Overlord_Venus Don't get me wrong. There is always the option to create some fake accounts to do some 5 star review swapping ;) with other authors no matter the site. At least the authors can't delete user reviews and the users can't post more than one review per novel. It's a lot more sane.....
Reviews Problem
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xcares RR review system is horrible. The fact that you are quoting it means you have never participated in their site as an author. People do drive by .5 stars all day on royal road to new novels posted. It's much more toxic than webnovel. The only thing RR does is prune negative reviews for popular novels. https://www.royalroad.com/fictions/best-rated.
Somehow every novel on the best rated has above 4.75 when its on a 5 star scale when you can give .5 star reviews. That would be impossible in a fair reviewing system as you would need 19 5 stars to every one .5 star to get anywhere near those ratings.
At 9 5 stars to ever 1 .5 star we get 4.55 rating. Yeah their rating system is bullshit please stop quoting it. The mods review purge for popular novels.
Even at a fair distribution of: 6 5 stars, 2 4 stars, 1 3star, and 1 .5 star you get stuck with 4.15 rating. Their ratings are obviously inflated for their top novels.
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Dan_Ryder Well i trust it more than the one used here.
I bet it's horrible if your novel just uploaded and some random dude bombs with 0.5 stars and stops that first rush of readers. There should be something like a minimum chapters read number before you can post a review.
Honestly if the mods review-purge then it's not done with reviews that have text and are not just star rated.
I've written critical reviews for some of the most popular novels and nothing like that has happened.
What's apparent in some cases is that when the rating drops a bit some new account will be created to bolster a list of novels with generic 5 star reviews
I think my reviews keep getting deleted too cause i can't see them anymore, or maybe it's bugged idk.
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Dan_Ryder Most of the novels i read there are at 4 stars or 4.1 etc. 4.75 is a bit high right?
Why not use the average score? Should the author be able to pick what should be included in the rating and what not? That would make no sense right?
p.s i can't deny that they purge the low star text-less reviews for the top 20 something novels or even a select list of pc correct novels.That's not what we're talking about. WN does it by power point injections to fix the scores. I can't be sure why they fix the lists. Ask both sites and let us know if they reply (never).
I could see where an author might want to delete some reviews. When I was getting ready to add a review, I read the last review. It was to the point of being spiteful but the author graciously accepted it. I read the low rated book and I almost read the whole book before I reviewed it, it was that good!
Had I gotten that review, I would have deleted it or worse. Just saying.
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texascann I've had authors there mail me with questions on how to improve their "product"... and they constantly do so. It's part of becoming good enough to go pro.
There are also cases where authors mail you to diss on the review. I then always read more of the story to make sure i didn't hurry the review. In some cases the rating improves and in others the edited review is even more hated by the author XD.
Most of the really malicious reviews and comments are from other "authors" but there are some ordinary readers that just like dumping 1 star reviews without any sane reason. Some 1 star reviews at chapter 1 for example.
The point is that some authors want to only be praised. They put effort into a novel and any critique against their "child" must be malicious. It's normal.Unfortunate but normal.
The ones that keep reading the reviews and comments and keep improving don't give a damn. They go pro.
Checkout Skully's Daedalus series. 4'th book published on @mazon just a month ago.
Webnoveling is for hopefuls. If the author doesn't care to improve why bother?
17 days later
I would agree tho. Just recently, I asked for a review swap and I really took time to read a lot of chapters for me to give my reviews. However, I only received a "bot" like comment. Others spend weeks just to work for a single chapter then some originals would get tons of reviews (majority of them are just plain and empty) even though they need to put a lot of work on it to improve. I find it unfair though, especially when I'm really hoping for a review to help me improve my writing style.
I dunno, I'm not mad or smth. I'm just a bit dissatisfied about those kinds of reviews. Cuz like, there's one of my novels that got 6 reviews but only one of them truly criticized my work and helped me decide to work on it once again.
And I reaaally wanna add tho. There are authors who demand five star ratings for their books. And it goes like this, "Rate mine five stars and we okay" something like that. Like, if you wanted to improve your work, you reallyyy need critics. You can't improve and tell yourself how great you are if you're ignoring and being an ass about it.
Sometimes I like to read the first few chaps of the novel regardless of reviews.
Some high rated ones are garbage while some lower ones are quite fun to read.
2 years later
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Hmm... this is interesting, because I don't get a lot of reviews on my story (i've only gotten 1 actually), even though I have more than 10 people who added my story to their collection, none of them leave reviews, and sometimes people remove my story from their libraries and STILL don't leave reviews. This is the only problem that I am facing, and because of it, I don't know what to fix because I don't know what's bad about my story. It would help if readers just spent a few seconds, maybe a minute on saying what could be better or what's good about one's story. I mean maybe it's just because my story hasn't been up for a long time, IDK.
9 days later
FluffyBunnyKing282 It's nothing bad about your book ,we have to learn that in each of our books they are always those types of people that will always remove your book to your library and not give a review no matter how hard we try to ask for their views about our books .so it's something as we Authors should learn that they are some people like that even if you book is interesting thy will always remove it from their library However I would really like if Wn gives us nofications on who removed the book from the library lol
6 months later
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Dan_Ryder
Haha... came across this post today and your post is the dumbest fucking shit ever. Full of disinformation and very obvious bias. RoyalRoad mods do not delete reviews unless they break the rules. Look at the top web novels on RoyalRoad's reviews and I guarantee you that you will find tons of low-rating reviews, unlike here on webnovel where the author deleted everyone's review that is critical of them. I leave low-star reviews on popular web novels all the time and not a single one has been removed. Those .5-star 'drivebys' are worth so little in the rating system, they may as well not exist, and your post conveniently doesn't mention the 5-star 'drivebys' that balance it out. Written reviews are what heavily determine a web novel's rating.
Compared to webnovel where authors can delete any review they want and every web novel is filled with the same user spamming the same review multiple times? What a joke to even try to compare the two. I use other websites that host the same web novels as here to get an accurate rating and see real reviews because of how corrupt the rating system is here. I don't have to do that with RoyalRoad because their rating and reviews accurately reflect the web novel. Stay mad because RoyalRoad doesn't allow you to inflate the rating and gatekeep complete trash writing like webnovel does, nor does it encourage writers to bloat word counts with craploads of filler and gobbly gook writing for profit.