The Critic's Plight

[vlad321]

Machina said:

vlad321 said:

 

 

Wow.... I was bored so I did the graph myself, it's a lot owrse than I thought it was. I don't even think I should have said "Practice what you preach" and outright called you a liar, because this is what the graph looks like:

 

Reviewers get absolutely no sympathy from me, only piss and vinegar when they cause shit like that to happen (btw those spikes are around the even 10s and 5s). Oh pelase tell me you also see the problem with this graph.

Edit: Basically a 80 is actually a 55 or so, an 90 is around a 75, and so on and so forth.

Nice work, very interesting graph. I imagine that graph would look even worse if you plotted the same games going by IGN score, for example (they go into the high 9s and 10s, whereas we haven't yet, and they scatter 9s around like crazy). The problem is the game review system as a whole. I expect that gamrReview would be smack bang in the middle or slightly under the average as far as this trend of only having a 6-10 scale goes. The only outlet that comes to mind that has a truly broad scale would be Edge (and to a lesser extent then Eurogamer and Gamespot), but even theirs seems more like a 4-10 scale to me, rather than a full 1-10.

I think gamers have adjusted to this though. They know pretty much anything under 7 is highly unlikely to be worth their time or money. That only once you get into the 8s is something really any good. And above 9 you get the 'must buys' (though most games above 90 on Meta I'd rather not buy <_<). So I don't think the scale in itself is a massive problem, what's more a problem imo is the consistent critic overrating of anything that's hyped and popular.


@Runa - vlad has always been blunt and speaks his mind, don't take it personally.

I wholeheartedly agree, this site is better tham most (worse than some). My suggeston is to go back to 5 stars. Call anything you have under a 50 right now a 0, or .5 stars, and anything 95 or over 5 stars. Then round to the nearest 10th and convert to stars. The good thing about a star syste, from what I have noticed, is that people realize a 2.5 star game can atually be good, far more so than a game with a 50, despite having the same score. Basically, the star system has not yet been spoiled by gamers' skewed perceptions as much.