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Forums - Gaming Discussion - So, was Nintendo right?

 

Was Nintendo right?

Sure, user scores are valid. 37 21.39%
 
No, user scores are to random. 94 54.34%
 
dunno 14 8.09%
 
see results 28 16.18%
 
Total:173
Boutros on 14 March 2017
specialk said:
Boutros said:

But that's not what Metacritic does lol

It gives you all the data you need to do it yourself. i.e. average score, number of positive, negative, mixed reviews. Quotations from the reviews itself. 

It doesn't take too much reading and looking into to determine what's what.

You can do all sorts of things to make the average score itself "better" or "more accurate", but just a score alone will always be imperfect. Even if you could develop a system for weeding people out, you still lose valuable information.

For example, if you could limit reviews to only people who have finished the game, you're biasing towards people who thought the game was good enough to be worth finishing. You're losing out on the opinion of everyone who dropped out 5 hours in.

You're putting too much faith on people's honesty. Anyone could pretend they've finished a game or are big fans of the developers and then give it a low score because in reality they've never played the game and probably own a rival console. That's why user scores or reviews are meaningless. People lie.

 

And this is what the Metacritic founder said when LittleBigPlanet got swarmed with haters back in 2008:

"My advice for our faithful users is to focus your attention on the Metascore for this game and not the thousands of user votes, most of which have been submitted before said users have played the game. This is a gaming community, and if people want to stuff the ballot box, there’s not much I can do at this point."

That was the final nail in the coffin for me.



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SegataSanshiro on 14 March 2017

Number based reviews and Meta is stupid period. It simplifies and blankets over a work of art. You can't compare two totally different types of games so blindly. I wish Meta didn't exist as it only serves fanboy wars.



etking on 14 March 2017

Userscores are not objective but they are valid. Especially if they do not come from PS4 owning Nintendo Haters but from die hard Zelda fans. Botw could be much better if it had music and a story and included more traditional gameplay elements, instead of aimlessly wandering through empty worlds and badly designed menus for hundreds of hours while solving boring physics based riddles until your weapons break.

In my opinion Botw is a great game. But not a great Zelda game.



specialk on 14 March 2017
Boutros said: You're putting too much faith on people's honesty. Anyone could pretend they've finished a game or are big fans of the developers and then give it a low score because in reality they've never played the game and probably own a rival console. That's why user scores or reviews are meaningless. People lie.

 

And this is what the Metacritic founder said when LittleBigPlanet got swarmed with haters back in 2008:

"My advice for our faithful users is to focus your attention on the Metascore for this game and not the thousands of user votes, most of which have been submitted before said users have played the game. This is a gaming community, and if people want to stuff the ballot box, there’s not much I can do at this point."

That was the final nail in the coffin for me.

I would say that I'm putting the exact right amount of faith in people.

If 1,000 fanboys give a game a 10 and 700 haters give it a zero, that is valuable information.

If 80 critics give it an average score of 9/10 then that is also valuable information. 

The critics aren't more right than the fanboys and the fanboys aren't more right than the haters because the only person who can be the arbiter of a game's quality is me when it comes down to it. 

It's on me to sift through all the information and make a choice. No one website or scoring system can do that for me. They can help though. 



Barozi on 14 March 2017
Boutros said:
specialk said:

If a product has 1,500 reviews on Amazon and a 1.5 star average there is nearly a 100% chance that I will not buy that product. 

It means something. At least to me it does. 

I guess Amazon got better since that verified purchase thing but before that it was equally meaningless as Metacritic.

It's still rather meaningless as Amazon likes to bundle reviews from multiple similar items together.
If you want to buy a movie you get one average score from multiple DVD, Blu-ray and Blu-Ray 3D reviews. If the Blu-Ray quality is shit, but you're only interested in a DVD version, the score is meaningless.
I bought a 47" Samsung TV and Amazon added reviews from all different subversions (basically sizes) into one score. Turns out the 32" version was known to be faulty after 2 years of use, while all other versions were fine. Logically there were tons of bad reviews for the 32" version.



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specialk on 14 March 2017
Barozi said:

I bought a 47" Samsung TV and Amazon added reviews from all different subversions (basically sizes) into one score. Turns out the 32" version was known to be faulty after 2 years of use, while all other versions were fine. Logically there were tons of bad reviews for the 32" version.

The subpar score probably caused you to look into the reviews and see what it was all about though right?

Before making your purchase you learned that the manufacturer has had issues with similar products being defective in the past. It's good information to know even if it doesn't relate to your specific TV.

Maybe they shouldn't bundle all those products together. I don't know enough about TVs to make an informed statement about that. Devil's Advocate for a minute though, there probably are similarities between the 48 inch model and the 50 inch model of many TVs. And sometimes manufacturers make minor revisions. 

The question comes down to whether it is more helpful to give consumers a general statement about Samsung XYZ 700 series TVs as a starting point, or whether it is more helpful to sub-divide the XYZ 700a, 700b, and 700c and risk giving customers almost zero information on the 700c when 95% of the 700a and 700b comments would be applicable and so on.

I bet someone at Amazon is getting paid a lot of money to try to figure this out right now.



monocle_layton on 14 March 2017
onionberry said:

review scores are a form of free advertisement, could be good or bad advertisement. When people hear about a game that has amazing reviews, that's when they start to show more interest (same with movies and music) users scores are useless when haters and trolls start giving 0 and writing stuff like "this game is crap fuck Nintendo"

Steam has a good system where you need to buy the game and play the game before a review.

^

As much as people hate on steam, it's nice to see play hours and ACTUAL reviews- not just "10/10 screw haters" or "0/10 gae game". 



ModBod on 14 March 2017

To me user scores are as valid as professional reviewers, they both ignore what they want when it suits them, some pros will ignore the fact that the games has technical issues, I.E frame rate drops in combat for some games then take points off another game for the same reason.

Both the professional and the users scores are equally bad.



kljesta64 on 14 March 2017

in this case obviously no



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outlawauron on 14 March 2017
Boutros said:
specialk said:

I also would argue in favor of the Metacritic user score.  You just have to know how to use it.

My local library kept a list of "banned books" from throughout history. I went through a phase as a teen where I checked out and read a bunch of these books.

I seriously doubt whether most of the dudes and chicks who got these book banned during history actually read them. They just objected to the idea of the subject matter. They were the 0 / 10 metabombers of their time.

The banned book list didn't tell me anything concrete about the quality of the books on the list. But it told me that all those books got people fired up enough to feel strong emotions about them. 

Well aren't you proving the point that user scores are indeed meaningless? lol

The point is that people who post their review or score on something like Metacritic may and often have ulterior motives. The same is happening right now on Netflix. This speaks more of ulterior motives than anything else. The least controversial the material, the more accurate user scores will be that I'm sure we can agree on. But how can you tell something is controversial if all you look at is user scores?

Ironically, I watched the first 15 minutes of that special last night with my wife. It was pretty terrible. I'll go back tonight and make sure to give it 1 star.



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