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[MiyazakiHatesKojima]

As we all know by now, The Last of Us Part II is being user review bombed on Metacritic for mainly homophobic reasons and nothing to do with the game per say.

As someone who advocated for the value of critics aggregate websites like Metacritic for many years, I believe their decision to keep the user ratings have done more harm than good, not necessarily to the developer but to the ever increasing toxicity that plagues the gaming community.

It's become the equivalent of Twitter's toxic "Cancel Culture" and it needs to stop. I'm pretty sure Metacritic will never remove it because it brings Ad revenue and whatnot, but I wish they can keep the user ratings toggled off automatically so that readers can have a chance to read the critics reviews first.

Now, I understand it's important not to shut down gamer's reviews themselves, but lets be honest: they're usually uninformed and filled to the brim with bias.

It's bad enough that game critics are not as reliable and credible as they should be, but atleast there is some form of objectivity behind their reviews. User reviews tend to be significantly less refined, especially when reading them from Metacritic.

As someone who would advocate this for games that come from all platforms (Portal 2 suffered a similar fate on the PC Metacritic page), I hope gamers understand the reasons why Metacritic's user ratings are undeniably biased, unreliable, and uninformed reviews of a game.

 

[O-N-E]

Boo

 

[Fuz]

No.

 

[ARK1391]

I don't think user reviews should go away, but I do think that they should lock them until people could have realistically finished the game. Obviously TLoU2 hasn't been out long enough for people to finish it.

So seeing so many negative reviews is kinda dumb because obviously they haven't finished it, if they have even played it at all.

 

[#Phonepunk#]

Lol this is absurd. There is no more objectivity from a professional review. In fact their paid status immediately puts that claim into question.

If Metacritic has a problem then why can’t they take care of it? How many years has this issue been a thing? They can’t update the website to address this? It impacts the entire point of the site.

Honestly this wouldn’t even be an issue if you, like, didn’t care. Its ok if people don’t like something that you do. It’s ok if people abuse a website’s poorly made user review section. Really if you are blowing this up to be a big deal then it’s mainly because of you for caring in the first place. Just don’t read the website! Easy.

Honestly how big of a problem is this? Should we curb free speech so that a video game score goes from 95 to 96?

Like get a grip. Not everyone has to all agree that they like a thing. It’s human for people to disagree. This is true diversity, a diversity of opinion.

Try tolerance

 

[Fuz]

If Metacritic has a problem then why can’t they take care of it? How many years has this issue been a thing? They can’t update the website to address this? It impacts the entire point of the site.

I don't see the problem, if you have half a brain. It's always obvious when it's bombing. Seriously, will anyone that planned to buy the game not buy it for this?

 

[CatLady]

I seriously doubt you'd be so concerned if it was Halo Infinite getting review bombed instead of TLOU 2.

I have no doubt Halo will get review bombed too. Do I care? Not at all.

 

[oagboghi2]

Who gives a shit if a game is review bombed?

Is a 0 score on metarcitic going to stop you from buying the game?

God, you people are acting as if TLOU is sacred. Animal Crossing was review bombed just a month or 2 ago. I didn't see anyone crying, and it still sold like gangbusters.

 

[farmerboy]

Everyone's an adult. They can decide if they want to listen to the reviews, metacritic aggregate or individual user reviews.

 

[TheWisp]

Why? Because some huge AAA game gets review bombed? A game that probably doesn't need user reviews to begin with?

 

[sublimit]

I feel bad for anyone who uses metacritic as a quality metric but i feel even worse for anyone who takes user scores seriously.
Basically if someone wants to loose my respect as a gamer all they have to do is tell me they take open critic seriously.

So they really shouldn't remove anything because no one who is sane enough takes user scores seriously.

 

[Dibils2k]

just stop crying about it and deal with it

 

[Potato Chip PRO]

Opinions shouldn't affect what you like. Facts is a different story.

 

[OutRun88]

Yes, lets take away the everyday persons voice when what they say doesn't align with our values and only listen to the "chosen" ones. Brilliant.

 

[Croatoan]

Yes, lets take away the everyday persons voice when what they say doesn't align with our values and only listen to the "chosen" ones. Brilliant.

You know what, that's a great idea. We should infuse politics with this exact idea. It can only make things better!

 

[cormack12]

Sychophantic reviewers and influencers versus salty fanboys. They're just opposite ends of the same problem to be honest.

 

[evanft]

User reviews are typically more accurate than critic reviews. Fight me.

 

[Caio]

User ratings is meaningless due to a very high percentage of idiots, trolls and fanboys. From my point of you, keeping them or removing them doesn't change anything. Masterpieces will remain Masterpieces, and the poor idiots will die idiots, nothing will ever change

 

[Xenon]

The Last of U...ser Reviews.

 

[Caio]

User reviews are typically more accurate than critic reviews. Fight me.

Wrong. Among the users you have plenty of fanboys, so their reviews means nothing. Of course there are still good users, so you should know which one is expert and honest, and which one is a poor idiot. Sadly the majority are trash.

 

[Guilty_AI]

TL;DR: I don't want others to bad mouth my beloved game.

 

[ACESHIGH]

No, we will be only left with reviews from paid shills from the press. Typically the score of these big AAA exclusives from industry darlings (Sony Nintendo and Rockstar) is an average of user and press scores.

 

[PleaseWaitStation4]

OP: Awe, words hurt, must propose safe-space.

 

[cormack12]

User ratings is meaningless due to a very high percentage of idiots, trolls and fanboys. From my point of you, keeping them or removing them doesn't change anything. Masterpieces will remain Masterpieces, and the poor idiots will die idiots, nothing will ever change

It goes both ways, take Volcano High for instance. Most people have derided that already and another subset of fans have decided it's awesome. It's likely that the user score will be skewed upwards for that. It will likely land higher than something like LiS just because of brigading for the cause. Basically just give three categories graphics, story, gameplay and let them score each component seperately and publicly. At the moment there are just vague, inconsistently defined scales with no accountability.

 

[GrayChild]

No, we must expose Druckmann's terrible writing to the world.

 

[Guilty_AI]

No, we must expose Druckmann's terrible writing to the world.

Druckmann is sexist. It should be Druckpersonn.

 

[PaulBizkit]

this happens EXCLUSIVELY with platform exclusives. Astral Chain, Death Stranding, God Of War, it's the same story all the time. We all know the real score comes from the critics

 

[JunkerWoland]

This phenomenon of review brigades, both positive and negative, is largely a result of a shrinking media that too often has unanimously similar opinions on games, especially tent-pole titles. This neither necessarily means collusion nor conflicts of interest with the producers of said games, but it does suggest a severe lack of reliability in the context of consumers at large. While this also doesn't mean users reviews are then inherently more accurate, the feelings and opinions of the potential purchasers of these products should remain visible in public forums and alongside professional reviews, instead of merely being quarantined to their own pockets of the Internet.

We already frequently see comment sections of well-known websites being deleted or locked, sometimes for individual stories and other times for entire sites, when the readers' views are perceived as going against the publication's narrative. For video games, shutting down user reviews on major-review platforms and other highly-visible forums would only further notions of corruption both in the company's producing games and the media covering their products.

The best thing for everyone is having the tools available to be an informed consumer. Read some professional reviews, see what the users are saying, and then make up your own mind.

 

[MiyazakiHatesKojima]

The Last of U...ser Reviews.

/thread.

 

[B-universe]

As we all know by now, The Last of Us Part II is being user review bombed on Metacritic for mainly homophobic reasons and nothing to do with the game per say.

Where's your evidence the game is being review-bombed for mainly "homophobic" reasons?

 

[Pejo]

I think you're looking at this from the wrong angle. I think review scores and review aggregates should be used as a tool for judging overall quality, but not used as the sole measure for if someone will enjoy a game or not. This is exactly why user scores are important. Otherwise, it's just the media controlling the narrative of what's great and what sucks, which is never a good outcome. If review bombing is bringing down a certain game's popularity, that means that something happened to piss off a number of people about a certain product. This should inspire you to look up what the hell happened, so you can make an informed decision about your purchase.

There are a host of problems with the current games/movies review system in general, mostly because how do you quantify a collective of different people's opinions, but I think they're a good guidepost to at least give you an idea of how the game turned out and what its strengths/weaknesses are.

 

[Bladed Thesis]

Another crying thread? There's already a thread for this....

You can't say user reviews don't matter and at the same time be this bothered by them.

 

[Stuart360]

I dont know if 'professional reviews are much better to be honest. And no i'm not saying TLOU2 reviews were 'bought' or anything, but when was the last time a mega budget, mega hyped game got bad reviews?. There is a lot of politics and factors going on behind the scenes in games journalism.

 

[trapanesenyc]

I think maybe a user review can be written but not have a score attached. Something to prevent bombardment but also not silence opinions. Reviews with the most likes filter to the top reddit style so if its a "SJW bad" review at the top with 10k likes you know to ignore it.

 

[Jimmy Rustle]

If it happened to a game you didn’t care about so much, I’m sure you wouldn’t give two shits about user reviews.

Metro Exodus off the top of my head was review bombed simply because it initially released exclusively on the Epic Store. But you probably didn’t give a shit.

 

[Vawn]

No. PlayStation keeps producing too many 10/10 games and Game of the Year winners. We aren't going to take it anymore!!

We NEED this. We have to tell people it is NOT okay for one platform to get so many great games. Metacritic user scores are how we fight back!!!

 

[MiyazakiHatesKojima]

This phenomenon of review brigades, both positive and negative, is largely a result of a shrinking media that too often has unanimously similar opinions on games, especially tent-pole titles. This neither necessarily means collusion nor conflicts of interest with the producers of said games, but it does suggest a severe lack of reliability in the context of consumers at large. While this also doesn't mean users reviews are then inherently more accurate, the feelings and opinions of the potential purchasers of these products should remain visible in public forums and alongside professional reviews, instead of merely being quarantined to their own pockets of the Internet.

We already frequently see comment sections of well-known websites being deleted or locked, sometimes for individual stories and other times for entire sites, when the readers' views are perceived as going against the publication's narrative. For video games, shutting down user reviews on major-review platforms and other highly-visible forums would only further notions of corruption both in the company's producing games and the media covering their products.

The best thing for everyone is having the tools available to be an informed consumer. Read some professional reviews, see what the users are saying, and then make up your own mind.

This is a great reply, thank you.

I guess you're right, maybe it's best to leave both and read and them make up your mind about the game at hand.

I just wish this review bombing tactic done by weirdos wouldn't be enabled by having user reviews so openly available for any person to make one.

Lol this is absurd. There is no more objectivity from a professional review. In fact their paid status immediately puts that claim into question.

If Metacritic has a problem then why can’t they take care of it? How many years has this issue been a thing? They can’t update the website to address this? It impacts the entire point of the site.

Honestly this wouldn’t even be an issue if you, like, didn’t care. Its ok if people don’t like something that you do. It’s ok if people abuse a website’s poorly made user review section. Really if you are blowing this up to be a big deal then it’s mainly because of you for caring in the first place. Just don’t read the website! Easy.

Honestly how big of a problem is this? Should we curb free speech so that a video game score goes from 95 to 96?

Like get a grip. Not everyone has to all agree that they like a thing. It’s human for people to disagree. This is true diversity, a diversity of opinion.

Try tolerance

I'm gonna tell Kojima not to listen to you and your thoughtful analysis of his games anymore.

Friendship over!

 

[GetemMa]

I really don't think negative user reviews on specifically metacritic do anything negatively to sales. No one really takes them seriously and everyone knows their just an outlet for trolling.

If the Last of Us 2 sales were hurt by anything it is the leaked footage and story info.

 

[reforen]

this happens EXCLUSIVELY with platform exclusives. Astral Chain, Death Stranding, God Of War, it's the same story all the time. We all know the real score comes from the critics

yeah right

God of War was review bombed

 

[Vawn]

I dont know if 'professional reviews are much better to be honest. And no i'm not saying TLOU2 reviews were 'bought' or anything, but when was the last time a mega budget, mega hyped game got bad reviews?. There is a lot of politics and factors going on behind the scenes in games journalism.

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[Dr.Morris79]

this happens EXCLUSIVELY with platform exclusives. Astral Chain, Death Stranding, God Of War, it's the same story all the time. We all know the real score comes from the critics

Alien: Isolation Review - IGN

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[MiyazakiHatesKojima]

yeah right

God of War was review bombed

 

[Fake]

I guess the problem is deeper than you can imagine MiyazakiHatesKojima . First because this is all about money (metacritic) no matter what you think. Second, even if Metacritic remove part of the troll reviews, we still get some old user review (the most trusted) with long time at the metacritic and probably will not get removed, so the score will be raised, but not by that much. Third, as much I know there are plentys of troll users on the negative side, there are troll users on the positive side as well giving 10 to counter this troll case. Is not a competition, I know there are vasty more users trolling the score to be low than users trolling for getting up.

If we think a little MiyazakiHatesKojima , the real problem are the review from games journalism. I read a plenty of reviews from The Last of Us part 2, and what I found? They are pretty much good and very detail write and he give us an ideia of the gameplay of the game. I not against their score, just I get this game a high detail description, but when I look for example, Days Gone, I was looking for reviewers that talk about gameplay and most of them don't even talk about that or perfomance issues, etc...

So, why some games get review so much detail and others games not?

 

[Umbral]

As we all know by now, The Last of Us Part II is being user review bombed on Metacritic for mainly homophobic reasons and nothing to do with the game per say.

As someone who advocated for the value of critics aggregate websites like Metacritic for many years, I believe their decision to keep the user ratings have done more harm than good, not necessarily to the developer but to the ever increasing toxicity that plagues the gaming community.

It's become the equivalent of Twitter's toxic "Cancel Culture" and it needs to stop. I'm pretty sure Metacritic will never remove it because it brings Ad revenue and whatnot, but I wish they can keep the user ratings toggled off automatically so that readers can have a chance to read the critics reviews first.

Now, I understand it's important not to shut down gamer's reviews themselves, but lets be honest: they're usually uninformed and filled to the brim with bias.

It's bad enough that game critics are not as reliable and credible as they should be, but atleast there is some form of objectivity behind their reviews. User reviews tend to be significantly less refined, especially when reading them from Metacritic.

As someone who would advocate this for games that come from all platforms (Portal 2 suffered a similar fate on the PC Metacritic page), I hope gamers understand the reasons why Metacritic's user ratings are undeniably biased, unreliable, and uninformed reviews of a game.

Are we completely devoid of nuance anymore? There’s a wide variety of opinions on there, and yes, there are some that one might call any assortment of names. There’s also reviews that are not.

User reviews are nearly the only way to get honesty in criticism these days, even if you have to sort through a little garbage to get to it. I’ll take that over some supposed authority dropping a score from on high.

Alanah Pearce even said that a lot of critics and writers now write more for themselves, their peers, and twitter than for the audience. I’m paraphrasing, obviously.

 

[Stuart360]

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Crackdown 3 for PC game reviews & Metacritic score: From out of nowhere, a new enemy attacked. Major metropolitan areas were hit with a never-before-seen form of elemental warfare, plunged into darkness and chaos...

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Ryse: Son of Rome

Ryse: Son of Rome plunges you into the chaos and depravity of the late Roman Empire. The game tells the story of Marius Titus who witnesses the murder of his family at the hands of barbarians. Seeking revenge, Marius must embark on a perilous journey of revenge, betrayal, and divine...

www.metacritic.com

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The Order: 1886 for PlayStation 4 game reviews & Metacritic score: The Order: 1886 introduces us to a unique vision of Victorian-Era London in which Man uses advanced technology to battle a powerful and ancient enemy. As Galah...

www.metacritic.com

Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified

Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified explores original fiction in the Call of Duty Black Ops universe with an all-new campaign of Special Ops missions.

www.metacritic.com

I said 'Bad' reviews, not average reviews. And none of those were mega budget, or even mega hyped games.

 

[The Alien]

A few problems with OPs post.

1. OP presumes the review bombing is due to "mainly homophobic" reasons (not narratives directions for beloved characters that fans disagree with....not the horrible and ensuing barrage of Sony & NDs takedowns and censorship attempts, etc.)
2. Fuck Metacritic. Who says anyone has to play by their rules. They ask for user activity. If that goes...so does their site traffic.
3. OP said gamers are biased and uninformed. Who makes that determination? Who's the gatekeeper that allows user reviews?

 

[MiyazakiHatesKojima]

I guess the problem is deeper than you can imagine MiyazakiHatesKojima . First because this is all about money no matter what you think. Second, even if he remove part of the troll reviews, we still get some old user review with time at the metacritic and probably will not get removed, so ge score will be raised, but not by that much. Third, as much I know there are plentys of troll users on the negative side, there are troll users on the positive side as well giving 10 to counter this troll case.

If we think a little MiyazakiHatesKojima , the real problem are the review from games journalism. I read a plenty of reviews from The Last of Us part 2, and what I found? They are pretty much very detail write and he give us an ideia of the gameplay of the game. I not against their score, just I get this game a high detail description, but when I look for example, Days Gone, I was looking for reviewers that talk about gameplay and most of them don't even talk about that or perfomance issues, etc...

So, why some review get so much detail and others not?

That's true, but there's still a good reason as to why Metacritic is still used as a measuring standard in the gaming industry.

Studios have it on their employee contracts bonuses for games that receive 85+ metacritic scores. No way is Metacritic scores bribed or bought out, so that tell me there's more objectivity to them than one thinks.

 

[Vawn]

I said 'Bad' reviews, not average reviews. And none of those were mega budget, or even mega hyped games.

It's difficult to spends tens of millions of dollars to produce a 3/10 game. I'm guessing if a game is that bad, it gets canned before as to not damage the publisher's reputation, like Scalebound.

 

[MiyazakiHatesKojima]

OP said gamers are biased and uninformed. Who makes that determination? Who's the gatekeeper that allows user reviews?

Gamer's reviews, not gamers in general.

 

[Slings and Arrows]

Tbh, when you buy a game is should come with a code or serial number.

You type that serial number in to whatever critic website and you can then put up a review.

Of course that will never happen because rival companies wouldn't be able to botfarm, AstroTurf and shill games