Ruler said:
JRPGfan said:
so many users (not testers) giveing troll scores and probably dont own the game. |
So? look at the last gen ports and pc port of the game. The users are giving exactley the score treyarch put the most and least optimisation into, i think its more reliable that the reviewers imo.
|
Right, i'm pretty bored and don't have much else to do right now, so allow me to give you a detailed explanation of why user scores in instances like this are functionally useless (excuse any grammatical errors, this is a long'n so i will undoubtedly be lazy with spell check).
The biggest problem with user scores in general is that you will always get those that will be more interesting in manipulating the score than providing an honest opinion (either because they think the average is too low/high, or because they just outright don't like the thing for a reason unrelated to its quality), and so will give it either the lowest or high score. It's important to remember that while there can be significant variations in the personalities and views of individuals, collectively we all fall onto a logical spectrum (hence the term 'human behavior' exists). It's why we can be subject to herd/mob mentality, why we have a political spectrum rather than solid political points, and how we can look at abnormal peaks in a quality score curve and go 'something's off here'.
It's worth noting that it's not completely impossible to ask people to scale something and end up with a legitimate peak at 1 and 10, but usually only if 1 and 10 (and thus also 5) can be specifically defined (which they can't be on a quality scale like we see here). The curve doesn't have to be perfect either (this is especially true for smaller sample sizes), but in general there should be a logical pattern to the general curve.
Anyway, here are two examples of logical score curves (one mediocre and one high):
You'll notice that both of these curves follow a clear pattern. They have a general peak point, and everything works approximately down from there. There will undoubtedly be some of the aforementioned voting manipulation going on, but they make up a small enough percentage of the total votes that the general curve is consistent.
Let's do the same thing again but with illogical curves:
Notice any points on these curves that seem out of place? Usually IMDb avoids particularly big anomalies by virtue of how many people vote (the more people that vote, the more you usually force the curve to be logical). Every so often however, you end up with something that really gets people's nickers in a twist, and you end up with something like what we have on the left. The 2 - 9 range follows a similar curve to the previous 2 pics, but then we suddenly have these huge peaks at 1 and 10.
On the right we have something a little different. The 2 - 10 scale follows a logical curve as with the 2 - 9 from the left, but the 1's are even less logical. Where as on the left we can tell from the 2 - 9 scale that the film was pretty mediocre in general, where as on the right the logical curve implies something very good (and even with over 10% of the votes being 1's it's still sitting at 8.4). This is an example of someone using bots to spam 1's. In this particular instance it was a TV show that's episodes had particularly high ratings, and someone who didn't like that decided to go through every episode and spam about 1000 1's.
Now that we've established what an out of place score point looks like, let's take a look at the score curve for the 8th gen console versions of BO3. Unfortunately metacritic don't show us the full vote scale, so instead I've made do with the scores given in written review. The curve for votes seems to be even less logical (based on the red, yellow, green view they show us), but the review scores still get the general idea across. Since metacritic use an 11 point scale, for the sake of consistency with the IMDb graphics I've combined the 0's and 1's but for the sake of transparency the exacts were 21 for 1, and 28 for 0's:
Notice anything that looks a little out of place? :p Welcome back to the world of vote manipulation, and why it's so hard to take metacritic user scores seriously in instances like this. I'm not saying you should take critic reviews seriously, how accurate they are to you as an individual is a personal matter, but for situation like this it can't be denied that critical scores are at least more consistent than the user scores (so are more likely to reflect a generalize reality, even if not perfectly because of the limited sample size and an inevitable degree of pandering). Any similarity that occurs between you and a averaged user score is likely to be mostly coincidence.
Anyway, that's me done. Feel free to disregard everything I've said, i just felt like getting the general message out o/. I should probably note that i don't actually like CoD much personally, but it makes for a good example of the stuff i'm describing.
