Why do people hate low review scores?

[Kantor]

amp316 said:

Kantor said:

amp316 said:

Mummelmann said:
I don't know to be honest. I don't so much mind low scores as I do inflated high scores that are given in the face of glaring flaws and massive issues, as has become the norm of the 7th generation.
This gen is where I officially stopped reading reviews seriously at all.

I agree with this.  The problem is that the scores are far too high.  On a scale of one to ten, a 5.5 would be exactly average.  This is not the case for a video game reviewer.  If I see a game with a score of 5.5, then that means that he / she thought that it was a piece garbage.  I'm all for lower scores and when people are crying that a game that they think is great gets a 8.5, I find it to be ridiculous.

5/10 means "mediocre" rather than "average". Since games cost so much to make, those which do end up being made are usually at least decent, which is why we end up with the 7/10 score. Playing a mediocre game, a 5/10, will be a dull experience, but the game won't be completely broken. This would be considered a below-average game.

We could rejig the entire scale so that 5/10 reflected the new average, as in the scale that Edge uses, but that would cause enormous inconsistencies. A 7/10 from last week would be as good as a 5/10 from this week. If all gamers everywhere understood what was happening, and that 5/10 no longer meant "stay away", it might work, but I'm not inclined to trust a group of more than 100 million people (or even the majority of that group) to behave sensibly.

So, we remain with the system that we have, and pray that perhaps one person in ten actually reads the review rather than coming to a rash decision based on the score.

Maybe that's what a 5/10 means according to the way that the system is set up, but it makes no sense.  I was a fairly good math student and know that 5 is exactly one half of ten and that should be average. Now I understand that problem that you, as a reviewer, have since a certain type of groundwork has been established.  You make a strong argument about why 5's shouldn't be handed out to an average game. 

The biggest problem though isn't that too many 7's are being handed out for average games though.  The biggest problem is that 9's are constantly being handed out for good ones.  A 9 should be saved for something special and not for every game worth buying.  

Pleases understand that I am talking about gaming reviews in general and I'm not talkng about the VGChartz reviewers.    

I agree that the overabundance of 9+ score from quite a few sites is a problem, but if you look at Metacritic (or GameRankings, which is better because it includes gamrReview) most titles, although they receive 9+ scores from IGN and such, end up in the high 80s exactly because so many reviewers are afraid of handing out 9s to everything, with the result that this becomes extremely overcrowded. I can't think of many games that average above 90 which don't really deserve it, but I can think of an enormous number of 87s, 88s and 89s which definitely don't deserve to score so high.

The 7 range needs to be used a lot more, and the 8 range a lot less.