Hi,

I always liked the idea of giving visitors the chance to vote for and review games and therefore becoming part of the community. Nothing new nowadays but relatively new when Gamespot first saw the light of day. This option and the relatively complete overview of games on Gamespot made me becoming a registered member in 2003.

As a member of a community I always try to do my share and I like doing so but first I have to be convinced that the website-team that manages the community website is honest. So the first 3 years I was a registered member of Gamspot I just rated every game I got and supported Gamespot by maintaining the diverse lists like "Now Playing", "My Wish List", "MyCollection List" and so on. After these first years I decided it is time to write a review. The first review went fine even so it wasn't very charming for the game. After I saw that the review stayed the way I wrote it I was convinced that this truely is a website where people can voice their real opinion. But then came my second review for a highly hyped game at that time, also not a charming one and it got deleted right away, reasoning I reviewed my PC and not the game. Something I really couldn't understand no matter how often I read my own review and still can't understand today. I followed the player reviews for that particular game closely and realized that not only my review got deleted but also lots of other reviews giving the game low scores. I read lots of the reviews before they got deleted and got the impression that it is not right that all of them got deleted because in most of them I couldn't find anything wrong as long as you do not consider a low score as against the rules. As a consequence shortly after that incident I stopped contributing to Gamespot for as a long as 3 years.

Eventually the day came where I thought it might be the time to give Gamespot another chance and wrote a review for an extremely hyped game. Like my second ever written review on Gamespot the new review was not charming for the game and it again got deleted right away. This time reasoning that it was trolling. Even so I was able to find something in my review that one could interpret as trolling for me a much more fitting description would be blunt and ironic but not trolling. As a consequence I started watching closely other peoples reviews for that game and realized again that lots of the low scoring reviews got deleted.

I am considering myself open minded and therefore I would like to put my last review that got deleted up to discussion. But I am not sure if this thread would then in consequence be deleted. Sure, I would anomynize the name of the game and the company.

A consequence of the way Gamspot handles low scoring player reviews for some games by deleting them for reasons one can not always follow is that I am losing any trust in the Gamspot scoring system as a whole.

Have fun and be open minded

Xiskio