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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scurvy_Platypus" data-source="post: 3945414" data-attributes="member: 43283">As a purchaser of products...I pay attention to reviews. I explicitly seek them out, and I usually try for several different reviews.Depending on the site, I pay attention to certain reviewers because they're pretty clear in what they like and don't like, and how the product in question matches up with that. The problem is that reviewers are people and therefore it's going to be hard to get a truly "objective" review. Some reviewers I have to read between the lines a bit to figure out if their perspective is going to be one I agree with or not.For example, art.I personally don't really care as much as everyone else seems to about art. Past a certain point, yes art can be a detriment. Otherwise, it's just there. Some people loathe the art style of D&D and its "dungeonpunk" or whatever deragatory term they're using these days, and other people love it. I don't care whether the reviewer loves it or not, I just want to know _what_ the art is, and if the art is a good example of that kind of _style_ or not.RpgNow/DriveThru rpg, I find the reviews/comments to be mostly worthless. Some of the staff reviewers are fine, but I have yet to read anything left by a non-staff reviewer that I felt would actually influence my opinion one way or another. There really isn't much that can be done about this, as customers in general just aren't going to think about saying much about the product in question other than "I liked it" or "I hated it" and maybe a couple of other sentences.As has been pointed out, reviews are pretty subjective. When someone buys something like Half-Life, they're buying a pretty specific product and game experience. In general, you're not going to buy an FPS game if you're not into that genre. RPGs on the other hand have all sorts of people buying them for all sorts of reasons. Some are collectors, some want to stripmine for ideas, some are into art, some treat the books like novels, some are completionists, some are fanboys,  and then there's a few that actually seem to want to run the darn thing.The problem is that with Reviewers, it's awfully hard to figure out _why_ they're reviewing a product in the first place. That's where knowing what the reviewer in question happens to like and dislike can be useful. It will often tell you whether or not the review is actually going to look at the product from a perspective that's useful to me the purchaser.I've considered writing reviews myself of various products I've purchased, but haven't actually done so. Mainly because I feel that what I want out of a product is sufficiently different than apparently most gamers, so I don't see the point to putting in a lot of time trying to write a well crafted review that's just not going to be of use to most people.</blockquote>

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