Update: The 5 up 27 down review has been removed, presumably because it wasn't a review. It however somehow manages to remain being the "MOST HELPFUL POSITIVE PLAYER REVIEW".
@Perth2008 said:
however when you open a specific games review page you see the "most useful" (or popular based on [thumbs up divided by total thumbs]) and then all the others sorted in order of thumbs.
That is not how it works, it is not a simple division formula, I haven't been able to reverse engineer it, but it seemingly matters only marginally how many downvotes a review gets. And the default ordering is oldest first, the selection menu on the left is by default set to "Most Helpful", but that doesn't take effect until you click the "Apply filters" button.
@Perth2008 said:
Finally, I am unsure about the term "most useful" as it is unclear to me whether giving a "thumbs up" necessarily means (1) a well written review irrespective of whether it is pro or anti the game, or (2) whether you agree with the review (i.e. you like the game too) and the contra for "thumbs down". Perhaps there should be thumbs up for (1) "good review" and (2) "agree" ... though this will be cumbersome. Best would be to base thumbs on review quality and leave the agreeing part to ones personal ranking of the game.
It ends up meaning a bit of both, and I think that sort of works, the result is that well-written reviews that reflect the game well get voted to the top (or they would be if the algorithm for deciding what goes on top actually worked).
@robotopbuddy said:
For some reason the 'most helpful' appears to be determined solely by the up votes, which is obviously a somewhat flawed mechanism, especially for reviews that get a lot of votes, as even if they're mostly down votes the amount of up votes still ends up quite high.
Not exactly true, there is some weight given to downvotes, for instance 3u-0d is listed ahead of 4u-5d, which is however itself ahead of the intuitively better rating 3u-1d. Somewhere in the GS code there is a somewhat complicated formula that ranks reviews. Someone should find it and replace it with something sane, for instance ([upvotes]+2)/([total votes]+4).
@robotopbuddy said:
Not sure why the spotlight is for most useful positive rather than just most useful or having one for most useful positive and one for negative either, that may be something that just came with the GB base code that was used or it may be a design choice, I'm sure a staff member would be able to get an appropriate answer there though.
I have seen the "MOST HELPFUL CRITICAL PLAYER REVIEW" feature on some games, Dear Esther for instance has it (though the choice of review put on the spot doesn't make a lot of sense).
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