Negativity on metacritic

[Mick]

I doubt it's the Avast thing, as we've only seen maybe a dozen reports of that (iirc) and all have found resolutions, that I know of.

Tons of games run on Unity and have that problem with Avast, I don't think all of them got big piles of negative votes just for that

Alright. I guess the game is just a little easier to dislike than I thought then. For some reason I thought that people would find this game hard to trash, so I considered that something technical may be the root of the problem instead.

There is no indication that the people who zero-bombed it even played the game at all.

Honestly, if someone reached a point where they were looking at the Metacritic page for this game, I think they'd get a fairly good impression. All the written reviews are positive.

I know they do some magic for their metascore (which is only based off critics), but I think the user score is just a straight up average of the user votes.

[Pepisolo]

There is no indication that the people who zero-bombed it even played the game at all.

Honestly, if someone reached a point where they were looking at the Metacritic page for this game, I think they'd get a fairly good impression. All the written reviews are positive.

I know they do some magic for their metascore (which is only based off critics), but I think the user score is just a straight up average of the user votes.

Yeah, it looks pretty good now. Yesterday it was at 5.5 or something which looked really bad, but it's bounced back. I'm probably just overreacting.

[keith.lamothe]

Alright. I guess the game is just a little easier to dislike than I thought then. For some reason I thought that people would find this game hard to trash, so I considered that something technical may be the root of the problem instead.

Oh, I don't think it's from the game either.  At least, I didn't see any actual explanations of the low scores when I last checked.  My guess is primarily troll votes with no reviews simply because they have no accountability and find it entertaining.

[Pepisolo]

Oh, I don't think it's from the game either.  At least, I didn't see any actual explanations of the low scores when I last checked.  My guess is primarily troll votes with no reviews simply because they have no accountability and find it entertaining.

Sigh... that sucks. Well, not much we can do about that then. Just post our own ratings on the game, I guess.

[Mánagarmr]

The day Metacritic dies in a fiery inferno will be a happy day.

As for those saying they've never heard of it outside of here... That's really frustrating. Erik worked his ASS off promoting this one, and I'm at a loss for what he could have done differently.

I don't pay much attention to gaming news whatsoever. I saw it on Steam though on new releases. Not the list you have to check, but the "pop up" Window.


Of course I saw on Twitter, shared by a LOT of people and on G+. So it got out there alright.

[Mánagarmr]

Oh, I don't think it's from the game either.  At least, I didn't see any actual explanations of the low scores when I last checked.  My guess is primarily troll votes with no reviews simply because they have no accountability and find it entertaining.

Sigh... that sucks. Well, not much we can do about that then. Just post our own ratings on the game, I guess.

Maybe I need to repeat myself: The day metacritic dies a fiery day, will be a glorious day. Scored "reviews" with that much impact on the market is just like an awful idea born out of a crazy mind.

[Greifenstein]

I fear the abysmal Metacritic rating might have something to do with the typical "whatthederpherp this aint no call of duty where can I shoot web?! - 0 points shit game" attitude that a lot of people who actually use the damn site seem to have.

Unfortunately (for some reason that remains unclear to me) a lot of gamers are still heavily influenced by metacritic scores. It's a damn shame.

[Tridus]

Unfortunately (for some reason that remains unclear to me) a lot of gamers are still heavily influenced by metacritic scores. It's a damn shame.

Because there's a lot more games than money or time to play them, and people are looking for something that helps them narrow down what games to look into. It's not hard to understand why it's frequently used, there's really nothing comparable available for PC/console games.

[PokerChen]

Oh, I don't think it's from the game either.  At least, I didn't see any actual explanations of the low scores when I last checked.  My guess is primarily troll votes with no reviews simply because they have no accountability and find it entertaining.

Sigh... that sucks. Well, not much we can do about that then. Just post our own ratings on the game, I guess.

Maybe I need to repeat myself: The day metacritic dies a fiery day, will be a glorious day. Scored "reviews" with that much impact on the market is just like an awful idea born out of a crazy mind.

 Well, (1) if Steam didn't integrate it into their columns, and (2) they implemented User and critical reviews better (there exists solutions)... The problems will always be there whether Metacritic exists or not. People will google for reviews and go by that, and Meta will give you access to reviews in other languages and countries where perhaps reviewers have more sense than IGN. There is extractable information, and I'd say it's arguably better than just going by the PC-Gamer stuff of yesteryear.

[Mánagarmr]

As far as press goes: Gaming On Linux picked up on it.

http://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/bionic-dues-cook-serve-delicious-escape-goat-on-steam-for-linux.2550

EDIT:
And now Rock, Paper, Shotgun as well.

[Misery]

Unfortunately (for some reason that remains unclear to me) a lot of gamers are still heavily influenced by metacritic scores. It's a damn shame.

Because there's a lot more games than money or time to play them, and people are looking for something that helps them narrow down what games to look into. It's not hard to understand why it's frequently used, there's really nothing comparable available for PC/console games.

I think one big part of the problem is that people dont really know where to look, for good info on games.  Metacritic is often a TERRIBLE way to get it, but..... it's also, annoyingly, the most obvious.  Until another, less bloody stupid site/method shows up that is as big and obvious as that one, it'll probably stay this way, because derp.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, metacritic has big problems, but the bigger ones that make it so frustrating didn't start with metacritic.  It just aggregates the manure, so to speak, it didn't produce most of it.  It just stinks more when it's all together.

But I certainly would like more sanity in terms of which publications count towards it.  I mean, that glowing (overall) RPS review won't even exist as far as the metascore is concerned, and the fact that they liked it that much means a lot more than most of the reviews that actually show up in our scores (which are often from publications I've never heard of before, and never hear of again).

And it'd also be nice for them to not accept user scores without a review (and for obvious "I just filled out the review field to put up my score" user-scores to be stricken from the record).


But whatever metacritic does, there will still be users and reviewers who are not putting adequate effort into sound evaluation, and those unsound evaluations will still be given undue weight.

Which is obviously frustrating when a game gets panned without cause, but it's also harmful when reasonable concerns are not raised and/or do not make it to the developer's ears because they're too busy trying to not get bogged down in the "I couldn't be bothered to be fair to this game" sludge.


That said, Bionic appears to be getting a pretty wide positive reception.

[Velorien]

Forgive my ignorance, but what exactly is it that's wrong with Metacritic? Everyone in this thread seems to consider it a necessary evil at best, but no-one's really spelled out why.

[Tridus]

Forgive my ignorance, but what exactly is it that's wrong with Metacritic? Everyone in this thread seems to consider it a necessary evil at best, but no-one's really spelled out why.

On the critic side of things, it distills things to a number. Review nuance goes away in a puff of 75/100 scores. Review sites that don't give scores are just excluded entirely.

Aside from the problem of comparing games cross genre and with wildly different budget sizes (orders of magnitude) on the same scale, it's also continued the trend of game reviewers only using a small range of numbers. AAA games are basically on a 7-10 scale, the other numbers might as well not exist and 7 is considered bad. Except from sites that don't do that, like when Quarter to Three gave something a 4, which Gamespot would never, ever do. Course, QtT was really giving 2 stars and metacritic made that a 4. Those scores are not as far apart as they look because Gamespot just won't go as low as 4 except in extraordinary cases.

Not all of that is metacritics fault. Rotten Tomatoes works better mostly because movie reviews are a much more mature industry and there are standards that sre generally followed, plus everyone uses the entire scale. The reviews compare and aggregate more easily when everyone is using the same basic rules.

As for the user reviews.  Sometimes they're the truth when the critics are flat out wrong. See, Simcity 5. That was an epic failure by the pro reviewers, who gave it high scores then had to wipe the egg of their faces when the game was broken for a week at launch, then it turns out the entire traffic model didn't work properly and the home/jobs were a sham.

Other times the user reviews are full of false ratings because people are mad about something else. Have fun sorting through them to find the good ones.

[BobTheJanitor]

I never miss a chance to spew my chief complaint about Metacritic: they turn everything into an X/100 review. And that's just not sensible. A publication might use that review scale, and that's fine. Or they might use X/10, which isn't quite the same, but close enough that it doesn't bother me much. But what if they use X/5? Or what if they use a 4 star ranking system? In these various systems, a game that they would all describe as 'nearly perfect' might get a 95%, a 9/10, a 4/5, and 3 stars. That parses fine if you're an intelligent human being looking at it. But Metacritic will blindly turn those scores into 95, 90, 80, and 75. And then average them and say the game is an 85. And that's just not accurate, if all of those reviews intended to convey the original idea of 'nearly perfect'. Most people used to game review numbers will interpret an 85 as something like 'decent with minor flaws'.

It's just inaccurate and mathematically annoying. If I ever start a game review site, I'm going to review games on a scale of 1 to 137 just to screw with them.