I still have my dream site, where everybody goes to review music, games, etc. The site limits you to so many reviews per year, and so many scores of 10,9,8, etc. per year. You could upvote good user reviews, and comment. You can't post reviews yourself until you've reached 100 posts. A 10/10, or 0/10 would be limited to one per 5 years per account. So if you want to give a game a 0/10 or a 10/10 on there, you are using up one of your once every five years scores.
All professional critics are, are people that have some experience with the medium, and are mature enough to put a reasonable score out there. By experience with the medium, I mean people that actually like games as a hobby, and have played a ton of games.
As of right now, I think scores on Opencritic are pretty accurate to an 8 point degree. For example: If a game is rated 81, I could find it to be a anywhere from 73 to 89. If you remove some of the shittier outlets like Metro, or Edge, or Slant, from the aggregate score, then Opencritic becomes accurate to a 5 point degree for me. That does require slowly recalculating the entire aggregate by hand, without the troll reviews. For example: After recalculating the aggregate minus troll critics, you might have a game go from 79 to 82. This would make that 82 rated game to be anywhere from 78 to 87 for me.
Oh, and people that think critic reviews are utterly useless, probably haven't played as many games as the critics. It's easy to be impressed by a competent Hack n' Slash if its your first hack n' slash game ever. Or they see a game from a genre they hate, and think "I hate that game, therefore the critics are wrong". Reviews aren't written for people that don't like the genre of game that's being reviewed. Some people will simply like nothing more than western AAA games, and so they can't understand why Nintendo, Indies, or JRPGs get so much love from critics. Some people never touch western AAA games and can't understand why those games get love from critics. Other people think that the full 10 point scale should be used, and since critics generally only use scores of 6-10, they think that critics don't know what they're talking about. In reality it's just a difference of opinion on how a scoring scale should be used.
Anyway, it would be nice to have a user-reviews site, like the one I outlined above. If it were good enough, and influential enough, the industry could step away from relying on critics.
