Well, the newer games are plagued with their own flavor of the problem, the "I don't like platformers/indies/walking sims/VNs/adventure games, so this game is probably crap, 1/5" reviews.
Of course, THOSE assholes are easier to spot, and often get relegated to the bottom of the review barrel pretty quick, so they're less of a problem.

provide personal information to the third side? looks like you guys not really think before coming up with plain solutions do you? :)

Of course there are a multitude of problems with user reviews. Always and everywhere. That's what I was talking about earlier- in the end everyone, if he or she wants to even bother with the reviews, has to read them for themselves and decide which ones look reliable and give infromation they are interested in. There is no limitation that can be imposed on the reviews that would only strike at the "undesired" reviews, and even trying to define what that is would be a slippery slope. Bottom line, either use "filters" in your own head while going through reviews, or ignore them alltogether, find information about the game elsewhere, google some reviews you can trust.

And since you get that info what stoped you from not to read it any further? Are you forced to read from telegraph band and can't fast look on text to rate it?

PS. Rabbit have run along a road. Than he saw something on the way. Took a close look - it's a shit. Sniffed - shit. Tasted - shit. Oh my, told rubbit, i was about step on it!

The problem is that they don't always disclose it and even if they do disclose it that means that the front page reviews are taking space that useful reviews should be taking.

And even when they do, that's one more review that you have to filter out on the way to reviews that will hopefully help you to understand whether or not to buy the game.

Yeah well, I'd rather be wrong most of the time. Unfortunately, I tend to be right and that kind of sucks.
Requiring people to have bought the games is hardly a slippery slope. If we don't care about that, then most of these games have been reviewed dozens of times elsewhere. Newer games are a bit less reviewed, but most of the ones here get proper reviews by critics before too long.

You're never going to remove people that are playing a game based upon nostalgia. It's just not possible to do without making the reviews completely worthless. But, making sure that they've at least bought the game goes a long ways towards clearing up the cruft of people reviewing games they've played years ago, but don't like enough to buy again.

If the game they played 15 years ago was really that good, then buying it now shouldn't represent a problem. Most of them are rather cheap anyways.

Meh, I want to see both kind of reviews:

1. People telling how good the game itself is, regardless of from which store they bought it.

2. For possible GOG-specific technical issues, yes I want feedback also from people who have played the GOG version.

The problem with #2 is that some early "technical reviews" might have been fixed already by the time I read it. So maybe I'd rather have these "technical reviews" on the game sub-forum, not in the review section of the gamecard. At least in the game subforum it is usually mentioned in the same thread if the technical issue is already fixed.

As Breja pointed out, GOG is not only about old games. To me it seems OP was mainly talking about the old classics (with possible compatibility issues) with his suggestion. I'm not expecting to see many GOG-only issues with newer games.

Unless THEY ALREADY OWN IT. Just not on GOG. I happen to own quite a few old and old-ish games on DVDs, they work perfectly fine, and I see no reason to buy it a second time, cheap or not.

Also, you do realise that there is a lot of new games on GOG? That can be bought in plenty other stores, digital or not? I already mentioned this before. Sometimes GOG gets new games a bit late. If someone got it elsewhere first, suddenly they won't be able to review it here, unless they buy it a second time, rather than being able to benefit people here by telling them what they think of the game. All to remove "nostalgia factor" for the old games (which will not really work anyway). This is ridiculous.

You're supposed to be reviewing the product they have for sale. There's any number of other places where you can go if you just want to write a generic review about this particular game.

And yes, there are a lot of new games, I'm not exactly sure what that has to do with the fact that the reviews of games here is about reviewing this product. In most cases the games should play the same, but they might not always play the same due to reasons.

Christ, are you people really this dense. Reviews of games here are of the games they're offering for sale, not random other versions that are available in various other places. Patches here when provided tend to take longer, as an example, so a review of a current Steam copy may not be entirely valid for a copy that's sold here.
It's more common with newer games than older ones due to the patching that goes on. Don't get me wrong, I support GOG in being a bit more thorough about verifying patches, but it does mean that copies bought elsewhere may not be exactly identical at any given time to ones purchased here.

At the end of the day, the reviews are supposed to be of games bought here. Not generic reviews of the game. If you want to write those, there's any number of places where you can do just that. But, if you're not reviewing a copy that was bought here, you shouldn't be posting it here.

Even if this was implemented, there's really nothing stopping people from buying games they fondly remember and then immediately posting their review based on those memories rather than playing through the game again (this happens on Amazon, which has a "verified owner" tag for their reviews). On the inverse side of things, I don't have Sacred 2 here, but I finished the Steam version the day before it showed up here.

It'd also do nothing to combat another problem the reviews here face, that being that multi-part games' reviews are skewed. Broken Age comes immediately to mind; a lot of the positive and most visible reviews for the game are based on the first act before the awful (in my opinion) second one was released. The overarching problem is that the reviews that get the most votes are usually the early ones, so the review system rewards haste if you want to avoid being buried pages back, and will always be skewed toward the beginning of a game if it releases in parts.

I think the simplest solution would be to disallow reviews for a week or so after release to give people some time to actually play the games in question (or play them again, which could very well challenge their nostalgia), and for games that release in episodes or parts, have individual review sections for each separate part.

Now those are the kind of reviews I like to see.

If i remember right i have two reviews based on experiences from the Xbox version of the games (Bard's Tale and Sudeki), and aside from not having played the game with a keyboard & mouse they should still be fairly accurate. It's not like i would plan to rate them 5 star awesome just out of nostalgia, actually i have very vivid impressions from 10 years ago for those games which rate them average or slightly annoying in some respects.

But... Having the reviews sorted differently, perhaps tags on the reviews (played long time ago, played but doesn't own, played but not this version, nostalgia, joke, warning, etc) would push away the ones that are less relevant reviews to the bottom.

Categorizing reviews is not a bad idea, it would separate the players from the dreamers. :)

That is assuming the reviewer is honest. It's possible to have external tags where enough people tag something which could override a review, so one that's obviously faulty or from nostalgia would get categorized that way...

Reminds me though... Although i think i reviewed Bard's Tale before i owned it here, i did play it recently and had a bad experience. Mind you the bad experience is based on hardware, specifically trying to play it with a PS2 controller: Namely all the buttons were labeled 1-15, and the directions of the right stick was incorrect so using any spell was an annoyance (i think everything was rotated 90 degrees, or one of the axises was inverted). Mind you someone having THAT specific issue is fairly low :P

Actually, categorizing reviews based on platform and hardware is a good idea. Some people get really "ticked off" and want to lash out at the world because they have a faulty controller and can't play their game proper.

It takes self-control (something I don't believe a lot of people are instilled with these days) to assess the situation and determine if there is a legitimate gripe. If there is, and they have read the documentation, tried everything possible and there is still an issue, then I determine whether or not common sense was used.

There are some 'real' problems that do exist out there, but people tend to call 911 if their pizza doesn't arrive on time or if their abused family cat corners them into a closet,

It seems at times people don't take responsibility for their own actions, is this the reason why they installed "automatic flush" toilets in our workplace? seriously, people can't be bothered to reach behind them or in front of them to flush? I guess the pools of urine on the floor that have to be cleaned up are a pretty good indication of that.

Sorry for the rant, I work in an Office Space.