Anything that is a quid-pro-quo doesn't work, and actually corrupts reviews. People will rate positive to get positive results back. So this can't happen.
Quid pro quo is problematic, I agree with you. Yet, I would like to see my own assets get more reviews, and I don't know what else to do.
Personally, I want honest feedback. I do the best work I know how when I make my assets, and I'm proud of the work I do, and of course I love it when I hear that people found my work to be of good quality. But if someone has a problem with it, telling me about it will only help me to make the asset better. Constructive feedback would be better appreciated as a private exchange between developer and customer, rather than part of a review, but if the publisher isn't responsive, I think it would be appropriate to put it in a public-facing review. I want all kinds of feedback: feature requests, bug reports, thanks, advice, you name it. The main purpose for a product review is to give other users an idea of whether the purchase was worth it, and I'd like for the content of a product review to primarily reflect that. I imagine that people being people, they'll use and misuse the review form for whatever their own purposes are, of course.
I really don't want to tell everyone how to review assets, though. People can tell if someone's putting the effort into writing a quality review that will help other Marketplace shoppers decide whether a given asset is likely to be worth their time or not. Trashing an asset for some personal vendetta would most likely backfire on the reviewer. But I haven't really seen that many reviews on other assets that were unhelpful. I just would like to see more reviews, on my own assets especially of course, but across the whole marketplace. Maybe once reviews are very commonplace we'll have a problem of bad reviews. But right now, I barely have any reviews at all, so bad reviews aren't really a problem I'm concerned with. I'm focused on upping the number of reviews I receive.
A site to specifically review assets seems odd.
First, it's not like they can't just go through the current Market place and get free assets and review them.
Second, if you get an asset to just review, your simply not doing it justice. Getting some script (or asset) and then complaining about it simply because you don't need it - or like it, is bad - it may not be aimed at them. Take a beginner who is after some simple running animation. The anims may not be amazing, but they may fill the hole that user needs.
I don't see why you would call promoting the act of writing reviews "odd". It's not odd; it's
promoting community.
Why do I suggest that it would be helpful to have a web app to help promote reviewing? Sure, it's right there on the page where the asset is for sale. However, out of around 1000+ purchases of 9 published assets, I've only managed to receive 8 reviews since publishing my first asset, about a month after the Marketplace went live. So having the review link on the asset page doesn't seem to entice people to put the time in to do a review. Maybe 0-1% is actually a "good" response rate, despite my perception that it is not. But I'm trying to come up with ideas for ways to boost the review rate.
If there was a way to search the Marketplace for "most reviewed" and "least reviewed" assets, it'd facilitate Marketplace users who are particularly interested in writing reviews. If we collectively sought to promote reviewing as a positive activity, it'd benefit the community of Marketplace users, publishers and buyers alike. So a web app that was geared toward promoting that would be a good thing.
I got the idea of there being a web app that was geared toward promoting under-appreciated assets to give them some attention from the way the Ludum Dare game jam promotes game submissions that haven't been reviewed enough to be scored in the rankings. LD48 has a 20 day period to review games, and there used to be a problem of games not getting noticed, and so many games didn't get enough reviews to get ranked. The LD48 community responded to this problem by developing the site to specifically highlight under-reviewed games. It worked -- or at the very least, it's helped.
People reviewing for the sake of it means they'll end up with stuff they think they could write or create easily and think it's crap. If that were the case, should I go and just give everything in the marketplace a bad review? no...that would be stupid.
Don't like this.....sorry.
People will have
all sorts of reasons for participating in reviewing assets. Some of them won't get it, and will write crap reviews. That's a given. That's
not a reason not to promote more participation in the review system. Good reviews will rise to the top.
The best way to promote writing better quality reviews is to discuss what makes a review a "quality" review, and for the community to debate and promote those values, and raise the bar.
Active participation is the key. The current system is under-utilized (from what I can see, at least) and I'd like to see individuals in our community who are so inclined to work together to do something about that. Having a more laissez fair attitude about it is fine (if, Mike, you're busy developing GM:Next, I wouldn't expect you to be focused everywhere) but someone who is focused on the Marketplace
should be taking the time to do things that will make the Marketplace better. I think promoting participation in the review feature qualifies.
