Here's the thing, if you're Metacritic, and you stop counting outlier scores to the overall average, then you're basically telling those outlets that their reviews are wrong, and basically there's no point even having those review outlets represented on Meta to begin with.

If you approve a review outlet to your site, you can't then just pick and choose which of their reviews really count, and which don't. That's just nonsense.

That aside, people really shouldn't let massive outliers bother them so damn much. What does it matter if one person out of 100 or something doesn't like what everyone else likes, or is being a contrarian for the sake of it? It's not going to change your personal enjoyment of that product, or the general perception of it.

And frankly, you haven't really made it big until you have people trying to knock you down, so hell....just think of it as a compliment.

People just need to get over their measly 01-03 points on metacritic. The only point of that site is to see whether a game was generally well-recieved or nor, people should not obcess over every minor point just because they seek some sort of weird validation.

Or people should just make an average for themselves. Pick two/three of the worst reviews, pick two/three of the middle one, pick two/three of the best ones, read them (or even if you don't want to bother, check their sum-up views), and see how the reasoning holds across them all. If the worst reviews happen to have a similar, justifiable reasoning than the others but on a negative note, then it's not clickbait, or at the very least it is pretty well masqueraded and quite frankly can pass for a legit one. If it happens to be a bunch of nonsense and extreme nit-picking, in huge contrast to the rest (even the two other bad reviews), then you know where they might be coming from.

The same applies to the 10/10 reviews, btw. Sometimes you can sense they're legit, and sometimes you can sense they're pure bias, by using this comparison model. The thing about reviews is that you don't have to just stick to the number alone, even if that's what people generally do I guess.

Thats actually a good solution.This way you remove the outliners, and get a better average for the score.I imagine taking out 2 or 3 of each end of the spectrum would be ideal, as long as the game has exceded at least 30 reviews or so.

Plus just noticed that we now can like posts on the forums?Nice.

Yes and no. If a game has 20 reviews with a score of 100 and 1 or 2 reviews with a score of 60 or below, its obvious that the those are the click bait reviews. This also works the other way around where the high review in a bad game count as a click bait or "paid" review

That seems like it'd remove the whole point of having an average score, which is supposed to have a representation of them all around.

You could take the median, not average.

Do they? How needlessly convoluted. Do they at least tell you which outlets are given more weight?

Maybe for the sanity of everyone sites should stop doing scores and let their reviews speak for themselves, cause that number they tack on at the end of it means absolutely nothing. If they want to summarize their reviews just add a "buy this" or don't buy this" at the end. But they won't because it adds to clicks and page upon page of fanboy-fights.

For stuff like this should be used a median score instead of an average. With an average extreme values have more influence on the result as moderate ones (it doesn't matter if extremely high or extremely low). A median solves all this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median