It is not a joke score or review, I was speaking to Gene Park on twitter yesterday (head of social media at WP) and he disagrees with the review. One review is AP and one is internal. All reviews are under the comic riffs section.....

The review is very badly written, has no reference to gameplay, mechanics or technical stuff and neither does it mention TPS's or other action adventure games and where Uncharted fits in, the arguements made are pointless and have no constructive element to them. In fact most of the sentances seem to be made so the are so obtuse that they are difficult to refute and impossible to deconstruct.... cause they actually say very little. 

Read the review and put down how many points you can get out of it...... 

Very few. It is a pointless piece that should not be allowed to be taken seriously as a matter of principle.... today you accept this and tomorrow!? 

First off, it needs to be clarified whether this is a satire or not (It's in the Comic Riff section).

Secondly, the petition appears to simply be a request to Metacritic. There doesn't appear to be any formal request for a Government agency to get involved, so, any first amendment talk doesn't apply here.

Thirdly, something does need to be done about 'news' sites, that intentionally post bad reviews in order to increase traffic. The AVClub did this as well. No idea what that something would be, preferably the profession of journalism would deal with it internally.

The review was never scored so why does Metacritic get to assign one? Also they saw they only take staff reviews. This was not a staff review.  So its more about being consistent with their own practices and being transparent. 

If the review was actually scored and the writer was a staff writter (their reason fo rejecting WP 10/10 score) then folks would have to accept it.

Metacritic scores affect bonus pay for a lot of developers so they need to know that are completely subjective whims of the people who pock and choose what to include. 

I simply want them to follow their own rules.

This is really petty.

Nope, not going to sign.

I think tge petion is good because its gonna bring a lot of tgis crap to light. I don't understand why certain cites get so much more influence either.

This has been going on for years. Where was the petition when Sonic 2006 got a 85 from a critic that said "You simply can't ask for more out of an action game. Mission accomplished. Sonic is born anew."

There have been worse cases, but NOW we have to take action because its Naughty Dog?

I don't think any good will come of the petition, myself.  The only real solution is getting people to look anywhere but Metacritic for games information.  Sadly, gamer's couldn't be bothered to watch a video on youtube (yes, you're lazy if you prefer metacritic vs seeing actual gameplay yourself).  The problem is how much weight Metacritic has, even though it's pretty well proven that the number they list isn't necessarily representative of the actual quality of the title. Reviewers can (and have) been bought.

What worse cases?  By all means, do elaborate.   Yes, I say that with a little skepticism, but I also say it so that we're not just talking in vagaries here in the thread.  It's important people realize how many times this shit has gone on.  It's not ok, it's not something we should just shrug our shoulders over.  Good games getting shit marks for lulz (or more accurately, web traffic), and bad games getting great marks for $$$ is a problem, and it's something that absolutely should be stopped.  Guess who isn't going to do that?  Metacritic.

And as has already been stated, the article itself wasn't scored, and the person who did the article isn't a staff writer. 

The points may or may not be valid, but since the review doesn't represent the site, it shouldn't count regardless

It has become a popular collective joke :)