catsclaw227 said:
I just added my name to my review. How can I find out how many people actually read it? I like the heavy flood of reviews, but it seems that reviews jump off the home page pretty quickly. This is good and bad I suppose.
As for Phil Reed's PDFs, I buy a lot of them. I haven't reviewed any (hell, I only have 2 reviews posted), but I really like the quality and content. I buy them on that merit alone, but bad reviews have deterred me from buying other products.
As a publisher trying to break into this business, this is prob what really hurts us. I'm not quoting phil exactly, but he said something about the one reviewer who would complain that it would not fit into his campaign or on the other hand someone finds a error in your book, or a misprint of a table and they just trash it all to hell, this is like a chain reaction and the next person trashes it without even giving the pdf book along. Then its not hard to get 3 or 4 of your buddies to trash it along, so what is could be a good product is gone. I'm not going off on catsclaws here, but he is at least honest about bad reviews.
Everyone wants good reviews and you wouldn't think there is politics in rpg, but there is. Yes there is some honest reviewers out there and they don't care if 20 people trashed your product just because they give it a fair shake. Naturally, publishers appreciate this. These are usually the type of people that may say something like this section of the book didnt do anything for me and my group, we found it yada yada yada, but thsi section really got our veins pumping. They weigh the good and the bad and while the review doesn't get great ratings it gets some satisfaction.
Then there is the reviewer that if you go against tradition once in a while, for example you break the rule of 2's, you go in a different direction, your layout is not tradional wise, you take a mechanic and give it a twist, they will cut you on that and so once again, what could be a good book gets hurt. I don't know I guess their afraid of change and because this is a niche market, you have to adapt to change, someone has to come up with a neat mechanic and run with it or break the rules of 2 to create a fairly cool race. I'm not talking about the people who make pdfs that are just unbalancing and they only made the pdf to see what they think is thier 1000 hp super nifty prestige class, variant class or race will make people buy them, and unfortunately these people usually have money to burn sometimes, so if you give them a bad review, no problem, they run down to their print shop and throw out 500 copies, then distrubute them in 50 stores and boom, it don't matter about your review, they made $5000 dollars. I'm talking about the publishers like myself and others who try a few things different just to have someone say, "wow that is a super neat mechanic" or "man you just simpified those tables and made it 100 times clearer or "hey just what we needed a strong race that isnt about the 2's but is well-balanced".
Another example, and I will use us, we went away from the traditional not in leaps and bounds but enought to notice, one of the things we did was break from the traditional two columns and were having trouble making the product viable to certain company because I honestly think they see the one column and reject it. Why did we go to a one column: when we playtested it, we got numerous, numerous complaints about having to scroll up and down, up and down since our product was primarily aimed at the player who plays online and likes to have material handy. So we changed to a one column and made lots of playtesters and a few others happy, no scrolling up or down, to get information. But we probably will take a huge hit on it, all because we went away from the traditional.
I really think Crothain has a good ideal here, its just no publisher wants to put his product up to have it torn down in the like manner mentioned above and the paragraph ahead of it, hence we prob feel that that one review could kill us or make us heros. Its not really the reviewers fault, its hard to seperate the chaff from the wheat. Just look at how companies are out there, how many are trying to break in (like us with limited success, but were still young), how many will try to break in). Were tough, we know that no matter what someone is going to just rip us as a publisher, that happens, but it makes us leary, when that person and 20 of his friends all hate the product because its not what they wanted, and those 20 bad reviews become 100 and so on. I hope this really takes off and that you get unbiased reviewers that can bring something good to the table. Constructive criticism can be a reward and that will make the both the reviewer and the publisher happy even if they don't get the five stars. Afterall, even if your totally honest and give it what you think is a horrible rating without offering why or something good about it, chances are the publisher or whoever will not ever contact you or who you work for ever again for another review. My bad I'm not trying to turn this into a rant, Just feel in my opinion why reviewers don't get the reveiws like they used to. No this is not A typical but it does happen enough in the industry to warrant attention.
