I wrote this Wishlist topic about 12 hours after the Top Gun DLC became available, and I was shocked that there were already hundreds of ratings. I have to imagine that some portion of these ratings was done impulsively: You download it, fire it up and play it for a few minutes, and then gave a rating based on a first impression. This has the potential to both unfairly help and hurt a product.
Nothing at the moment precludes you from buying a product and rating it 10 seconds later. I think that there should be a period of time following a purchase (I’ll let Microsoft and Asobo figure out how much time is appropriate…it doesn’t have to be a long time) where it should be impossible to issue a rating for a product.
This isn’t about Top Gun, but about any add-on that you buy. People should spend some time with a product before rating it. Impulse ratings not only do a disservice to the people who spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours developing their products, but also to the people using those ratings to make sound purchasing decisions.
I see this quite often with airport sceneries from developers we really don’t know much about. If it isn’t Aerosoft, NZA, Pyreegue, FlyTampa, FSDT, etc., you know… then take a closer look on that 5.0 out of 5 rating for Timbuktoo Int’l.
Never have taken any notice of ratings for anything because often they don’t mean a lot. They are opinions and sometimes biased opinions at that. They may or may not agree with my personal view. I find it’s better to do independent research rather than rely on a 5 star rating.
That’s a fine system for purchasing popular products. And I read those reviews, too. But to bucsgolf142293 s point, a lot of less-popular products like small airports don’t have write-ups at FSElite and the like.
The best idea would be completely finishing a game before giving a rating.
When playing a simulation (I don´t know any better word than playing because “simulating a simulation” sounds kinda weird…) like for example the Fenix Airbus or SnowRunner or Forza Motorsport, spending at least a week with it and testing various things and having a real close look at the newest purchase is always recommended
Agree to a certain extent. But with the current state of the products on the marketplace it’s a big help to understand quickly if a new product is broken or a scam.
Problem is: people look around on a new airport and are impressed by some moving passengers you can see through the window of a terminal. They give 5 stars. Now you come and try to set up a flight press fly and CTD. Then you realise that the ILS frequencies are missing and during an ILS approach you are offset by several hundert meters from the centerline. 5 Stars? No way. In fact you have to wait at least for 2… 3 mths until more users with longer experience with their purchase have posted their judgement. You can see the numbers of a 4.8 stars and 20 users rating going into a 2.8 and 300 users. I have set my minimum limit for bying an airport to at least still 4.7 stars and 100 users Feedback. Quite few of those exist. Same for planes.
PS: I also do not buy anything that has “no version history” be it simply forgotten by the seller or on purpose…
My advice is look at ratings screenshots youtube reviews etc etc etc. But to impose a rating control system is overly complicated. Or to disallow is odd… who will determine when one is allowed to rate an addon?Example… i was waiting for boeing renton to appear on the fsmarketplace for weeks. I watched yt reviews etc then when it landed i gave it 5 stars after owning it an hour. So to suggest i shouldnt be able to review it seems well… well… take star ratings as an indicator. Look at all the night sceneries that get 5 stars…i visited renton in seatlle in real life.
I am suggesting you shouldn’t be able to review it for a short period of time. The point of the Wishlist topic is to say that someone who has spent thirty seconds with a product shouldn’t be able to issue a review. Thirty seconds into product ownership, your main source of information is someone else’s review and not your own experience with the product.
Strictly speaking, currently the market place is not fit for it’s purpose and we really need to wait a bit longer for FS2020 to be slightly more reliable and mature, with better SDK for the developers.
A lot of the time things go wrong because the developer has to re-invent the wheel again!
All those ratings based on a rickety base FS2020 does not do justice to the developers who are trying to do their best for the flight sim community.
However there are some developers who are in for a fast buck without a care for the needs of the community, I say please vote with your wallet.
I first saw this and disagreed, but ironically after thinking about it I can understand the reasoning. I too have wondered how many people rate something low or high simply because of the initial reaction or past experiences with that developer. So I guess I would lean in favor of it. What I’d really like to see are required comments. A simple number doesn’t help me that much, but if I see “CTD” plastered all over the screen on multiple comments, I’m going to back away from it.
I disagree. I have purchased several sceneries in the past and one of them stands out as broken and being poor quality. I knew within 5 minutes that it should receive a poor rating. And I gave it so others would see it and at least think before buying it. MS was good and gave me a refund when I requested one. No one should keep me from being able to leave a rating when I feel one is due. If the OP wants to wait a while before giving a rating or review he/she should do so. But don’t tell me that I can not leave one until a certain amount of time has passed.
You and I might have to disagree on this one, and no worries if we do. But I would hope that people would take to either the developer or MSFS forums instead of using ratings to convey that something is broken. Things break and it’s not always the developer’s fault. It could be a new sim update, and something doesn’t work that used to work, and it bothers me when people seek to punish developers with 1-star ratings for things like that. (But anyway, I’m sure it happens daily, and my proposal wouldn’t stop people from doing that, anyway.)
If an aircraft is completely broken or a cash grab you might never fly it.
You should be able review it accordingly so that other people know before buying.
I suggest removing reviews that are older than a year.
Most marketplace purchases should be rated one star only right away if the version history list is empty - as it is the case for most purchases. Secondly I was wondering why there is quite little emphasis in the marketplace on technical aspects of an airport like for example runway length/width and max weight for planes, nav equipment, ILS frequencies etc vs showing lot of pictures of the interior of the airport with some more or less nice looking humans or details of the coffee machine.
