The death of reviews

Human judgment is noisy. You get different opinions even from the same person for the same WAD (even sometimes when that person is you).

I've had the same level ranked both "best" and "worst" in a WAD by different reviewers. There are no set standards.

The concept of a "reviewer" has changed from the 90's where it was more like "amateur movie critic, but for WADs." Nowadays reviews are more focused on directing internet attention toward or away from something. That's it. Thoughtful, constructive criticism is relegated to play-testing, and what one can glean from watching play-through streams. In my view, the pace and scope has accelerated so much that most individuals don't see the value in spending their energy on a detailed review, unless that review is itself a product for internet attention (e.g., Cacowards).

I agree, and I think everyone would get better content if more people pitched in to help content creators improve. But that's a lot of energy to ask for these days.

You can't really say "This is a fine map, but..." on DW, the more vocal people over there will always interpret it as an insult and tell you to stop being mean; it will always result in conflict, you won't get out without a hitch.

there must be a language barrier for sure because i agree with you completely. the questions you ask i would also ask. Because there arent many channels for doom wad reviews, its very easy to feel alone and confused in my disposition.

Many highly recommended maps require me to be on edge the whole time, doing mathematical calculations in my head to manage ammo, cause mandatory infighting to survive, go as long as i possibly can without taking any damage, utilize engine bugs for slight advantages, etc. Theu are cool skills to have in my toolkit but they are difficult to execute and i find myself needing to abuse them often. Sometimes they are huge maps or wads that simply demand way too much of my time to get a complete experience out of it. Its like what being trapped in an abusive relationship might feel like.

I see that they are liked because the likes and comments say so but then they will feature very oppressive gameplay that ive witnessed makes players feel very inferior for not beating. i certainly dont like to see players of my maps being shut out of a complete experience or getting angry and rolling their eyes when they load their game over and over on it on a twitch stream but then after a long sigh say something like "look i can definitely understand it and i can respect that a lot of work was put into it. and also this music is good so thats a plus"

these mappers may as well be trolls except that the greater doom community is actually taking them seriously. not to say i have no respect for things that have had a lot of time and heart put into it, but why do i need to care about what so many of these wads overpromise if they keep underdelivering? i dont need to be misled by the way positive comments artificially inflate a wads perfeived quality from people who feel the creator has a friendly demeanor and they want to see them succeed. When i read shit like that it makes it extra annoying to see repeats of mistakes that wads from 2012 make that make them feel very dated today.

Even though theres so many people actively engaging in the community and playing and mapping for doom today, its somehow still difficult to find someone who's saying something other than a received opinion.

I think there are universal standards. We humans (normally) exist in a certain form (bipedal) that is functional relative to our surroundings. Therefore relative relations are a universal standard. Another universal standard is the Pareto Principle. We see this in how stars cluster into galaxies and the galaxies themselves have denser clusters of stars within while the rest is (relatively speaking) sparse. Most excellent literature is crated by a few authors. Most wads are average and only a few a good. Most boxers are average and only a handful are great. Etc etc.

Based off of this, one can discern certain consistencies between the good wads such as aligned textures, solid linedef actions, no poor encounters (hot start with 100 cybies in box room with no health or ammo), no softlocks etc. Then comes the more subjective stuff such as style, theme, storytelling, whatever. I think here we are talking past each other.

TL;DR There are authorities, you just disagree with them. And that's perfectly fine.


But there are authorities, most notably the Cacowards, but also individual reviewers like Not Jabba or Kmxexii or rdwpa or the Doom Wad Station guy or whoever. There also used to be the /Newstuff/ chronicles (I wrote a ton of reviews for those myself), but... yeah... Oh and also the DW Megawad Club if that's still a thing.

First of all about the brief reviews many people leave:
Ordinary random guys don't really care enough to elaborate, or maybe they even cannot do so. WAD XYZ made them feel good and have fun, so that's what they say.
Like, if someone had fun playing WAD XYZ, that means that WAD XYZ is probably Good ™. If WAD XYZ is probably Good ™, that means that I'll probably like it too. So I'm gonna check out WAD XYZ.
Sometimes that level of feedback is just enough, force of the crowd or whatever.

Second about people pretending to like stuff they don't like:
You also seem to assume that, if you don't like WAD XYZ, but most people do, that means that they're doing that to suck up to important people, and not because they just plain like it as well. That's possible but improbable. Rather your taste just differs from the mainstream one, and that's okay. Feel free to write your own reviews on WAD XYZ from a non-mainstream perspective, that way maybe you weirdos who don't like WAD with purple palette #55020 can discuss that stuff and find WADs you like.

Idk if you have some sort of persecution complex or whatever, but there's nothing sinister about you not liking a mapset that most of the community does like. Take your meds schizo?? 8-)

99% of the community loves Ancient Aliens, but I found it literally insulting to my intelligence. And that's okay. That doesn't make it a bad mapset. A ton of love and effort was put into it. It's just that -- Xeep Eep didn't like it. Xeep Eep likes other wads though.

40oz Use a lower difficulty, or jump down all the way to ITYTD if the map doesn't have it, for the ammo and HP benefits that you are looking for.

No 40oz, we're not on the same page here. The "problem" you're having and the core of the solution you're proposing leads to a ouroboros scenario which already exists. Xeep, joe-ilya and vigilant's posts pretty much puts your ramblings to rest. The same applies to Jtsunami, catering to content creators and/or writing glamorized informational reviews it's already the norm. You didn't present me any example on how what your take will improve things. And other than DW, we have the wadazine as an "alternative" and i don't see any difference on their ramblings to the ones on cacowards. Some may like it, i don't. That's fine. For me it's nothing more than this (pun intended).

kvsari; what you are describing as "consistency" is nothing but a consensus that no one is bound to partake and will cease to exist if there's no one to enforce it. There's nothing intuitive at all about them, proof of that is new mappers falling on the same old tropes to this date. Now, the examples you've provided are the typical first times mistakes. So in this case there's nothing pedantic about giving some feedback and offering help. It's no different then when you start playing an instrument. So in order to actually do something you need to open yourself for learning notes, theory and practice enough to sharpen your coordination.

But there's a difference in restricting your fingers to the fretboards so you can lear how to play guitar and restricting your playstyle and/or songwrithing in order to catter to trends/fit in the norm. The former is a necessity, the latter a convenience. Also none of your examples are immune at all to subjectivity. One might not give that much attention to aligned textures, other may find it unecceptable. Softlocks could be easy ignored by someone, "poor encounters" is an extremely vague term that wouldn't do much in clearing things up either.

lunchlunch; opinions are like assholes, you may want to share with others but isn't guaranteed that the outcome will be any good. So, you may want to give your contructive criticism and the author may not want to suck it up, instead, say to you to fuck off. But yeah, if all you could get from what i've wrote so far is that i'm just butthurt, therefore implying that i'm incapable of ignoring criticism and do whatever i want nonetheless - well then it's pretty cleat that you don't know what the hell you're talking about or even to who you're talking to. A better attention span or a few clicks would prevent your jumble of nothing from existing in the first place.

Yes I agree. It really does. Wonder no more, you post as much as you want on this forum.



I already know this is an option without anyone needing to tell me this. It doesn't address the issue of wads being massive time commitments (just to kill everything) or having reaction-based traps (because these are driven more by the linedef action properties than the thing placement anyway,) or that swaths of people are saying the wad is great and including it in their recommendations in people's "can you recommend something to play" threads. It's usually not easy to find people saying specific things they like about the mapset other than that it looks good from the screenshots, which is often true. The maps look great. They just play terribly.

Playing with my best skills forward is not a way I want to be playing all the time. It's like the wad is demanding so much of my commitment to play it. I have to first play it on easy, see if I can get through it, then when I'm finished, play it again on a harder skill level, now with foreknowledge watering down my experience to get the fuller 'intended' experience the mapper wanted. Not to mention that skill tiers are not addressed well in most of these wads, which should be a huge red flag if "play on a lower skill level" is the qualifier for maps being nearly unplayable without me using an arbitrary mechanic like doubling ammo and halfed damage. It doesn't take extra time as a mapper to add a few blue armors and shellboxes to your map, so why is the onus on me to play something up to the point where I'm having a miserable experience playing it, close out of the game and start over on an easier skill? The way you designed your map is not pleasant in its released form and I have to add qualifiers to it on my end to digest it? Some wads are a more grueling experience on easy or medium than Hell Revealed 2 is on hard.

Sometimes I don't have a lot of free time to be playing Doom, and when I've had a stressful week, it's nice to unwind with some Doom. Sometimes I want to play something new, but I dont necessarily want to be 'challenged' into conquering some insanely difficult task. I don't have the kind of time that's ok to waste grinding away at something. Dying, reloading and replaying the same encounter over and over and over until I get it right. It doesn't matter to me if I can eventually beat it. I usually can after enough tries, but every subsequent try is wasted time because it's not rewarding. Its usually followed by another bigger and even more difficult scenario that's going to require another half hour of dying and repeating until I get it right. From the time I started playing Doom, an hour and a half goes by and I will have maybe experienced two rooms out of this presumably "amazing" mapset. And if I get good enough to beat it without dying, the total play time can still be multiple hours. By the time I've had enough dying over and over I only have a half hour left to do laundry and wash my dishes before going to bed for work tomorrow morning. And I'm sweaty and frustrated. What a fucking waste of a day.

In 1994 it was difficult to determine if a custom wad was worth your time. The community was scattered and not communicating with itself very much, there weren't many resources to go to know what good game design is, and few people were very serious about ensuring that the player would have a good experience in their wad. Jump forward to 2021, and we have the same problem with a different veneer. Huge doom community, with a big catalog of content to draw opinions from, it's easy to communicate with each other, share media, etc. We have long lived legacy members who have played a shit ton of doom actively participating in the community, too. Yet, in order to find something good to play I can't just trust most people's words, even when they have been playing for a while. Wads are artificially inflated with likes and positive comments saying its great, and then I get persuaded into playing only to discover that its not.

These days, before I play something I'll look for the massive playthrough posts somewhere in the middle of the project release thread that usually say in summary that the wad was pleasant. I'll comb through the middle paragraphs looking for key details for negatives and incidentally find descriptions of events they say they didn't love, which is code for "I really despised this part and couldn't justifiably avoid mentioning it," because I've experienced a similar situation myself and it's miserable. But finding those sentences takes a lot of time too. Sometimes I'll go check youtube and twitch for playthrough videos with commentary and skip around to random parts to gauge the player's reactions as they're playing to find out if I'm gonna like it or not. It makes me so angry when I see these likes and written positive comments on a wad, then when i find videos of a casual player playing it, the player is rolling their eyes, groaning, and begrudgingly grinding their way through it. That's not the experience I want to have while playing Doom so why are so many people saying this is good? Having to watch the video to find this out is, in itself, more wasted time that I would have rather spent enjoying my game. It could have been resolved sooner if people would honestly just say they didn't have fun with it. Why, in 2021, do I have to do so much busy work to know if something in the Doom community is going to be worth my time or not? Why is the threshold for what is amazing set at whatever makes people the angriest while playing, what requires you to load the most saves, what requires you to know what's going to happen in advance in order to survive it without having unnaturally good improvisation skills developed over 15 years of playing? (Sometimes I do survive a blind playthrough of some insane encounter, and when I do survive on my first try, my reaction isn't "holy wow that was epic [smile]" it's more like an exasperated howl like "how the fuck was I supposed to know that was going to happen? [angry face]")

It's just getting really stupid that the community at large is a giant competition for attention. Who can get the most attention with making the most beautiful screenshots; who can get the most attention with their playing ability; who can get the most attention with their insanely diabolical traps; who can get the most attention with their funniest meme; who can get the most attention with their technical knowledge of the game; etc. etc. None of this has anything to do with making the general experience of playing the game good.

40oz Try to have your own fun, why do you care to play the intended mapper's experience? The difficulties settings exist for a reason, not to mention mods like De-Grinder and Russian Overkill to make your game more enjoyable.

If you don't like the popular stuff, then play the unpopular stuff, there's plenty of easy/medium and shorter mappacks that just don't sway the public, just go to page 2 of Wads & Mods or something, I've found plenty of fun wads that way to spend a few minutes in between mapping sessions for inspiration.