You have to learn to read reviews.

Examples:

This game is great - IGNORE

The combat is smooth - IGNORE

There is no targetting - ACCEPT

The map is huge - IGNORE

The map contains 15 subzones - ACCEPT

See, try to only take objective information and ignore all subjective information.

Yes.

Also in B4 deleted thread.

Uh ya it's kind of obvious..

Now calm down and watch another lame advertising stream with the blue haired lady.

Agree with OP 100%. All have had big issues and you NEVER hear about them in any review anymore. There is a major reason for this and it does no service at all to those cosumning it. I don't even read their stuff anymore, look for Joe Q, sure he might be a little to negative, but you still can walk away knowing some issues and truths.

mmorpg.com is not the same place it used to be and has changed drastically for the worse but it certainly caters to a new gaming crowd....

Two "recent" things have made me question this site's integrity. 

1) The F2P garbage blog they used to do to try and convince us these asian f2p garbage clones were fun and innovative. 

2) The incredible amount of hype and news story that SWTOR gets. Pokket is doing a live raid stream? Are you serious? People can barely stay awake when they are actually raiding. Who is going to stay awake to watch someone else raid?

A bunch of teenagers and old creepy men. 

Head-scratchers.

Originally posted by Golelorn

A bunch of teenagers and old creepy men. 

This sites target demographic! ;)

It went downhill back when Guild Wars started to get covered as a MMORPG. Then instanced games became being covered as MMORPGs and the whole massivelly required scope of time and effort, territory, number of players, content variety got reduced to "if the characters are stored on the servers, and people can chat with each other online under the most fragile graphic interface, then its an MMORPG". So they basically concocted themselfs an excuse to cover what was not mmorpg and not in the best interest of mmorpg players, while trying to argue their integrity. 

Everytime the standards got lowered, they didnt took a stand. The monetization would get more and more unethical and they would take it and the companies and publishers would go further and further. I watched with perplexity the abuses that were commited with the genre and every time the community would raise its voice, we would get silenced. One week later we would see articles praising the "inovations" raining on this site.

The only thing they had was that they started the race first and had already built a community and google ranks. I judge them guilty of alienating the new comers, manipulating and changing the concepts of what mmorpg originally was and affecting the ethics of our cyber culture. What was originally considered wrong, here was pushed as "acceptable". It started with little abuses such as vip, gold and premium memberships being "good ideas" and now we ended up with games being designed like cassinos and there wasnt a single article saying a word to stop this when they had the power to influence the masses and stopped it. They basically watched it happen, as long as they could keep their lead and proffit from whatever blob emerged.

They lost their integrity when they started to enlarge and twist the concept of MMORPG itself so that they could get $ from the publishers of those popular games.

The last nail was when it started to push the RMT agenda half a decade ago.

In the last few years in the games list we started to see all kinds text based browser room based flash fps online games as MMORPGs, as long as it has some kind of cash shop and potential to pay for the advertisement. They no longer try to defend or hide it anymore, and they made an example for the other gaming communities. Its very hard to find a gaming community with integrity, but the damage has already been done. Now it doesnt matter anymore. Weve lost the war.

There are some of us who know the dark history of how it went downhill and who were there and did nothing and we will never forget.

If you are so sick of the review, you can post your own review and give it 1/10(like someone is doing already).

When I click on the review page, I get the user review on the same page as the mmorpg.com review.  Some one gave swtor 1/10.  so Shrug.

There are also 2 mmorpg.com review which gave AoC 6/10.  It's really subjective and you could have people who get funding from the game publisher to put good review for them.  That's all I can say. 

I don't know why people take the review so serious though.

Originally posted by Voiidiin

I think gaming websites that offer reviews and pre-views of video games have lost there objectivity due to publisher pressures and threats.

Its rather evident when you compare the glowing reviews that games are given constantly now, and then the complete opposite from the average player reviews.

 

One caveat to this, the hype for Guild Wars 2, for some reason people have taken the recent deluge of information about GW2 and its positive views as a form of hype. I am not sure people are looking at this correctly. This is information most of it in video form, and from that information we the player have had the chance to see how well the game is coming along. Contrast this with how SWTOR was before release, CGi movies, boiler-plate information sent to media outlets from the developers. Really not alot of pre-launch information was allowed to get out.

 

Anyhow, if i could find someone who reviews games based on how the game actually plays not on how much crap they get from a publisher/developer, then i would pay alot more attention to that site/reviewer.

The same could be said for people that fall in step from watching videos...

Originally posted by Zippy

 

1.  The people that write for mainstream sites like MMORPG.COM TTH and so on do not play MMOS except in the most casual of sense.  They write their reviews on playing level 1-6.  They play 30 minutes to 2 hours and thats it.  They have no idea how to play a MMO except in the most basic sense and they almost never play endgame.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Hlv5uEgEL1E

Watch this video and you will see how true this is.  While I really do like how MMORPG took the time to make this video and Garrett is very enthusiatic about the video, it is quite apparent that Garrett does not have a lot of experience playing MMORPGs (especially PvP) at a very high level.

There are tons of capable people who use this forum every day - plenty of whom are PvPers, they should be enlisted to help with the review of this content.  While there are a lot of quality videos out there, my concern with this video in particular, it was very difficult to get a feeling of how "competitive PvP" actually was in the beta.

i dont usually trust large sites for reviews because they are liars. its best to get opinions from people on forums or smaller blogs/websites. 

this applies to everything. eg. Cnet is one for the worst technology review websites.

Experienced gamers don't really need reviews. They can figure out whether a game is worth trying or not by just looking at it for awhile :J