Conegamer said:
Because it stops completely bias reviews from the smaller sites (like the AV Club Uncharted review) and insanely high reviews from smaller sites who are inexperienced in reviewing from skewing the score too much. On the other hand, reviews from sites like ONM, Edge, IGN, Destructoid etc. who do a lot more reviews, have a lot more respect and often get a lot nearer to the actual metascore of the game (on the actual quality) get a higher preference. It's a strange system and one I'm uncomforable with, but I see why they do it. |
Except that you don't actually know who's getting more weight, here. There's no transparency to the system. We don't even know if the weight is the same for sites between different reviews.
I don't hold one reviewer's set of opinions as being inherently higher than others. IGN's been around for about 15 years or so now (probably longer), but they still employ some of the worst reviewers in the industry. Giving them higher weight because of their age or popularity doesn't add to the veracity of metascore, it subtracts from it.
Keep in mind that the age of a publication has almost nothing to do with the experience of its reviewers, though it often has something to do with the experience of its editorial staff.
No, I prefer a simple mean average, unweighted, so I can see how the game actually reviewed. If I want to just look at a few sites, I'll just look at a few sites. If I just want to average a few sites, I'll do that. If I want to weight a few sites, as we do in our heads by giving more prominence to certain publications (Edge and Eurogamer for me, though I still disagree with them a lot), then I'll do that.
Review aggregates should leave the averages alone, or be transparent in how they weight them.
