Hi,I'd like to find the rating system being used in the Reviews. Is it published somewhere? I figure 1 to 5 is from good to best but where do the following fit in - or do they fit in:5 stars- AOE what does AOE stand for? I assume this is better than a plain 5 stars.What is the difference between a Gold Star Award, a Gold Star, and an Avsim Gold Star?Where does "see review" fit into the rating system or does it?thanks.Russ

Hi, Russ. Your question is actually a pretty big one, because you are going back over several years' worth of reviews.Firstly, the AOE = Award Of Excellence. The AOE, like many great things, comes with a Gold Star attached to it. All the Gold Star references are equal; different people have different names for the Gold Star.There used to be a Bronze Star. The way that went was payware products could earn a Gold Star, while freeware offerings could earn a Bronze Star. The AOE is awarded to any product that not only shows features that are uniformly excellent, but it also permanently "raises the bar" for any developers that would follow it. It would possibly be something that the ACES crew would go, "dang, it, if only we had thought of that feature ourselves, now it will have to be written into the next version of MSFS for sure!". A good example is TrackIR. A TrackIR makes a VC come to life. Very quickly after the TrackIR was introduced, support for MSFS was generated. Now TrackIR support is native to MSFS. As for the Star Ratings, that's a little different from the Gold Star. 1 basically meant "more work is needed on this product", 3 meant "this is equal to the level of quality you'd find in MSFS", and 5 would be "this is an exceptional product". 5 stars with a AOE was a product that set a new high standard. There used to be a mathematical formula that went into calculating the stars. The trouble with the formula (as I saw it) was that the value would skew upwards as developers improved on their products; or put another way, the more products we saw the more likely it would be that the lowest value we could asign based on the math was 3. That left us in all practicality a 3-star rating system, and due to the formula we used, it became difficult to either differentiate between average products, or to give a 1 or 2 star to poor products. I don't miss the star ratings at all. "See Review" means just that, you can read the review and draw your own conclusions as to the value of the product. Most of the "see review" references occur after the star system was dropped. Jeff Shyluk Assistant Manging EditorSenior Staff ReviewerAVSIM

Jeff,Thank you.Russ