What Makes a Good Review?

I honestly wonder what makes a good review.

Excellent question. Quality? Grammar? A very interesting question.

In my opinion, a good review is one that highlights and reinforces good ideas and things done right/well, explains why poor choices in formatting/content are poor, and is overall constructively critical.

^ More or less.
You're not looking for someone who's just going to state "X is bad." or "You should do Y"
You're looking for "X is bad because of ___, and there are several options instead of it, such as ___"

They review each and every section of your guide, and mention if there are sections missing (E.G. you don't have an alternative items section). They could also comment on what could be aesthetically better, or what seems too wordy.

Obviously the better worded and more intellectually sound your statement is, the more likely people are going to find you credible and listen, so there is a rhetoric element to anything in the forums, but in some cases if you simply illustrate what you're trying to advise straightforwardly enough, people will listen. That comes down to who you're trying to talk to, however.

I have one more thing to add: A guide is just that. A guide. It is nigh impossible for an experienced review to know if a guide can guide; argh, I'll say an example.

A few minutes ago, I played Fenrir for the first time. It was to test DarkJaw's Ragnarok Rises guide. And it opened my eyes a bit.

It was easy; he's a low skill floor god, but after playing him (and trying and failing at times), I realized that while DarkJaw's guide has excellent skill overviews, and good item explanation, it offered absolutely no guiding on jungling as Fenrir.

Now, why does this affect more experienced players over new ones? Because since we already know how to play as the subject god, we don't know how effective the guide is at actually teaching how to play that god.

tl;dr version: You need another thing to be a perfect reviewer: inexperience.

You don't *need* inexperience, you just need to know how it would affect inexperience. Rather, experience may actually be better at understanding, because you KNOW how a god works, so you know what they may be leaving out in forms of teaching.

For example, if they leave out the "stack runes to 4, then engage on someone with brutalize, auto attack, howl for rune use, and finish them, with a jump for an escape or chase", the inexperience players would NEVER KNOW the difference. We would, so we can tell them to include that.

An inexperienced player doesn't know what the 'guide' is leaving out, to put it simply. Granted they may have a better idea of how well it teaches, but a veteran can put in a little bit of brainstorming time and realize if people are going to not understand what's going on.