in my humble opionion metacritic and other user scores are way more reliable than any review by ONE journalist.
The number shows you "the balance of love and hate".
If 80 people vote "10" and madly love the game, and 20 people vote "0" and hate/bash the game, it would still be a solid 80%
Of course the non extremists will always vote in the "2-9" range and balance it out even more.
(Those scores are only reliable if there are lots of votes though)
What does a 80% metacritic score tell me? It tells me," there is a 80% chance that I will like the game". But I might end up being in the 20% group because I am a special snowflake.
Dragon Age 1: (Slightly disagree with user rating) Game was step in right direction and in some way resembled BG. Althrough amount of streamlining and casualization, less frreedom than in BG, retarded companions relation system and while combat was ok, game had too much of it. It seemed like consicious decision to imput so much filler combat - it made game unbearable at one point. My score - 6,5
Dragon Age 2: (Agree) Game was trash. Advertised as AAA game - when it screamed cheap cash grab. Another part of series described as 'spiritual succesor to BG' while in reality it had little in common. Idiotic amount of slashery combat, cheesy relations & dialogues in game, dialogue wheel idea, 'press a button something awesome has to happen' (wtf?). Just bad. My score - 3.0. Had it been very clear descibed as action game with some rpg elements and as a spinoff - instead of rpg game then it would get 5.0 from me.
Sim City: (Agree) Forcing playing on game servers only + 'advertisement' limited buildings have clear adcantage + game fundamental mechanbics & AI broken. My score - 3.0
SWTOR: (Agree) Not an virtual world at all, does not feel like mmorpg. Very linear, streamlined into oblivion, uninspired, bad crafting, bad races, game does not offer anything besides voice over & cutscenes. Very "thin" game and again - should not be advertised&classified as mmoprg. My score 4.5
GW2: (Disagree) Feel like several smaller-games put into one-interface. Too streamlined, non-consequental, get boring very fast. Overrated. Have to agree though - that for people that like this game underlying concept - it's propably a good product. Similar like with Defiance. My score - 6.0
TSW: (Disagree) Overrated. Similar faults like in Swtor case. Better 'dialogues&atmosphere' than in Swtor, but that's it. My score 5.0
Defiance: (Agree) Technically solid and it's good that it spearhead PVE MMO Shooter/ MMOTPS genre, hopefully it takes players that like that sort of gameplay off MMORPG genre. Only really objective complain is tawdry dialogues and cheesy story, other than that - just not my type of game, but definately it is solid and peopel who like MMOTPS idea should be happy I think. My score 6.0
RIFT: (Agree) Similar like Defiance. Even more solid technically than Defiance, superb support, great businesss model, but super generic world and totally not my type game. Add-ons, LFG, smallish world, huge focus on instances - WoW 2.0. Another mmorpg that does not feel like an mmorpg and that's why does not really deserve subsciption & playing with all that mmo has to bring and could be as good or maybe better as a lobby game with shared cities and co-op instanced questing zones. Even though for first three positive things I mentioned - I wanted to like it- I ultimatelly could not. My score 6.5, maybe 7.0. That high becauxe while I did not like game concept, Trion definatlly tried and tries to make it great product.
Concluding . User score is not a superbkly accurate thing, but it's more accurate than IGN and many other big western / USA gaming sites.
Going purely off Dragon Age 1 + 2, sure.. DA1 was better than 2 imo but is 2 really worth 'that' low a score? 4.2?.. no way. I mean, look at how many 1's and 0's there are straight away from DA2. It's just stupid. 1? Like it's the worst game ever made? Madness. It wasn't as good as people wanted it to be, fine.. but a 1...?
Yep and thats where the problem lies. People who are annoyed at a game that didnt live up to expectations give stupidly low scores, or fans give overly high scores to counter that. It doesnt work. Anyone could objectively look at DA2 and see that it doesnt deserve 4.2. Its a better than average game. Does it live up to DA1? No not to me, but that doesnt make it sub par in general.
I disagre. DA2 was really sub-par game. Really I had to literally force myself to play to give it a chance before I uninstalled it in disgust.
Concluding . User score is not a superbkly accurate thing, but it's more accurate than IGN and many other big western / USA gaming sites.
Yeah, I guess so. As long as "accuracy" here simply means whether we agree with the mob. A few others in the thread have used the terms "right" and "wrong", which definitely doesn't apply to opinions about subjective things.
Really what bothered me wasn't having a different opinion from the mob. That's expected.
No, what bothered me is the hyper-fixation the mob has on single failure points. Games which are entirely amazing and deserve 9.0 or better, but whose solitary failure point causes them to get a 1.9. This is bad for a few reasons:
99% of the game is completely awesome, and the dev team absolutely deserves credit for their accomplishment.
Players who want to enjoy the game will have their enjoyment lessened by the idea that a vast sea of people is hyper-fixated on that one failure point. This is sort of vague, and I lack the formalized pyschological/sociological education to give it a proper term, but if you have a favorite movie and someone you respect insults that movie as being terrible, it has a certain impact and you can't ever quite ignore the criticism, even though you still like the movie. (TLDR version: when the mob reviews something poorly, it can literally reduce the fun you have in that game.)
And finally, the bad review will prevent some players from even trying the game -- they'll miss out on an experience which they may have found completely enjoyable.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Concluding . User score is not a superbkly accurate thing, but it's more accurate than IGN and many other big western / USA gaming sites.
Yeah, I guess so. As long as "accuracy" here simply means whether we agree with the mob. A few others in the thread have used the terms "right" and "wrong", which definitely doesn't apply to opinions about subjective things.
Really what bothered me wasn't having a different opinion from the mob. That's expected.
No, what bothered me is the hyper-fixation the mob has on single failure points. Games which are entirely amazing and deserve 9.0 or better, but whose solitary failure point causes them to get a 1.9. This is bad for a few reasons:
99% of the game is completely awesome, and the dev team absolutely deserves credit for their accomplishment.
Players who want to enjoy the game will have their enjoyment lessened by the idea that a vast sea of people is hyper-fixated on that one failure point. This is sort of vague, and I lack the formalized pyschological/sociological education to give it a proper term, but if you have a favorite movie and someone you respect insults that movie as being terrible, it has a certain impact and you can't ever quite ignore the criticism, even though you still like the movie. (TLDR version: when the mob reviews something poorly, it can literally reduce the fun you have in that game.)
And finally, the bad review will prevent some players from even trying the game -- they'll miss out on an experience which they may have found completely enjoyable.
Game scorings were evolving for a long time into higher and higher scores. In 90's 7/10 was good score, now it's considered average, 9/10 was very rare 10/10 almost unheard of. Now 9/10 is expected. It's nothing surprising = it's business after all. Thing is that and because of higher and higher hype and huge marketting campaign had lead to polarization and strong negative scoring as well.
I would not over-fixate on 'over-fixation' point you bring. People usually desciribe few things whenever they score negative or positive. This is hardly true only for negative poins of a game.
Mob thing you mentioned. Go to other scoring communities and you'll have diffrent scores. It does not have anything to do with 'miniority vs majority' - popular games do get smashed and other popular games do get praised, similar with lesss popualr games. It's about whenever you agree with current group of users using metarcritic or not.
Many of big gaming sites have their user score system as well - and there are many with user scores diffrent from metacriti user scores. I am sure you'll find a popular user vote site that'll correspond with your personal opinion more.
So I see people bash a lot on Metacritic and how you can't trust any score on there because people post ridiculous scores all the time (10's and 0's), so forth and so on. And I have seen this myself in the individual user reviews. But I've got to tell you, I've yet to see a single AVERAGED USER REVIEW score for any game on that site that I didn't think was pretty much right on the money. Sure the averaged critic review score can be bogus at times, especially when you see games like Dragon Age 2 or Sim City with super high scores, but that's not Metacritic's fault, they are just averaging the stupid professional reviewers scores. So again, where is the incredible innacuracy with the USER REVIEWS if we look at the weighted average? I don't see it. Let's take a look at some examples.
I could post more and more. And the only 2 games out of those that I play are Defiance and The Secret World, and I still would say objectively I think every one of those AVERAGED USER REVIEWS are completely accurate. So why all the metacritic hate? Because a few fanbois and haters like to give 0's and 10's that are ridiculous? Looks like they must balance themselves out to me, because the end result looks pretty dead on from anything I've seen.
Yeah.... unless SimCity murdered your family there is no way in the world it deserves a 1.9. I get it, people hate unnecessary anti-pirating measures, especially when the publisher claims the obvious anti-pirating hoops aren't anti-pirating hoops, they're a feature! But the game is fully playable, and it's certainly arguable that it's either as good or better than previous SimCIty games.
The ratings of other divisive games are also ridiculous. For example, the original World of Warcraft is a 6.8, The Secret World is an 8.2. Come on. One sold millions of copies and retained many of those subscriptions. The other barely got 200k sales and lost enough subs that they went f2p less than a year after launch. Can you tell which by the ratings?
Metacritic and sites like it are useful because they aggregate reviews. The averages of the ratings of those reviews are meaningless though. Why? Because even just a single rating is meaningless if you didn't READ the review to see if you agree with how they reached that rating in the first place.
Please don't try to pretend the numbers are evidence of anything more than what they are, that people are lazy even when trying to be frugal/seeking validation.
Originally posted by JimmyYO At first I thought OP was trolling when he posted the Dragon Age 2 score but the rest are pretty much dead on. The problem is you're cherry picking the accurate ones and claiming it's legit based off the few that are correct. The broken clock argument basically.
I posted mmo's and ones that have been controversial that come to mind. Please by all means post links to show me the ones you think are totally inaccurate.
I don't even look at user scores anymore after agreeing with so many critics. I look at the user scores and see piles of people rating either 0 or 10 and saying things like "DIS GAME IZ BETTAR THEN WOW" or "DIS GAME SUX, AND IS FOR NOOBS AND BABIES". I'm not surprised at half of the averages because of this.
I don't agree with DA:O being a 91 though. Terribly boring game. Luckily, I got it for free.
Game scorings were evolving for a long time into higher and higher scores. In 90's 7/10 was good score, now it's considered average, 9/10 was very rare 10/10 almost unheard of. Now 9/10 is expected. It's nothing surprising = it's business after all. Thing is that and because of higher and higher hype and huge marketting campaign had lead to polarization and strong negative scoring as well.
I would not over-fixate on 'over-fixation' point you bring. People usually desciribe few things whenever they score negative or positive. This is hardly true only for negative poins of a game.
Mob thing you mentioned. Go to other scoring communities and you'll have diffrent scores. It does not have anything to do with 'miniority vs majority' - popular games do get smashed and other popular games do get praised, similar with lesss popualr games. It's about whenever you agree with current group of users using metarcritic or not.
I dunno, in the late 80s and early 90s one of the very first criticisms I had was 5 wasn't "average" by any stretch, and that it was mostly just 8s and 9s. Doesn't really seem that different from nowadays.
My concerns about the review systems aren't for myself. I buy all sorts of games, and hardly give reviews a passing glance; I think perhaps 1-in-20 games I will check a review or metacritic score for.
My concerns are more for players who haven't figured out that reviews are mostly meaningless. I'm concerned that companies like Maxis put out a fantastic product and that due to one tiny slip-up the community hyper-fixates on they actually see hundreds of thousands of fewer sales because of poor reviews. You're right that it's not just an issue with negative reviews, and that reviews can also be abnormally positive (Bioshock Infinite was a great game, but the Metacritic rating puts it noticeably higher than it really deserves. Honestly, a few well-placed negative critiques of the ending to Bioshock Infinite could've had a drastic impact on the scores it received, considering the whole ME3 debacle.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
The only way you are going to know if a game is what you personally consider good is to try it yourself. If you let Metacritic or anyone else for that matter determine your game purchases you may miss out on some games that got lower scores but you personally may like a lot. Don't let a low score anywhere deter you from trying a game you personally think looks interesting.
While everyone should make up their own mind, reviews give good information. Don't look at the number. Read the facts & impression.
If a reviewer said the game a good variety of terrain, and the world is big .. that is probably true. And then you can decide if you like those facts about the game or not.
My concerns are more for players who haven't figured out that reviews are mostly meaningless. I'm concerned that companies like Maxis put out a fantastic product and that due to one tiny slip-up the community hyper-fixates on they actually see hundreds of thousands of fewer sales because of poor reviews. You're right that it's not just an issue with negative reviews, and that reviews can also be abnormally positive (Bioshock Infinite was a great game, but the Metacritic rating puts it noticeably higher than it really deserves. Honestly, a few well-placed negative critiques of the ending to Bioshock Infinite could've had a drastic impact on the scores it received, considering the whole ME3 debacle.)
Well, how can reviews be "meaningless" when they drive the market? They mean "success" or "failure". In fact, many devs have their bonuses tied to metacritics score.
If you mean they are subjective, and not always consistent with your own view .. then it is true. But certainly reviews mean a lot ... in reputation .. and often in real cash for devs.
And in the case of Bioshock, i do agree with the review. I think it is the best FPS produced for quite a while, and i like the ending. Sometimes you agree with reviews, sometimes you don't.
The only way you are going to know if a game is what you personally consider good is to try it yourself. If you let Metacritic or anyone else for that matter determine your game purchases you may miss out on some games that got lower scores but you personally may like a lot. Don't let a low score anywhere deter you from trying a game you personally think looks interesting.
While everyone should make up their own mind, reviews give good information. Don't look at the number. Read the facts & impression.
Don't JUST read the facts and impressions, but (referring to user scores if you have no other choice than to go by them) also what the user is comparing them to. I've noticed that much of the time, professional critics give games a solid playthrough and then base their scores on how much they enjoyed the game, not how it compares to every other game in the series, or worse, the genre. There have been people giving consistently low scores in the user section for years simply because of that one game they played back in the MMO stone ages that they never quite got over.
But I've got to tell you, I've yet to see a single AVERAGED USER REVIEW score for any game on that site that I didn't think was pretty much right on the money.
"Your honor. The prosecution will today prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Metacritic is reliable and accurate.
If it please the court, I would like to submit to evidence, exhibit A: My opinion.
The only way you are going to know if a game is what you personally consider good is to try it yourself. If you let Metacritic or anyone else for that matter determine your game purchases you may miss out on some games that got lower scores but you personally may like a lot. Don't let a low score anywhere deter you from trying a game you personally think looks interesting.
While everyone should make up their own mind, reviews give good information. Don't look at the number. Read the facts & impression.
If a reviewer said the game a good variety of terrain, and the world is big .. that is probably true. And then you can decide if you like those facts about the game or not.
I agree but this thread isn't about the actual reviews. It's about the numbers associated with them and far to many people will judge a game based purely off of what scores it got either from critics or users. This is a mistake and a lot of people miss out on some really great games. I agree that reading the actual reviews is a good way not only to judge a game but also to judge the reviewer which is equally important. The best way to judge a game however is to try it yourself as only you can decide if the game is a good fit for your personal tastes.
Originally posted by Wylf I agree with the OP, generally the results are very close to how I would rate the games. There are of course some exceptions, but those occur rarely. I have found that Metacritic is a useful tool in deciding what games to play.
I agree with this. The critic scores tend to be garbage but the user scores are generally pretty close to my own.
Dragon Age 1: (Disagree with user rating) Combat put me to sleep, so despite the fantastic game world I couldn't enjoy it and didn't finish.
Dragon Age 2: (Disagree) Combat was finally fun, and the story just as enjoyable! Much better than the original!
Sim City: (Disagree) Perfect example of gamers being stupid. Apart from a bad launch day, Sim City has kept me very addicted and is honestly probably the best city-builder game of all time. As a fan of the genre (and someone who has made city-builders professionally in the past), I feel it's a fantastic game deserving of much better than the internet's irrational wrath.
SWTOR: (Agree) While the rating is a little lower than how much fun I had, the complete lack of mob variety really hurt this game. It didn't help that grouping was a massive pain too, when all I really wanted to do was group most of the time.
GW2: (Agree) Yeah, 8.0 sounds about right.
TSW: (Agree)
ME1: (Agree) Fantastic game, although rough compared to later installments.
ME3: (Disagree) The best game of the series given a 4.7 just because of a weak ending? Perfect example of gamers being stupid.
Defiance: (Agree) While fun, it didn't really keep me playing. Although it's also a perfect example of gamers rejecting innovation, so don't complain when the next 10 MMORPGs are WOW copies again
RIFT: (Disagree) This game was considerably better than a 7.3. It's solidly the third best MMORPG ever made, behind CoH and WOW.
Making city builders professionally doesn't mean shit if they were crap. Which games did you work on?
Also, everyone hating Sim City must objectively mean its not fun because you have argued billions of times that games which are popular like WoW must be good or so many people wouldn't enjoy them.
Making city builders professionally doesn't mean shit if they were crap. Which games did you work on?
Also, everyone hating Sim City must objectively mean its not fun because you have argued billions of times that games which are popular like WoW must be good or so many people wouldn't enjoy them.
As I still work for the company I made the two city-builders in, I choose not to reveal them due to wanting to remain free from company association in a forum. But thanks for the personal attack!
Also it seems you still fail to understand long-term subscriptions as being a loud and clear indicator of customer demand, compared with box sales (and reviews). It's simple and I've explained it many times.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Making city builders professionally doesn't mean shit if they were crap. Which games did you work on?
Also, everyone hating Sim City must objectively mean its not fun because you have argued billions of times that games which are popular like WoW must be good or so many people wouldn't enjoy them.
As I still work for the company I made the two city-builders in, I choose not to reveal them due to wanting to remain free from company association in a forum. But thanks for the personal attack!
Also it seems you still fail to understand long-term subscriptions as being a loud and clear indicator of customer demand, compared with box sales (and reviews). It's simple and I've explained it many times.
Repeated purchases of games from the same series are just as good as subscriptions.
[mod edit]
"Guys the growing size of the games market proves that old games are bad. Ubiquitous internet, removal of nerd stigma for more casual games, the ballooning marketing budgets of AAA products? Fuck that. Its all because of superior game design. And god dammit Draw Something is too an MMO, stop being so uptight with labels."
Game scorings were evolving for a long time into higher and higher scores. In 90's 7/10 was good score, now it's considered average, 9/10 was very rare 10/10 almost unheard of. Now 9/10 is expected. It's nothing surprising = it's business after all. Thing is that and because of higher and higher hype and huge marketting campaign had lead to polarization and strong negative scoring as well.
I would not over-fixate on 'over-fixation' point you bring. People usually desciribe few things whenever they score negative or positive. This is hardly true only for negative poins of a game.
Mob thing you mentioned. Go to other scoring communities and you'll have diffrent scores. It does not have anything to do with 'miniority vs majority' - popular games do get smashed and other popular games do get praised, similar with lesss popualr games. It's about whenever you agree with current group of users using metarcritic or not.
I dunno, in the late 80s and early 90s one of the very first criticisms I had was 5 wasn't "average" by any stretch, and that it was mostly just 8s and 9s. Doesn't really seem that different from nowadays.
My concerns about the review systems aren't for myself. I buy all sorts of games, and hardly give reviews a passing glance; I think perhaps 1-in-20 games I will check a review or metacritic score for.
My concerns are more for players who haven't figured out that reviews are mostly meaningless. I'm concerned that companies like Maxis put out a fantastic product and that due to one tiny slip-up the community hyper-fixates on they actually see hundreds of thousands of fewer sales because of poor reviews. You're right that it's not just an issue with negative reviews, and that reviews can also be abnormally positive (Bioshock Infinite was a great game, but the Metacritic rating puts it noticeably higher than it really deserves. Honestly, a few well-placed negative critiques of the ending to Bioshock Infinite could've had a drastic impact on the scores it received, considering the whole ME3 debacle.)
Well maybe it was just diffrent depenant on country.
In 90's in my country in example game magazines generally were not giving 10/10 AT ALL. Current most popular game magazine - (that started few years later than other mind you) did not give 10/10 for first few (3 I think) years of it's existence to any game. Yes 5/10 was not cosnidered average, but 6/10 was, 7/10 was preety good, 8/10 was very good 9/10 was exceptional and was rarely given - there were magazines issues with no game that got 9/10.
Simcity definately don't deserve 1.9, that's too low but for me it's not fantastic product. It's very far from fantasic product, so I definately don't have as big problem with this score as you do.
As for other people making their purcharse decisions based on either very low scores or very high scores. Well that will happen. Not much you can do about it. Good game getting lower sales because of low scores is bad, but bad / average game getting super high sales because of super high scores that generate hype train is just as bad from my purely gamer point of view.
RIFT: (Disagree) This game was considerably better than a 7.3. It's solidly the third best MMORPG ever made, behind CoH and WOW.
User experiences and taste varies, because personally I tried and played those 3 mentioned here and they don't even appear in my personal top 30, I played God knows how many MMOs, those 3 don't even measure up to swtor imho lol, and that's a awful bad mmo.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
i guess that you could in theory do a calculation on all the data on metacritic and then run it to get a new average then form this avedrage you could re-rate the games in order to get a proper average.
The thing is you see... Happy content customers rarley take the time to do reviews of.. well anything. Otoh irrate or angry customers tend to do just that in order to get "vindication" and when they do they tend to be overly harsh.
Because of this the only thing metacritic is really good for is judging the fandom reaction to something if you are to lazy to visit a forum.
By the same token the users tend to call gaming magazines/sites "bought" and that in their mind makes the "proffesional" opinion void.
So if user-scores are bad and magazine scores are bad... what does that make metacritic... Yeah.
User experiences and taste varies, because personally I tried and played those 3 mentioned here and they don't even appear in my personal top 30, I played God knows how many MMOs, those 3 don't even measure up to swtor imho lol, and that's a awful bad mmo.
*I'm now posting in a thread where SWTOR was called "better than WOW, CoH, and RIFT"*
Trololol!
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Repeated purchases of games from the same series are just as good as subscriptions.
[mod edit]
They're nowhere near "just as good". Subs are an ongoing continuous cost. The second someone stops having fun, they stop subscribing. Box sales are mostly about hype and only weakly influenced by a company's prior box sales.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Comments
Hello,
in my humble opionion metacritic and other user scores are way more reliable than any review by ONE journalist.
The number shows you "the balance of love and hate".
If 80 people vote "10" and madly love the game, and 20 people vote "0" and hate/bash the game, it would still be a solid 80%
Of course the non extremists will always vote in the "2-9" range and balance it out even more.
(Those scores are only reliable if there are lots of votes though)
What does a 80% metacritic score tell me? It tells me," there is a 80% chance that I will like the game". But I might end up being in the 20% group because I am a special snowflake.
Cheers
Doc B
Concluding . User score is not a superbkly accurate thing, but it's more accurate than IGN and many other big western / USA gaming sites.
I disagre. DA2 was really sub-par game. Really I had to literally force myself to play to give it a chance before I uninstalled it in disgust.
Yeah, I guess so. As long as "accuracy" here simply means whether we agree with the mob. A few others in the thread have used the terms "right" and "wrong", which definitely doesn't apply to opinions about subjective things.
Really what bothered me wasn't having a different opinion from the mob. That's expected.
No, what bothered me is the hyper-fixation the mob has on single failure points. Games which are entirely amazing and deserve 9.0 or better, but whose solitary failure point causes them to get a 1.9. This is bad for a few reasons:
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Game scorings were evolving for a long time into higher and higher scores. In 90's 7/10 was good score, now it's considered average, 9/10 was very rare 10/10 almost unheard of. Now 9/10 is expected. It's nothing surprising = it's business after all. Thing is that and because of higher and higher hype and huge marketting campaign had lead to polarization and strong negative scoring as well.
I would not over-fixate on 'over-fixation' point you bring. People usually desciribe few things whenever they score negative or positive. This is hardly true only for negative poins of a game.
Mob thing you mentioned. Go to other scoring communities and you'll have diffrent scores. It does not have anything to do with 'miniority vs majority' - popular games do get smashed and other popular games do get praised, similar with lesss popualr games. It's about whenever you agree with current group of users using metarcritic or not.
Many of big gaming sites have their user score system as well - and there are many with user scores diffrent from metacriti user scores. I am sure you'll find a popular user vote site that'll correspond with your personal opinion more.
Yeah.... unless SimCity murdered your family there is no way in the world it deserves a 1.9. I get it, people hate unnecessary anti-pirating measures, especially when the publisher claims the obvious anti-pirating hoops aren't anti-pirating hoops, they're a feature! But the game is fully playable, and it's certainly arguable that it's either as good or better than previous SimCIty games.
The ratings of other divisive games are also ridiculous. For example, the original World of Warcraft is a 6.8, The Secret World is an 8.2. Come on. One sold millions of copies and retained many of those subscriptions. The other barely got 200k sales and lost enough subs that they went f2p less than a year after launch. Can you tell which by the ratings?
Metacritic and sites like it are useful because they aggregate reviews. The averages of the ratings of those reviews are meaningless though. Why? Because even just a single rating is meaningless if you didn't READ the review to see if you agree with how they reached that rating in the first place.
Please don't try to pretend the numbers are evidence of anything more than what they are, that people are lazy even when trying to be frugal/seeking validation.
I posted mmo's and ones that have been controversial that come to mind. Please by all means post links to show me the ones you think are totally inaccurate.
I don't even look at user scores anymore after agreeing with so many critics. I look at the user scores and see piles of people rating either 0 or 10 and saying things like "DIS GAME IZ BETTAR THEN WOW" or "DIS GAME SUX, AND IS FOR NOOBS AND BABIES". I'm not surprised at half of the averages because of this.
I don't agree with DA:O being a 91 though. Terribly boring game. Luckily, I got it for free.
I dunno, in the late 80s and early 90s one of the very first criticisms I had was 5 wasn't "average" by any stretch, and that it was mostly just 8s and 9s. Doesn't really seem that different from nowadays.
My concerns about the review systems aren't for myself. I buy all sorts of games, and hardly give reviews a passing glance; I think perhaps 1-in-20 games I will check a review or metacritic score for.
My concerns are more for players who haven't figured out that reviews are mostly meaningless. I'm concerned that companies like Maxis put out a fantastic product and that due to one tiny slip-up the community hyper-fixates on they actually see hundreds of thousands of fewer sales because of poor reviews. You're right that it's not just an issue with negative reviews, and that reviews can also be abnormally positive (Bioshock Infinite was a great game, but the Metacritic rating puts it noticeably higher than it really deserves. Honestly, a few well-placed negative critiques of the ending to Bioshock Infinite could've had a drastic impact on the scores it received, considering the whole ME3 debacle.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
While everyone should make up their own mind, reviews give good information. Don't look at the number. Read the facts & impression.
If a reviewer said the game a good variety of terrain, and the world is big .. that is probably true. And then you can decide if you like those facts about the game or not.
Well, how can reviews be "meaningless" when they drive the market? They mean "success" or "failure". In fact, many devs have their bonuses tied to metacritics score.
If you mean they are subjective, and not always consistent with your own view .. then it is true. But certainly reviews mean a lot ... in reputation .. and often in real cash for devs.
And in the case of Bioshock, i do agree with the review. I think it is the best FPS produced for quite a while, and i like the ending. Sometimes you agree with reviews, sometimes you don't.
Don't JUST read the facts and impressions, but (referring to user scores if you have no other choice than to go by them) also what the user is comparing them to. I've noticed that much of the time, professional critics give games a solid playthrough and then base their scores on how much they enjoyed the game, not how it compares to every other game in the series, or worse, the genre. There have been people giving consistently low scores in the user section for years simply because of that one game they played back in the MMO stone ages that they never quite got over.
"Your honor. The prosecution will today prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Metacritic is reliable and accurate.
If it please the court, I would like to submit to evidence, exhibit A: My opinion.
Please note how it coincides with metacritics.
I rest my case."
I agree but this thread isn't about the actual reviews. It's about the numbers associated with them and far to many people will judge a game based purely off of what scores it got either from critics or users. This is a mistake and a lot of people miss out on some really great games. I agree that reading the actual reviews is a good way not only to judge a game but also to judge the reviewer which is equally important. The best way to judge a game however is to try it yourself as only you can decide if the game is a good fit for your personal tastes.
Bren
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I agree with this. The critic scores tend to be garbage but the user scores are generally pretty close to my own.
Making city builders professionally doesn't mean shit if they were crap. Which games did you work on?
Also, everyone hating Sim City must objectively mean its not fun because you have argued billions of times that games which are popular like WoW must be good or so many people wouldn't enjoy them.
As I still work for the company I made the two city-builders in, I choose not to reveal them due to wanting to remain free from company association in a forum. But thanks for the personal attack!
Also it seems you still fail to understand long-term subscriptions as being a loud and clear indicator of customer demand, compared with box sales (and reviews). It's simple and I've explained it many times.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Repeated purchases of games from the same series are just as good as subscriptions.
[mod edit]
"Guys the growing size of the games market proves that old games are bad. Ubiquitous internet, removal of nerd stigma for more casual games, the ballooning marketing budgets of AAA products? Fuck that. Its all because of superior game design. And god dammit Draw Something is too an MMO, stop being so uptight with labels."
Well maybe it was just diffrent depenant on country.
In 90's in my country in example game magazines generally were not giving 10/10 AT ALL. Current most popular game magazine - (that started few years later than other mind you) did not give 10/10 for first few (3 I think) years of it's existence to any game. Yes 5/10 was not cosnidered average, but 6/10 was, 7/10 was preety good, 8/10 was very good 9/10 was exceptional and was rarely given - there were magazines issues with no game that got 9/10.
Simcity definately don't deserve 1.9, that's too low but for me it's not fantastic product. It's very far from fantasic product, so I definately don't have as big problem with this score as you do.
As for other people making their purcharse decisions based on either very low scores or very high scores. Well that will happen. Not much you can do about it. Good game getting lower sales because of low scores is bad, but bad / average game getting super high sales because of super high scores that generate hype train is just as bad from my purely gamer point of view.
User experiences and taste varies, because personally I tried and played those 3 mentioned here and they don't even appear in my personal top 30, I played God knows how many MMOs, those 3 don't even measure up to swtor imho lol, and that's a awful bad mmo.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
i guess that you could in theory do a calculation on all the data on metacritic and then run it to get a new average then form this avedrage you could re-rate the games in order to get a proper average.
The thing is you see... Happy content customers rarley take the time to do reviews of.. well anything. Otoh irrate or angry customers tend to do just that in order to get "vindication" and when they do they tend to be overly harsh.
Because of this the only thing metacritic is really good for is judging the fandom reaction to something if you are to lazy to visit a forum.
By the same token the users tend to call gaming magazines/sites "bought" and that in their mind makes the "proffesional" opinion void.
So if user-scores are bad and magazine scores are bad... what does that make metacritic... Yeah.
This have been a good conversation
*I'm now posting in a thread where SWTOR was called "better than WOW, CoH, and RIFT"*
Trololol!
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
They're nowhere near "just as good". Subs are an ongoing continuous cost. The second someone stops having fun, they stop subscribing. Box sales are mostly about hype and only weakly influenced by a company's prior box sales.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver