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genbatzu · Oct 19, 2015

Mattenth said:
You'll have to tell me who you're friends with because I don't recognize you (I'm guessing Aaron?). The two devs are both sleeping atm - we were up brutally late last night squashing some final compat bugs.

Thanks for the post though. Full disclosure, I work on OpenCritic as our content manager (basically, I program all of our spiders/scrapers and automation and check the reviews that come in before they go live).

Looking forward to y'alls feedback.

Simple averages. You can click the score orb on any game details page to get a detailed breakdown of all scores/conversions included, but it's fairly straightforward.

no search function?
it's either hard to find, or it has none, but if the main purpose is not on finding the scores of a game I'm interested in, what's the main purpose of this site?

//edit: or my browser doesn't display the search window

//edit2: browser displayed the search kinda plain:

Mattenth · Oct 19, 2015

genbatzu said:
no search function?
it's either hard to find, or it has none, but if the main purpose is not on finding the scores of a game I'm interested in, what's the main purpose of this site?

//edit: or my browser doesn't display the search window

Sent you a PM

blackjaw · Oct 19, 2015

After playing with it for a week or so I agree with most, it's gamerankings with a slick coat of paint

The_Darkest_Red · Oct 19, 2015

Mattenth said:
No 3DS or VITA titles :-\

We'll be adding them in December / early 2016. 3DS titles are especially painful as Nintendo makes it fairly challenging to get screenshots correctly attributed.

That's great to hear! It's a shame about the screenshots but once you guys get 3DS games I doubt I'll have any use for MC going forward.

Mattenth · Oct 20, 2015

NightDriver said:
I wish these sorts of sites would report the Standard Deviation as well. Without a measure of variability, the average, alone, doesn't tell you a whole lot.

Done. It's a little hidden for now - click on the score orb and it's at the bottom.

We're in the process of overhauling score calculations to use a net promoter / rotten tomatoes like system, so we didn't want to put too much work into the design here when it's going to change so significantly.

CrAzY FiNgErS · Oct 20, 2015

Mattenth said:
Done. It's a little hidden for now - click on the score orb and it's at the bottom.

We're in the process of overhauling score calculations to use a net promoter / rotten tomatoes like system, so we didn't want to put too much work into the design here when it's going to change so significantly.

Thank you for this. Much respect. I was just going to request you switch to a Rotten Tomatoes like system, but you are ahead of the game. I wish you great success as you continue improving your site.

SkyTurnsRed · Oct 20, 2015

I just looked at this site, and wow! This is great! I love the design of it a lot. Very simple and easy to use as well.

Arkham · Oct 20, 2015

astonish said:
OpenCritic, a new game-only review aggregator, has launched (full disclosure my friend helped build it and gave me the heads up that they launched today). It includes some nice features that MetaCritic doesn’t have. Most notably you can exclude publications you don’t usually agree with or build a score using only your favorite publications. Another big feature for me is the crawlers constantly scanning, even for games it’s already seen. As publications have their “x weeks-in” or post-patch review updates the score will update automatically to reflect them.

The “Open” name and the FAQ suggests they are aiming for transparency both in how reviews are scraped and in the formulas used to normalize and calculate scores. They’re also aiming to let community feedback help shape the process.

OpenCritic

Looks good, thanks for posting.

Do you know if they'll have user profiles? I couldn't find a way to sign-up and it'd be nice to be able to customize your profile. I guess the way it's remembering filters is by cookies.

N/M:

Your trusted publications are saved each time you toggle one on or off. As mentioned in the user reviews question, we currently don't have any version of a "user account" due to the high costs associated with developing that feature. As a result, trusted publications are stored on your device through a cookie. We know this isn't an optimal experience, and is something we're looking to improve after our launch.

Gator86 · Oct 20, 2015

Mattenth said:
Done. It's a little hidden for now - click on the score orb and it's at the bottom.

We're in the process of overhauling score calculations to use a net promoter / rotten tomatoes like system, so we didn't want to put too much work into the design here when it's going to change so significantly.

You should also display a confidence interval for each game on some easily understood visual metric. That provides much of the information of a standard deviation but in a way that would make sense to more people, I think, than standard deviations which is not how the average person thinks.

meanspartan · Oct 20, 2015

Great site upon my first impression. I especially love the embargo countdowns.

system11 · Oct 20, 2015

Black screen. Well, dark grey at least.

You'll want to add some detection for people who block Javascript by default.

Mattenth · Nov 17, 2015

Bumping this back up? We pushed out a few new features today, including ranking graphs, recommended percentages, and our API alpha: http://opencritic.com/#!blog/3

Gaf's been a great source of feedback for us, so let us know if you've got any questions, comments, concerns, etc.

Ralemont · Nov 17, 2015

Any word on the List view? Or is it there and I'm missing it?

Semi-related, and this is pure QoL stuff, but I think the top featured section is way too big. Specifically, with my resolution and browser, the scores for all the games under the featured section are just out of sight.

If it's possible to reduce the size of the top section, it'd be a little annoyance eliminated while sacrificing essentially none of the presentation. I'd prefer if there wasn't a featured section at all and that instead everything was grid form like it is the for the next reviews in line, starting with the latest game to have reviews released, but that's also something List format would fix for me.

slayn · Nov 17, 2015

since there's actual devs reading this thread...

something I've always wanted from aggravate review sites is the ability for it to tell me which reviewers I should be following.

I want to input my score on a bunch of games and then I want you to compare my scores to those of the sites you crawl and match me against them and then tell me which reviewers/sites most closely resemble my views.

Then, I'll turn around and change your site's scores to be based on the critics who have agreed with me so far.

Ralemont · Nov 17, 2015

slayn said:
since there's actual devs reading this thread...

something I've always wanted from aggravate review sites is the ability for it to tell me which reviewers I should be following.

I want to input my score on a bunch of games and then I want you to compare my scores to those of the sites you crawl and match me against them and then tell me which reviewers/sites most closely resemble my views.

Then, I'll turn around and change your site's scores to be based on the critics who have agreed with me so far.

This would be cool, too. Like a version of Netflix's ratings predictor.

Tertullian · Nov 17, 2015

I keep meaning (and forgetting) to use this site instead of Metacritic.

Vincent Grayson · Nov 17, 2015

Ralemont said:
This would be cool, too. Like a version of Netflix's ratings predictor.

IIRC, Netflix's algorithm is incredibly complex and has been fine-tuned with what I assume is hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars of investment. A site like this isn't going to be able to do something like that.

IISANDERII · Nov 17, 2015

Site won't load for me. My browser also says 6 trackers have been blocked to protect my privacy, yikes maybe that has something to do with it.

Mattenth · Nov 17, 2015

Ralemont said:
Any word on the List view? Or is it there and I'm missing it?

Semi-related, and this is pure QoL stuff, but I think the top featured section is way too big. Specifically, with my resolution and browser, the scores for all the games under the featured section are just out of sight.

Not yet, but we are focusing a lot on QoL stuff. I'll talk to the team about the list view. I personally want it, but we're at a tough-ish spot in development. We're working on moving to angular and push state to just have a better and more modern front-end architecture. On the back-end, we're working on APIs, tech debt, and starting to look at user reviews. I'm betting they'll be resistant to larger changes at this stage.

For the homepage, I completely agree. I have to use a chrome mod to resize my window at 1080p to get an accurate picture. We're working on some design modifications now.

It's likely our next features are "new review" things. Our traffic is super spikey. Days like today are great! But I'm pretty confident that Thursday will be a downer.

So I think our next QoL feature has to be "what games have been reviewed TODAY?" Football Manager 2016 was reviewed today, for example, but nothing on the homepage points you there.

Similarly, a popular feature we've gotten asked about is "Reviews since I was last here." I imagine some people would have wanted this feature today for Battlefront. You might have checked the initial wave at the embargo last night, and now you want to see what reviews have come in since.

IISANDERII said:
Site won't load for me. My browser also says 6 trackers have been blocked to protect my privacy, yikes maybe that has something to do with it.

Do you have Javascript disabled? If not, try clearing your local cache. The only trackers we use are Google Analytics and Rakuten (for GameStop's affiliate program). Though we might drop Rakuten in favor of GMG or GOG.

firelogic · Nov 17, 2015

Are there platform specific scores or am I just not seeing it?

FrozenCell · Nov 17, 2015

should add Steam Community rating as a Trusted Publication

Mattenth · Nov 17, 2015

firelogic said:
Are there platform specific scores or am I just not seeing it?

We don't score for specific platforms, though reviews are tagged by platform and you can filter them using the buttons in the top right of the review panel.

FrozenCell said:
should add Steam Community rating as a Trusted Publication

Would love to :-\ but copyright

We actually had this in the specs for a while - aggregate user reviews across Amazon, Steam, PlayStation Network, etc. - but lawyers shot us down.

Arion · Nov 17, 2015

I have pretty much switched over to this from metacritic. It works great and the presentation is nice. One complaint is the upcoming games list is too disorganized.

Doug Heffernan · Nov 17, 2015

PetriP-TNT said:
Question: Why isn't the code behind it open source?

Because it's not open source?

Nipo · Nov 17, 2015

Vincent Grayson said:
IIRC, Netflix's algorithm is incredibly complex and has been fine-tuned with what I assume is hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars of investment. A site like this isn't going to be able to do something like that.

Netflix's algorithm is predictive (it uses what you have watched to tell you what you will likely enjoy). Here we would just need a reactive one, which is much easier.

Have a person rate 20-30 games then run a regression against all the reviewers in the database and spit out recommendations based on certain correlation. The user would then have a set of reviewers who in the past have similar rankings to them to follow.

FrozenCell · Nov 17, 2015

Mattenth said:
We don't score for specific platforms, though reviews are tagged by platform and you can filter them using the buttons in the top right of the review panel.

yea I really like the way you implemented multiplats

Mattenth said:
Would love to :-\ but copyright

We actually had this in the specs for a while - aggregate user reviews across Amazon, Steam, PlayStation Network, etc. - but lawyers shot us down.

Steam as a Trusted Publication would be really neat, talk to Gaben about it, maybe they'll even replace metacritic for opencritic on Steam

PetriP-TNT · Nov 17, 2015

Loch Doun said:
Because it's not open source?

Back then when I made the comment I assumed before opening the topic even that it would have been open source, not open as in "open to post the link to all the review threads and words on the FAQ" kind of deali-o

KooopaKid · Nov 17, 2015

Doesn't load on my very old PC and Opera.

Tertullian · Nov 25, 2015

Finally really took a look at this site, and I just wanted to give this a bump and say that I do think it's a way better aggregating site than the alternatives. Looking forward to using it in the future.

Edit: Definitely needs 3DS games though, what the hell?

Mattenth · Dec 21, 2015

Hey everyone,

Bumping an old thread here, but we just launched pages for each individual publication. The team built these over a weekend as a passion project, so might have a few bugs and whatnot. These pages can be accessed by clicking on any publication name on any review card, or through the links below.

Would love feedback, even if it seems really needle-dicky. Please help us improve.

Our next items are some layout improvements for those who hate the card layouts, a few more publications, and adding 3DS/Vita platforms.

Mattenth · Jan 7, 2016

One more bump, but we launched critic pages today: http://opencritic.com/blog/4/critic-pages-and-january-7th-updates

Honey Bunny · Jan 7, 2016

Stumpokapow said:
It's not really clear to me that Metacritic's secret formula departs from a simple average by more than a few points in the vast majority of cases. I've very rarely looked at an MC score, said "Wait, what", and then checked the Gamerankings simple average and saw them diverse. And I'm not super troubled if a weighted average that weights down BlogFacts.ru gives a game an 87 instead of an 85 or an 89. So that's not really a criticism I've ever fully understood.

But the ability to exclude reviews from particular publications is probably useful, and it looks clean and pretty, and it runs fast as hell.

The criticism is probably more to do with the principle of it than its effect on the score.

Alo81 · Jan 7, 2016

Mattenth said:
One more bump, but we launched critic pages today: http://opencritic.com/blog/4/critic-pages-and-january-7th-updates

Just a heads up, but it seems like your site doesn't handle the case where different platforms are given different ratings - specifically in Giant Bomb's case.

http://opencritic.com/critic/663/jeff-gerstmann

Fallout 4 got a 4/5 on PC, a 3/5 on XONE and PS4.

http://www.giantbomb.com/reviews/fallout-4-pc-review/1900-726/
http://www.giantbomb.com/reviews/fallout-4-ps4-xone-review/1900-727/

Mattenth · Jan 7, 2016

Alo81 said:
Just a heads up, but it seems like your site doesn't handle the case where different platforms are given different ratings - specifically in Giant Bomb's case.

http://opencritic.com/critic/663/jeff-gerstmann

Fallout 4 got a 4/5 on PC, a 3/5 on XONE and PS4.

Not a great solution, but what we're going with for the time being.

Edit: this was fixed btw <.< 5 months later

kulapik · May 31, 2016

.

Hey everyone,

One of the challenges we've been seeing online is that gamers have different expectations for the same general score ranges. While many gamers see an 89 average as an omg amazing game, others see it as well, it's not 90 so it's not that good, even though an 89 or higher has typically landed games among the top games of the year. Several months ago, we made our first attempt at solving this with ranking graphs, and while they have caught on in some respects, they haven't completely addressed this issue.
With today's update, we're introducing a new tier system to continue to help gamers get a better understanding of the quality of a game at-a-glance. We've added four new badges to each game to help orchestrate this:

Average Score: 85 or higher
Roughly top 10% of games reviewed
Minimum of 5 scored reviews
The absolute best games the industry has to offer. Games that a very high number of general gamers would likely enjoy.

Average Score: 75 to 84
Roughly top 40% - 10% of games reviewed
High-quality games that deliver on the promise of a fun and engaging experience to more than just their intended audience.

Average Score: 70 to 74
Roughly middle 20% of games reviewed
Quality games that deliver a fun and decent experience in many respects, but may miss the mark in others.

Average Score: 69 or below
Roughly bottom 40% of games reviewed
Games that generally have several missteps and limited appeal beyond their intended audience.

We've also added another new feature titled "Guess The Score." We've seen a lot of online forums and communities try to guess the average score in advance but rarely do we seen an aggregate distribution of those guesses. We thought this would be a fun little experiment to test.

The early rules are simple but may change over time. Anyone can make a guess in the six weeks prior to a game's launch date. Guessing closes when the first review comes in. You can change your guess any time during that timeframe. Once you guess, you'll also be able to see the distribution of other guesses. Eventually, we hope to be able to show your guess history on your profile, but for now, you can see older guesses that you've made on the game detail pages.

harrisk954 · May 31, 2016

kulapik said:
.

Very cool update... but shouldn't there be a category for the "Best of the Best"? Those games that transcend the games industry and are elite... those games that change gaming and are so highly ranked that only a few reach those heights of acclaim?

Uncharted 2 and 4
Super Mario Galaxy
GTA Vice City and 5
Ocarina of Time
Bioshock
Last of Us
Skyrim
Halo 2
Portal 2

ETC.

A game with an average score of 85 is not of that level.

Humdinger · May 31, 2016

Lots of improvements going on there. Good job.

Kasper · May 31, 2016

I really dig the design of those badges. Seems a little odd there's no category for the real stinkers, though. Seems a little odd to put a 6.9 next to a 2.1. There's often plenty of value in a 6.9.

Nestunt · May 31, 2016

well, it was strange at first to see that color scheme. But I guess it is due to years of "indoctrination".

Other than that the idea is great and having another category would go against the purpose of creating those stamps. I would still maintain the "traditional" colors on the grades and get a different color scheme for the stamps. My 2 cents

Glass Shark · May 31, 2016

I like OpenCritic and I haven't really had much to disagree with up to this point, but I'm really not a big fan of the tiers and badges for games. I feel like it starts to approach editorializing when you assign a "Weak" badge to a game, for instance, when some publications would consider a score of 69 to be good.

Alex_Mexico · May 31, 2016

Review aggregators should work like judge scores in the Olympics for, say, gymnastics and figure skating. Eliminate the highest and lowest score and keep the rest. This way an outlet looking to skew the average or grab clicks won't influence by being an outlier.

I mean there's Uncharted with a 93 Metacritic average with nothing but green colored scores and along comes one guy and scores it for a 4.0? He's entitled to his opinion and you still should be able to look that up and read it but the high and low outlier should not count for the average.

ps3ud0 · May 31, 2016

Hmmm why not have those labels fit a normal curve so say only the top 10% of games get the highest rating which obviously changes as the catalogue does? Seems a better representation and easier to iron out changes in how critical reviewers are at different points in time.

EDIT: I agree with Alex_Mexico perhaps just use the middle two quartiles of reviews (perhaps thats too much truncation - drop the extreme %; hard to define when some games might not elicit many reviews)

ps3ud0 8)

Tratorn · May 31, 2016

harrisk954 said:
Very cool update... but shouldn't there be a category for the "Best of the Best"? Those games that transcend the games industry and are elite... those games that change gaming and are so highly ranked that only a few reach those heights of acclaim?

But that wouldn't fix the "89%"-problem they are talking about.
They want to make clear, that every game higher than 85% is really good and worth buying (not in my opinion, but well...).

If they would make a category for these type of games (95+?), than people would still say something like "well, it's mighty, but not best of the best"...

Glass Shark · May 31, 2016

Why should legitimate opinions be thrown out just because they're outliers? OpenCritic isn't a competition, it's a source of information. For me, reviews that are outside of the norm offer much more valuable information than 20+ of the same score.

Z3M0G · May 31, 2016

100-85 = Mighty
85-75 = Strong
75-70 = Fair
70-0 = Weak

ps3ud0 · May 31, 2016

jrh2 said:
Why should legitimate opinions be thrown out just because they're outliers? OpenCritic isn't a competition, it's a source of information. For me, reviews that are outside of the norm offer much more valuable information than 20+ of the same score.

Mind explaining why, because really that doesnt make sense. Outliers dont ever tend to inform more than consensus. The opinion could be more interesting but its value is lessened purely because its an outlier...

ps3ud0 8)

Theonik · May 31, 2016

Z3M0G said:
100-85 = Mighty
85-75 = Strong
75-70 = Fair
70-0 = Weak

Ah yes the 7-10 scale

Glass Shark · May 31, 2016

These are subjective opinions, not arbitrary data sets. All opinions carry the same weight as long as they are justified.

Portugeezer · May 31, 2016

jrh2 said:
Why should legitimate opinions be thrown out just because they're outliers? OpenCritic isn't a competition, it's a source of information. For me, reviews that are outside of the norm offer much more valuable information than 20+ of the same score.

Yes because same score = same opinions... c'mon.

ps3ud0 · May 31, 2016

jrh2 said:
These are subjective opinions, not arbitrary data sets. All opinions carry the same weight as long as they are justified.

Not sure if that was a reply to me, but if it was it doesnt explain your earlier point - indeed it negates it.

EDIT: Actually no I think Im wrong as Ive assumed you mean outliers rather than reviews that dont meet the mean score - still pretty confusing opinion.

ps3ud0 8)

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