Zkuq said: 5 stars with half-stars is probably the most meaningful scale to me. A 88, 91, and 93 could probably all be roughly equal to me, depending on the games, so such a fine-grained scale doesn't really provide much extra value over a coarser scale. On the other hand, a scale from 0 to 10 is heavily biased towards the upper end, which I don't feel like is the case with a 5-star scale, with or without half-stars: 3 stars is roughly in the middle, just as 50 points is, but whereas I would call a 3-star game pretty average, I'd certainly call a 50-point game thrash. The equal of a 3-star game is actually something like a 70-point game, or maybe even more, because I would expect most 3-star games to be pretty passable, but most 70-point games are probably getting into the risky territory already. Also, I feel like using stars instead of precise points puts more focus on the review itself, which better acknowledges the complexities of rating a game. |
You are very correct. When using a 10 point scale it is very easy to lean to the higher score for some reason so there tends to be cades where you'll see people say it's a strong 7 or a weak 7. If 20 point scale with decimals wasn't as neat I'd prefer that. Thing is, the other rating systems have the same issue, especially 5 star with half stars cause that's a 10 point scale and if you're doing a 100 point scale what really is the difference between an 74 and a 76 or even a 76 and an 80.
I think it makes more sense to define exactly the categorization of the scoring blocks and have a guide to how the scoring system works with a link beside the score to get a sense of where the reviewer is coming from. I know some outlets 7's are relatively the same as other outlets four stars. Wouldn't it be great to get a standardised scoring system across all outlets, say Metacritic or Opencritic put out a guide to outlets for how games should be scored so we get more accurate scores and weed out some of the bias.