad reviews already chose not to but it at all from the description and demo.  Some of those full-sized previews are enough example to know the product would get a one star review at best.There are also a lot of useless reviews.  Many contain no real information about the quality or contents of the product.  (I recently was looking at a product on RPGNow where one of the reviews was just a bunch of random characters, presumably just enough to get the system to accept the score given.)  I do occasionally find some really good and detailed reviews, and these will sway my opinion more than anything else.  During the recent sales, I bought a set of spells for my Pathfinder game because one reviewer had done a solid, detailed analysis of each of them and I now had enough information to make an informed decision.  (Too many of the RPGNow product pages give little or no information on the contents of the book.)I keep wanting to write reviews for various products I use.  I am building a new campaign world and have been making notes on the various books I'm using for it because it's a segment of the PDFs that I think there aren't enough reviews in.  The problem comes down to that I can spend and evening writing an intelligent review, or I can spend the evening adding to my campaign, and the campaign wins.</blockquote>

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