# Could we Rate the Heresy Series as a Forum?



## ckcrawford (Feb 4, 2009)

Do you guys think it would be a good idea to rate each novel as a forum? I was thinking, because I have yet to really see a good place where the novels are rated as a whole by the readers. I think Heresy-Online has a great amount of fluff and Heresy Fans. 

I think it may be a tedious project, and I'm not sure how it could be done without drowning a section with poll threads. Essentially my idea would be for a group of us to make threads for each novel. It probably be best a couple at most at a time. The polls would be rated from 1-10 for each novel. At the end we would add the results and find the average. Somehow it would be great if we could announce it somehow to the rest of the forum and make a time limit. At the end of that we could have one thread that has an official Heresy-Online Rating for each novel. Along with these ratings we could have the link to the actual poll with personal reviews of the readers. As new novels come out, we would do the same. Announce a poll and a deadline. When they vote they can do a long or short review of the novel.

The following poll is just an example.


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## Vaz (Mar 19, 2008)

Using a poll is poor idea; it is too heavily skewed, falsified and potentially intentionally fucked with even with a bellcurve removing extraneous votes. However a written format is far better; and provided someone provides a running covering of the posts changing scores, at each new page say.

Alternatively, a better idea is to have a written review catalogue, providing links as well.

For example; 

HORUS HERESY
- Highly Rated/Recommended/8-10
--Vaz's review
--LotN's review
- Decently Rated/5-7
--Phoebus' review
- Poorly Rated/2-4
--ckcrawford's review
Not Advised <2
--Angel of Bloods review

That provides an idea of opinions, while allowing subjectivity of the reviewers to be present; i.e say someone loathes my reviews and someone else loves my reviews and have opinions mirroring their kwn, but hates phoebus' say, while I rate Example A as being 10/10, and b as 1/10, and Phoebus is the opposite, it gives people a better idea (in addition to recognising the polarising effect of the novel, but also giving a "face" to that arbitrary value. It could be like seeing someone rating an FPS when they are racing game players, they will each like different things; and look for different things to please them. A SP mode is rarely high on many FPS players minds, whereas an open worlder/mmo player might be. If you are looking to come into the books, used to (to use my favourite hitting stick,) McNeil you might love his books, but hate ADB; reviews of myself are likely to show ADB as being better, and people can take that into account.

Long story short; poll = bad.


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## ckcrawford (Feb 4, 2009)

That is true. The only reason I like the poll thing is because it attracts people. People tend to be more visual. But that would be interesting too, if somehow we could organize it into bad good. moderate. Do you think that could also be a poll with just those three?

A review could be each person writing their own response (long or short) a scale from 1-10 and a vote Good, Bad, Moderate.

I do know what you are saying about the poll, but again, people just want to see. Another thing about moderate is that everyone tries to be moderate and not the dick that rates it bad... until... their favorite topic or legion is written about.


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## darkreever (Apr 3, 2008)

I don't particularly like that rating system for the reviews. That will most definitely skew things because one persons 8/10 might in fact be the same as someone else's 6/10.


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## ckcrawford (Feb 4, 2009)

The Outliers could be a problem. But do you think perhaps there could be a rating with fewer ways to vote and with words to specify what they are actually voting for?


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## Bane_of_Kings (Oct 28, 2009)

Great idea, but we could use the 5 star rating system that Goodreads has:

1 - Didn't Like It. (_Battle for the Abyss_) 
2 - It was ok. (_Mechanicum_) 
3 - Liked it. (_Galaxy in Flames_)
4 - Really Liked it. (_A Thousand Sons_)
5 - It was Amazing. (_Know No Fear_)

The novels above are just my examples. Although I voted 7 on the poll for _Horus Rising_, I'm probably going to end up rating it a 4/5 if we adopt this method. I'll also probably hold off the rating until I start re-reading the series again next year. Got a chunk of the books done but never got around to finishing it this year so I think I'll give it another go next year, probably with reviews to boot.


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## Lord of the Night (Nov 18, 2009)

Well I might be signing myself on for something i'll regret when it comes time to do... *WORK*. But I might be willing to write up written reviews for the HH books prior to _A Thousand Sons_, which is when I started reviewing the series. Would help provide some extra reviews.


LotN


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## Bane_of_Kings (Oct 28, 2009)

@LotN: We could write dual reviews for the Heresy series on TFF like we've been doing with the more recent installments if you want to go down this route.


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## Lord of the Night (Nov 18, 2009)

Bane_of_Kings said:


> @LotN: We could write dual reviews for the Heresy series on TFF like we've been doing with the more recent installments if you want to go down this route.


We could. That seems like a good idea. Do Dual-Reviews for each Heresy book and I could rewrite some of my earlier HH reviews like _A Thousand Sons_ and _Nemesis_.


LotN


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## Angel of Blood (Aug 18, 2010)

Straying away from the idea of a forum review though, or at least multiple perspectives. Would be quite good to have a lot of the regulars, such as the ones Vaz has listed to write reviews for the novels, even if they are just short ones of one or two paragraphs, just enough to sum up the novel and give an overall perspective and varied opinions of the novels. As we've got quite a diverse set of tastes, favourites and non-favourites here. The Founding Fields is good, don't get me wrong, but say someone looked at the FF to decide what to buy next as let's say they're on a budget and can't go buying all the Heresy books, they would see the reviews for _Fear to Tread_ which are all 10/10 on the FF and think that's got to be the one to buy. Where as if we had one on here, they might see some less than enthusiastic reviews for it from myself or Phoebus and reconsider. Where as a book like _The First Heretic_ or _Thousand Sons_ tend to have almost 100% positive reviews from all of us here.

Again, can see where CK or Vaz are coming from with the forum style as opposed to just more on FF. To save complications of an out of 10 system as like Darkreever said, opinions vary as to what say an 8 is, go with more like BoK said, with 3 or 5 categories to group them in. Bad/Below Average/Average/Good/Excellent.


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## Bane_of_Kings (Oct 28, 2009)

Lord of the Night said:


> We could. That seems like a good idea. Do Dual-Reviews for each Heresy book and I could rewrite some of my earlier HH reviews like _A Thousand Sons_ and _Nemesis_.
> 
> 
> LotN


Sounds cool. When are you up for starting the re-read/reviews? 



Angel of Blood said:


> Straying away from the idea of a forum review though, or at least multiple perspectives. Would be quite good to have a lot of the regulars, such as the ones Vaz has listed to write reviews for the novels, even if they are just short ones of one or two paragraphs, just enough to sum up the novel and give an overall perspective and varied opinions of the novels. As we've got quite a diverse set of tastes, favourites and non-favourites here. The Founding Fields is good, don't get me wrong, but say someone looked at the FF to decide what to buy next as let's say they're on a budget and can't go buying all the Heresy books, they would see the reviews for _Fear to Tread_ which are all 10/10 on the FF and think that's got to be the one to buy. Where as if we had one on here, they might see some less than enthusiastic reviews for it from myself or Phoebus and reconsider. Where as a book like _The First Heretic_ or _Thousand Sons_ tend to have almost 100% positive reviews from all of us here.
> 
> Again, can see where CK or Vaz are coming from with the forum style as opposed to just more on FF. To save complications of an out of 10 system as like Darkreever said, opinions vary as to what say an 8 is, go with more like BoK said, with 3 or 5 categories to group them in. Bad/Below Average/Average/Good/Excellent.


I know that we can't offer a wide range of opinions as TFF is only one website with nowhere near as many reviewers/views as Heresy, there are also loads of other blogs out there (such as Civilian Reader and Graeme's Fantasy Book Review) that also cover Black Library novels and offer their opinions on them. From my experience, genre readers who take reviews into account generally look at several blogs to get a wide perspective of a particular book. 

But the blogs are normally spread about the place and some have more exposure than others, so having all the reviews for each Heresy title on this forum (Maybe even a sub-form designed for Heresy reviews) would be a massive help to people (especially for those that don't check out various blogs), and this can be further helped with a consistent review verdict scale.

If we go the whole Heresy sub-forum route and ask a mod to create one, we could even get users to contribute Posts about the Heresy as a whole and where they think the Series will go, and so forth.


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## Shepherd492 (May 1, 2012)

I'm on board with a sub forum or thread with OP updates that give readers a spot for all the Heresy reviews in one spot. A scoring system we can all agree on is also very important; I find the idea of scores to be quite helpful for looking at how a book compares to another for one particular review, but even then it loses a lot of its relevancy if the lowest score ever handed out is like a 5 or 6. Both sound like great ideas that could be a little more focused than the review sub forum.

I like the idea of having the sub forum a little more, but either will be an invaluable resource. I would love to contribute to whatever is decided on once I find time to actually read more Heresy books.


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## ckcrawford (Feb 4, 2009)

I'll submit an example I'm looking at. If anyone wants to help please feel free to PM me. I think the biggest problem is introducing these threads. This would essentially be a devastating flood of polls and threads. It would essentially look like spam. What I'm thinking is that we have at least 5 threads with five novels being graded in each. Anyone wanting to help would be given A Thread but would have to constantly update it weekly or as much as they can when the log on. Also it would require every thread to have a link to the others.

What I'm talking about would be something like


First Thread
*Heresy Novel Reviews, The Beginning (First Five)* 

_Horus Rising_

1 Poor 2 Novel Below Average 3 Average, Novel just made Standards 
4 Great Novel, A great contribution to the Heresy 5 Excellent, a top novel and contribution to the Heresy
_False Gods_


_Galaxy in Flames_

1 Poor 2 Novel Below Average 3 Average, Novel just made Standards 
4 Great Novel, A great contribution to the Heresy 5 Excellent, a top novel and contribution to the Heresy

_Flight of the Essenstein_

1 Poor 2 Novel Below Average 3 Average, Novel just made Standards 
4 Great Novel, A great contribution to the Heresy 5 Excellent, a top novel and contribution to the Heresy


_Fulgrim_

1 Poor 2 Novel Below Average 3 Average, Novel just made Standards 
4 Great Novel, A great contribution to the Heresy 5 Excellent, a top novel and contribution to the Heresy



2nd Thread
_Heresy Novel Reviews, Heresy Spreads (Novels 6-10)_

Next five novels... etc...




It would look a lot nicer than this obviously. We could also put pictures and make is look fancy and what not. After each grade, they could right a paragraph of what they thought about the novel. It could be longer if they want, however, these threads are really meant for the average joes to look at this website and almost use us like a source. If they wrote more than a paragragh or two, people are less likely to look at their reviews.


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