I do not like the depot review system, or more specifically, how people are using it.

My latest 3059 review has nothing to do with the actual gameplay, or even the game itself. It more looks like a forum question, or something that would just need to be cleared up in an e-mail.

In addition, the latest Ants! reviewer didn't even play my game, but reviewed it anyway. Again, something that could have been cleared up in an e-mail or forum.

Anyway, I am frustrated that my game got a 2 star rating because I chose not to support Alt+Tab (for very specific reasons). I instead programmed a very quick and seamless save/exit and restart feature to replace Alt+Tab.

Bottom line is, I would MUCH rather see people with single issues or questions be directed to me as an e-mail, memo or forum topic before deciding to score my entire game on it.

PM the reviewer and ask him to actually test the game properly and change the review. If that doesn't work PM Matthew and ask him to remove the inappropriate review...

OK, say version X didn't work for player Y. Y then leaves a bad review saying X doesn't work. The programmer then fixes that bug in version X+1, but that bad review for version X still ruins the overall score, even though nobody will ever experience that problem again.

Well, I have a specific reason for not allowing switching of applications. I have used those trainers a million times, memory hacking programs blah blah blah, and I just didn't want it to make it too easy for a player to cheat in my game by switching to a memory hacking program. I know a cheater will eventually find a way to hack my game if they wish... I just don't want to support it. Instead, I make the game quickly save and quit, so it can exit as quickly as an Alt+Tab.

Being able to change and update reviews would be great, so old reviews wouldn't get stuck with newer versions (especially if the review is based on a bug or feature etc.)

For a quick fix, how about requiring reviews to include a version number? Then once the depot version changes, just put a symbol next to the review that means that review was for an older version.

Yeah, it should get a low score; hardware is released to hundreds of thousands of people and is hard to fix or update as quickly as software. It just sucks on this Allegro site for software we can update in a days time. I fixed that bug with Ants! about 1000 years ago, but that 'review' will always be there.

If you ask me, these are NOT reviews, but bug reports. I do not believe they belong where they are.

I haven't heard from the last reviewer yet; I hope he responds. I fixed his bug (the freezing), and added a warning message on the title screen. I hope he can leave a more appropriate review.

I don't think I'll support Alt+Tab for reasons above, I believe my save/exit and restart feature is sufficient.

I second this.

I think the notifying would cause ML's PM box be full quite quickly

Why not the project "owner" could remove those which present innacurate data. Tho then there is this risk of manipulating "negative" comments away.

Well, so you punish 98% of your players for the 2% of cheaters?
And 100% of the players will hate it (both cheaters and normal players).

Though, that can be abused. They may just tack on a new version ".0.0.0.1b" so that they can kill all the comments.

Perhaps he could just make sure the values are within proper ranges. That's (partially) how punkbuster works.

I like that idea

Good point. However, I'm worried that that 2% of players can ruin some of the sense of accomplishment in getting a high level character, if you could have just otherwise cheated fairly easily... might as well make those 2% work for it... i just would like to do what I think is a small change to help keep 3059 a little more 'valid.'

Hrm, there really are no real 'proper' ranges for my game... you can keep improving your player to a pretty insane level, and I don't want to mess up any of their games. I've seen this attempted in other single-player games, and it usually doesn't work very well, or I just kept tweaking numbers until it worked.

Thank you very much. However, I noticed the overall ratings are still effected.

Do the reviews publically say what version they are linked to? Anyone see any of these new reviews?

There might be some old reviews I still want on my front page that still apply...

I think Matt's new system sounds pretty good. Although, in my situation, I would not have liked to remove some of my other reviews (which are good quality) for 1 inappropriate review.

Eh, I guess it has to do with my background with memory hacking programs like ArtMoney. You can easily track down variables and change them with any running process, but you had to switch applications back and forth to search for changes in values. I thought the easiest way to prevent this was to prevent Alt+Tab at some level. I didn't want to lose the 'switch out' feature, so I coded an entire quick-save-exit and restart-at-same-point feature.

Bottom line is, I wanted it to take a little more than firing up ArtMoney to cheat at my game...

Hrm.. interesting.. but I don't know how I could possibly 'clear all values'... there some are insane amounts of values... sounds like it would take quite a bit of work.. my compromise was taking away the Alt+Tab but programming in the quick-save-exit and restart feature.