• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Communities should stop having ratings in reviews, numeric or alpha numeric like those collected by Metacritic, to avoid toxicity. [Cyberpunk inside]

D.Final

Banned


This is just another of the already numerous cases and reasons why I think it would be wiser to eliminate ratings in reviews, in general, from entertainment content such as video games and movies.

We go on to see people obsessed with the overall result obtained from a single product, passing to hysterical scenes of insults or even threats to those who make themselves the "creator" of carrying with them the weight of their personal opinion regarding a purely subjective taste.

Just think of the case of those who only dare to give a non-optimal evaluation to a new Zelda game, as happened with BotW.
And what if Zelda BotW 2 was rated worse than the first?

Unfortunately we already know ....
Indignation and scandal.
(and this applies to many intellectual properties, entered into the collective imagination, and so linked to "valuation standards to be respected" that the thought of the contrary would destroy them)

And all this because of the ratings in the reviews, and in the aggregates of the ratings.
For many reasons, like this one, I believe that ratings (all, whether positive or negative) in reviews should be deleted along with aggregator sites that give them media power such as Metacritic.

PS: Unfortunately the market does not have "passion" as a rule.
And instead he has only the money that moves him.

But I'd still like to think of a future world where evaluation aggregators (and numerical and alpha numerical evaluations of the multimedia products themselves), such as Metacritic and Opencritic, no longer exist.
 

Dunki

Member
You can actually eliminate rated reviews if you follows these easy and simple steps!

1. Don’t read them.
Does not change how important they still a. When a developer or Publisher uses the TERMN AAA game he also expects a certain metacritic score. Fallout New Vegas developer had in their contract that they would get a bonus if it hits 85% on Metacritic. It did hit 84% and several projects had to be cancelt because of it.

So just ignoring them does not work.
 

notseqi

Member
Some people look for the number and won't engage if there isn't one. It's not going to go anywhere.

Anybody with real interest will read from their favourite reviewers and make a mental pros and cons list, 'this I like' vs 'this I don't like' and weigh up if it's worth their time.
That's at least how I do it. And I don't care for the number.
 
Does not change how important they still a. When a developer or Publisher uses the TERMN AAA game he also expects a certain metacritic score. Fallout New Vegas developer had in their contract that they would get a bonus if it hits 85% on Metacritic. It did hit 84% and several projects had to be cancelt because of it.

So just ignoring them does not work.
Do you have a more current example? Cyberpunk has seen massive criticism and they seem to be doing just fine. From my point of view, the importance of scores is at an all time low.

Also, I do not care, personally, about scores. So ignoring it has worked just fine for me. If there are hidden, mass consequences for developers whose games have gotten bad scores, it hasn’t affected my experience with the hobby.
 

Dodkrake

Banned
"Let's eliminate ratings because reviewers are not grading things as I like them or their opinion doesn't match mine".

This is why there's more than one review and several outlets.

I'd much rather prefer sites like metacritic required proof of ownership before buyers could review a product (sign in with an online account for their store of choice, for example). How many times have we seen Xbox or PS4 games review bombed this gen because people can't stop console warring?
 

D.Final

Banned
You can actually eliminate rated reviews if you follows these easy and simple steps!

1. Don’t read them.

From personal experience, of course.
But, if you try to play the role of those who have to suffer such harassment (and therefore feel empathy) only for having "dared" to undermine the media credibility of what must necessarily have been considered an essential masterpiece for anyone, coming to read about threats against such a person who expresses himself negatively about it, I would say that on a social level it certainly cannot be ignored.

And I believe that much of the blame lies with the players and the video game market which, in the case of the years, has given too much value, importance and power to the media chorus produced by aggregations of useless votes given on products that, in the end, always come piloted in certain directions, based on the mood of the user, or the money received to speak well of anything, and what is expected of it.
And this has ruined, and is still ruining the video game market.
 
Those numbers are completely dumb and meaningless these days anyway.

In the 80ies a score in the 90ies was reserved for games that completely invented a new genre, like SMB or Tetris.

Stuff that was simply very good got something in the mid 80ies.

Normal games something in the 70ies.

These days it's 10/10 or it's crap.
 

Dunki

Member
Do you have a more current example? Cyberpunk has seen massive criticism and they seem to be doing just fine. From my point of view, the importance of scores is at an all time low.

Also, I do not care, personally, about scores. So ignoring it has worked just fine for me. If there are hidden, mass consequences for developers whose games have gotten bad scores, it hasn’t affected my experience with the hobby.
Meta Critic score are written in Contracts for the Development of new games. As I sad AAA means 85-90+ Metacritic score as an example. Thats why I do not even care about Polygon or Kaotku reviews anymore since they o not have scores attached. With no scores attached I do not care what people write about it.
 

notseqi

Member
Those numbers are completely dumb and meaningless these days anyway.

In the 80ies a score in the 90ies was reserved for games that completely invented a new genre, like SMB or Tetris.

Stuff that was simply very good got something in the mid 80ies.

Normal games something in the 70ies.

These days it's 10/10 or it's crap.
<60 - for fans of the genre
60+ - aight
70+ - solid
80+ - wowzers, fresh
90+ - dang what a cracker

All the ratings on a 10 scale with .X values are stupid and a 5 scale is more than enough.
 

AV

We ain't outta here in ten minutes, we won't need no rocket to fly through space
Nah. I like aggregate scores. There's no one outlet I trust 100% of the time, so a high aggregate lets me know that I will probably find a lot of enjoyment in the game, and 95% of the time that's true. That's more convenient to me than reading 50 different reviews only to discover that the general consensus trended towards "average".

The also doesn't mean I only play high aggregate games. Dying Light was a 74 on MC before the DLC and it was one of my favourite games that year.
 

ZywyPL

Banned
I don't blame the media TBH, because if you need to look at review scores to know whether you like the game or not, rather than just watch some gameplays and judge by yourself, then no wonder they're using such mindless lemings to their advantage to get as many clicks and views as possible, people will always be exploited whenever they'll allow for it, I'd do exactly the same if I were them.
 
Last edited:
I really dislike it when these white knight types chime in with their illogical thoughts whenever a woman is being criticised. Why is it that whenever people criticise someone who happens to be a woman, people like Jeff think it is being done so because she is a woman? Maybe, just maybe, it is because she did something and people are critiquing that? And as far as death threats go, we should remember that this is the internet and twitter of all places, it is a given that there will be someone crazy who will do stupid stuff like sending death threats etc; so one must be prepared to ignore stuff like this.
 

Saruhashi

Banned


This is just another of the already numerous cases and reasons why I think it would be wiser to eliminate ratings in reviews, in general, from entertainment content such as video games and movies.

We go on to see people obsessed with the overall result obtained from a single product, passing to hysterical scenes of insults or even threats to those who make themselves the "creator" of carrying with them the weight of their personal opinion regarding a purely subjective taste.

Just think of the case of those who only dare to give a non-optimal evaluation to a new Zelda game, as happened with BotW.
And what if Zelda BotW 2 was rated worse than the first?

Unfortunately we already know ....
Indignation and scandal.
(and this applies to many intellectual properties, entered into the collective imagination, and so linked to "valuation standards to be respected" that the thought of the contrary would destroy them)

And all this because of the ratings in the reviews, and in the aggregates of the ratings.
For many reasons, like this one, I believe that ratings (all, whether positive or negative) in reviews should be deleted along with aggregator sites that give them media power such as Metacritic.

PS: Unfortunately the market does not have "passion" as a rule.
And instead he has only the money that moves him.

But I'd still like to think of a future world where evaluation aggregators (and numerical and alpha numerical evaluations of the multimedia products themselves), such as Metacritic and Opencritic, no longer exist.


I think reviewers need to be better at reviewing games.

Also reviewers themselves need to be able to take criticism of their own work.

If someone thinks her review is awful and publicly says so then that's just too bad.

These dramas are fun to watch sometimes but really its just a big load of nothing.

She game the game 7. OK.
He thinks her review is dreadful. Also OK.

In this instance I think the reviewer maybe already had an axe to grind with the game and its developers and the score is at least a little bit influenced by that.

It doesn't really matter though.

I do think its shitty to maliciously give a game a low score. I think her review and attitude is a bit incompetent and unprofessional but in the end its not a big deal.

The game sits at 91 on Metacritic. That's good.

People need to stop thinking that these massively hyped games are going to come along and change the entire face of gaming. Not every game needs to be a world beater and a 91 score is still right up there with the best.
 
Personally I think games like Cyberpunk 2077 cannot have scores less than 9, simply by the amount and quality of the content in the game. Not to mention graphics.

What I think though is that
  1. We should separate score groups because when you rank the game as 7 it goes on the same level as other - much worse games. I mean Bugsnax got 8 from GameSpot, while Cyberpunk 2077 got 7. So what are you saying that Cyberpunk is worse than Bugsnax LMAO. So the games should not be ranked the same way.
  2. Reviewers should review the game multiple times - ideally after each patch but it is not feasible - so maybe after a couple of them. Because it is just not fair for a game to have the same score after all the fixes.
  3. Reviewers should be very objective ideally, and even if they are swayed by the emotions they should have some romanticism in that instead of aggressiveness.
 
Last edited:

nemiroff

Gold Member
Where am I, Resetera..? Wtf is going on. Also, thequartering specifically said it wasn't about the review score but the stunning and brave admission from the urinalist that she didn't bother to play this transphobic white supremacist game as intended.
 
For those that say ratings should be removed from reviews, have you ever actually tried that yourself on your own project? I have tested for a few months before and it doesn't work like you think it will. Readership drops off and publishers become less interested in your reviews. People don't actually want to read your wall of text on a game - they just want a score at the end to share. Kinda makes writing the review moot, but someone out there may read it - I hope. Somewhere like Eurogamer is big enough to get away with it, but small hobbyist/enthusiast sites can literally wither away due to the lack of exposure publishers & developers actually sharing the review can bring it.
 
For those that say ratings should be removed from reviews, have you ever actually tried that yourself on your own project? I have tested for a few months before and it doesn't work like you think it will. Readership drops off and publishers become less interested in your reviews
So?

Personally I have always believed that we do not need reviewers - people should decide themselves. The reason why reviewers exist is because people cannot afford buying everything they want, so they have to rely on third-party whether to buy the game or not. For the games like Cyberpunk, GTA, maybe Fifa, CoD you don't actually need the reviews - the games will sell anyway.
 
Last edited:
So?

Personally I have always believed that we do not need reviewers - people should decide themselves. The reason why reviewers exist is because people cannot afford buying everything they want, so they have to rely on third-party whether to buy the game or not. For the games like Cyberpunk, GTA, maybe Fifa, CoD you don't actually need the reviews - the games will sell anyway.

So why all complaining? Don't read reviews if you don't need to 🤷‍♂️ Honestly these Cyberpunk review complaining threads are a joke, Just folk annoyed they haven't had their own bias confirmed.
 
Last edited:

DunDunDunpachi

Patient MembeR
The problem is caused by amateur / unprofessional journalists.

i like the idea of glancing at the score from a trusted publication and judging whether I wanna read the review ("wow that turned out better than I expected, it got a 9!" or "wow that must've bombed. I thought it looked like an 8 at least")

Saves me time.

But like I said, there's a lack of professionalism and maturity among game reviewers. Scores are just another corporate-bought facet of games "journalism".
 

Bitmap Frogs

Mr. Community
People should just grow balls and/or tits and learn to accept criticisim and ocaassionally some offence. It's fucking part of life.

While I agree generally with what you’ve said, slamming video games because they aren’t political propaganda is fundamentally duplicitous when you’re supposed to value their merits, not their ideology and even less the ideology of the people who created them as is mostly the situation with cdpr and cyberpunk.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Fuz
Using this logic, reviews should only be done in Latin so few people can read them. Rating are a good overview of a game/movie. If a review doesn't have one, the odds are much less that I'll read/see it.

If I'm looking for a good game to buy, I want to at least be able to start looking at games that rate the best. I don't want to have to read a bunch of reviews and then try to decide which games the reviewer thought was better. That's a piece on information that shouldn't be hidden from me. I can then take that info and adjust it to my own preferences.
 


This is just another of the already numerous cases and reasons why I think it would be wiser to eliminate ratings in reviews, in general, from entertainment content such as video games and movies.

We go on to see people obsessed with the overall result obtained from a single product, passing to hysterical scenes of insults or even threats to those who make themselves the "creator" of carrying with them the weight of their personal opinion regarding a purely subjective taste.

Just think of the case of those who only dare to give a non-optimal evaluation to a new Zelda game, as happened with BotW.
And what if Zelda BotW 2 was rated worse than the first?

Unfortunately we already know ....
Indignation and scandal.
(and this applies to many intellectual properties, entered into the collective imagination, and so linked to "valuation standards to be respected" that the thought of the contrary would destroy them)

And all this because of the ratings in the reviews, and in the aggregates of the ratings.
For many reasons, like this one, I believe that ratings (all, whether positive or negative) in reviews should be deleted along with aggregator sites that give them media power such as Metacritic.

PS: Unfortunately the market does not have "passion" as a rule.
And instead he has only the money that moves him.

But I'd still like to think of a future world where evaluation aggregators (and numerical and alpha numerical evaluations of the multimedia products themselves), such as Metacritic and Opencritic, no longer exist.


Yours is a terrible post on all fronts.

1. The existence of such indexes does not affect you negatively but their disappearance would negatively impact those who do use them.

2. It's not the scores that award media power. It's the decision of each individual consumer to depend on mainstream reviews for their purchasing choices.

3. In this specific case, The Quartering is the victim of a smear campaign that has already shown its ugly face on other threads. It is slanderous to lie and claim The Quartering called for harassment against the GameSpot reviewer. It is also slanderous to describe his criticism as sexism. No one is above criticism, and that most definitely includes female gaming journalists.

4. Aggregation and quantification are extremely helpful to game developers and laymen. I don't have to read 100 individual reviews to get the idea. I can simply look at Metacritic. It's a convenience I'm not willing to let go of.

5. You are not owed anything. If you don't appreciate reviews
and indexes, don't use them. You have neither the right nor a single good argument on which someone can base any appeal to the elimination of these aggregates.

And to the people sighing over The Quartering. Do your respectability a favour and actually post something one can either stand behind or oppose.

The diva posts ending with ellipsis belong in a graffiti in a restroom. If you have a point, say it. If you don't, it's not going to magically transpire from nothing.
 
Last edited:

KingT731

Member
Personally I think games like Cyberpunk 2077 cannot have scores less than 9, simply by the amount and quality of the content in the game. Not to mention graphics.

What I think though is that
  1. We should separate score groups because when you rank the game as 7 it goes on the same level as other - much worse games. I mean Bugsnax got 8 from GameSpot, while Cyberpunk 2077 got 7. So what are you saying that Cyberpunk is worse than Bugsnax LMAO. So the games should not be ranked the same way.
  2. Reviewers should review the game multiple times - ideally after each patch but it is not feasible - so maybe after a couple of them. Because it is just not fair for a game to have the same score after all the fixes.
  3. Reviewers should be very objective ideally, and even if they are swayed by the emotions they should have some romanticism in that instead of aggressiveness.
To this point honestly I'd just chalk it up to inflated review scales. 7 isn't a "bad" game but that's how people tend to see it due to the aforementioned point.
 

notseqi

Member
I want to add to my previous comment: You need to judge, you need to assign a score. If you aren't able to summarize your experience in the well established measure of a scoring system, preferably with a tight two lines of text, I might not know what you really thought as it's not always easy to convey emotions through the written word.
If you can't judge something and everything is hunky dory I am betraying my readership.

You might praise a lot of different small aspects through a wall of text and then tear the major ones apart in two sentences, that can be good writing and reviewing, but if you don't read it whole you might think the game is the bees knees.
 

DelireMan7

Member
Or people should just make they own opinion and decide by themselves if they like a game or find it nice looking (I really can get how people wait for Digital Foundry video to decide if they find a game pretty or not).

I know games are expensive so people wants to be sure to like it before buying it.
If you want to play on release, buy physical, if you don't like it you can resell it for a minimal loss.

EDIT: reviews are not evil, they can be a good tool to choose a game but you have to know how to use them
 
Last edited:
To this point honestly I'd just chalk it up to inflated review scales. 7 isn't a "bad" game but that's how people tend to see it due to the aforementioned point.
Scoring is the issue of course but basically everything that is below 8 is considered bad, 8 is average, 9-10 is top.
We reached the point where 10 score system turned into some form 5 score system.
10 => 5
9 => 4+
8 => 4-
7 => 3
.... everything below is 2. People just ignore the games that score less than 7-8.
 
Last edited:

Fuz

Banned
Reviewers should review the game multiple times - ideally after each patch but it is not feasible - so maybe after a couple of them.
Strongly disagree.It's on the devs to release a finished product. You get the score on what you are selling.
 

D.Final

Banned
Yours is a terrible post on all fronts.

1. The existence of such indexes does not affect you negatively but their disappearance would negatively impact those who do use them.

2. It's not the scores that award media power. It's the decision of each individual consumer to depend on mainstream reviews for their purchasing choices.

3. In this specific case, The Quartering is the victim of a smear campaign that has already shown its ugly face on other threads. It is slanderous to lie and claim The Quartering called for harassment against the GameSpot reviewer. It is also slanderous to describe his criticism as sexism. No one is above criticism, and that most definitely includes female gaming journalists.

4. Aggregation and quantification are extremely helpful to game developers and laymen. I don't have to read 100 individual reviews to get the idea. I can simply look at Metacritic. It's a convenience I'm not willing to let go of.

5. You are not owed anything. If you don't appreciate reviews
and indexes, don't use them. You have neither the right nor a single good argument on which someone can base any appeal to the elimination of these aggregates.

And to the people sighing over The Quartering. Do your respectability a favour and actually post something one can either stand behind or oppose.

The diva posts ending with ellipsis belong in a graffiti in a restroom. If you have a point, say it. If you don't, it's not going to magically transpire from nothing.

You seem pissed about what it is, in fact, only my opinion regarding this particular argument.

And even if it can be useful for someone for locating their preference for the upcoming purchase, this it isn't certainly a good way to see the qualities offered by the product itself.
(since multiple expression of these kind of reviews are always subject by the public and/or publishers money)

So, the argument about the "outrage" over just a single review opinion vs the mass media reception is still on
 
Last edited:
You seemed pissed about what it was, in fact, only my opinion regarding this particular argument.

Pissed isn't an accurate description. I disagree with your points. It is particularly disappointing to see you apparently cite The Quartering critique of Gamespot's review and a slanderous Tweet that followed it in defence of your point. In the very video you linked to, The Quartering, clearly in the most vehement terms conceivable, disavows any form of harassment and explicitly repeatedly asks for people not to contact the reviewer in any shape or form.

But to the smear-campaigners facts are irrelevant. Their feelings have ben hurt and the war on reality must rage on.

And even if it can be useful for someone for locating their preference for the upcoming purchase, this it isn't certainly a good way to see the qualities offered by the product itself.

It most definitely is.

I don't have time to sift through, say, 10,000 reviews of 100 different games. I can speed up the process by going to Metacritic and sorting all the games that have an aggregate score of say, 85/100 and above. That alone roots out a considerable portion of the supposedly mediocre games and allows me to spend time more judiciously, carefully going through those games who pass the test.

No one is forcing you to look at the index, though.

(since multiple expression of these kind of reviews are always subject by the public and/or publishers money)

Yes and I leave that to the discretion of each individual, for them to determine that on their own.

The Gamespot review is a clear example of an ideologically-driven piece, not because of the score, which is fine, but because of the reasons forwarded in its support.

So, the argument about the "outrage" over just a single review opinion vs the mass media reception is still on

You can call it whatever you want. The adjective is immaterial. What matters is this: Are there valid reasons to object to Gamespot's review?

Yes, most definitely.
 
Last edited:

Hudo

Member
I agree but then that would require people to actually read and that goes over most people's mental capacity on the internet.
 

Fuz

Banned
You seem pissed about what it is, in fact, only my opinion regarding this particular argument.
bc1.png
 

KingT731

Member
Scoring is the issue of course but basically everything that is below 8 is considered bad, 8 is average, 9-10 is top.
We reached the point where 10 score system turned into some form 5 score system.
10 => 5
9 => 4+
8 => 4-
7 => 3
.... everything below is 2. People just ignore the games that score less than 7-8.
Yeah this slowly started happening in the early 2000s and just progressively has gotten worse. Especially after devs started to brag/boast about review scores and GOTY awards.
 
Last edited:

Woopah

Member
LMAO at Grubb, he completely ignored the part where she reviewed the game without actually playing it.
She played the game for over 50 hours. The Quartering intentionally put a big lie in the thumbnail of his video to generate clicks and outrage.
 
Last edited:

Kazza

Member


I generally agree with the point of numerical scores not being good, but regarding the linked tweet, isn't the fact that the female reviewer has a much higher profile job (Gamespot) than this Jeff guy (never heard of him or his channel, which looks pretty small tbh) a more likely explanation for the greater amount of criticism than, you know, misogyny?
 

Amiga

Member
Does not change how important they still a. When a developer or Publisher uses the TERMN AAA game he also expects a certain metacritic score. Fallout New Vegas developer had in their contract that they would get a bonus if it hits 85% on Metacritic. It did hit 84% and several projects had to be cancelt because of it.

So just ignoring them does not work.

workers should re-negotiate realistic termers.

From personal experience, of course.
But, if you try to play the role of those who have to suffer such harassment (and therefore feel empathy) only for having "dared" to undermine the media credibility of what must necessarily have been considered an essential masterpiece for anyone, coming to read about threats against such a person who expresses himself negatively about it, I would say that on a social level it certainly cannot be ignored.

And I believe that much of the blame lies with the players and the video game market which, in the case of the years, has given too much value, importance and power to the media chorus produced by aggregations of useless votes given on products that, in the end, always come piloted in certain directions, based on the mood of the user, or the money received to speak well of anything, and what is expected of it.
And this has ruined, and is still ruining the video game market.

blame social media platforms for the harassment, their algorithms deliberately amplify vitriol to increase "engagement". Twitter/Facebook are very able to lockout the abusers if they want like they blocked voices dissenting the election.
 
Top Bottom