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Forums - Gaming - Review Inflation

Vagabund on 04 November 2009
Smeags said:

I once had a gaming blog that sometimes reviewed games. Our scoring system was this:





It was simple, yet got the point across. Plus, it made readers actually live up to their name and read the written review.

The best scoring system, if you ask me. I really wish it would be more popular. You can almost always tell if a game is good, average or bad, but if it's a masterpiece or just a solid game largely depends on your taste, preferences, maybe cultural background, etc. pp.... so in fact, a simple thumbs up/thumbs down/something in between system is the only "safe" and appropriate way to rate a game. And as you said, it pushes people to actually read the article, which is more important anyway.



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Naum on 04 November 2009

I think there is alot of hidden "moneyhating" in the gaming world today.



If it isn't turnbased it isn't worth playing   (mostly)

And shepherds we shall be,

For Thee, my Lord, for Thee. Power hath descended forth from Thy hand, That our feet may swiftly carry out Thy command. So we shall flow a river forth to Thee And teeming with souls shall it ever be. In Nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritūs Sancti. -----The Boondock Saints

Onyxmeth on 04 November 2009
Kenryoku_Maxis said:

That's the problem I'm worried about.  Certain reviewers, like Famitsu, review games as you described, as being 'the best in their genre' or 'best on their system'.  While most western reviewers are taking a different approach and reviewing games based on a multiple point scale including graphics, presentation and a completely gray area of 'gameplay'.  When you throw these things into a pot, most Wii/DS games get downscored next to 360/PS3 games because they don't have as good graphics and are more harshly judged in gameplay.

Putting that into a 5 point scale would be a madhouse is all I'm saying...generating a ton of 2s and 3s for DS and Wii games and a lot of 4s and 5s for 360/PS3 games.  Its essentially what we have now with the difference being DS/Wii games range between 7.0-8.9 while 360/PS3 games avg between 8.0-9.5.

But who knows...maybe it could fix everything.

I don't think that will happen at all. Look at G4's X-Play, which is the only review site I could find that actually has this system in place of single digit 1-5 scoring. Let's just take a look at the 5's for this year.

Dragon Age: Origins
GTA IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony
Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time
FIFA Soccer 10
Forza Motorsport 3
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
Halo 3: ODST
Mario and Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story
Need for Speed: Shift
IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey
Shadow Complex
Wii Sports Resort
Fight Night Round 4
Boom Blox Bash Party
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 Wii
inFamous
GTA: Chinatown Wars
Street Fighter IV
GTA: The Lost and the Damned
Killzone 2

Every platform but the PSP is represented here. To be fair, the PSP does have quite a few fours, but whatever. That's beyond the point. When you drop the worth of the 5 and you condense the scoring, you allow the review within to speak for itself as opposed to arbitrary 9.3 and 9.4 differences. To further prove my point, the only games to get 1's are shovelware, and 2 and up is reserved for games worth playing of different individual qualities. This hasn't fixed other problems that would be fixed with no scoring system, but it's a start.



Tag: Became a freaking mod and a complete douche, coincidentally, at the same time.



Kenryoku_Maxis on 04 November 2009
Onyxmeth said:
Kenryoku_Maxis said:
 

That's the problem I'm worried about.  Certain reviewers, like Famitsu, review games as you described, as being 'the best in their genre' or 'best on their system'.  While most western reviewers are taking a different approach and reviewing games based on a multiple point scale including graphics, presentation and a completely gray area of 'gameplay'.  When you throw these things into a pot, most Wii/DS games get downscored next to 360/PS3 games because they don't have as good graphics and are more harshly judged in gameplay.

Putting that into a 5 point scale would be a madhouse is all I'm saying...generating a ton of 2s and 3s for DS and Wii games and a lot of 4s and 5s for 360/PS3 games.  Its essentially what we have now with the difference being DS/Wii games range between 7.0-8.9 while 360/PS3 games avg between 8.0-9.5.

But who knows...maybe it could fix everything.

I don't think that will happen at all. Look at G4's X-Play, which is the only review site I could find that actually has this system in place of single digit 1-5 scoring. Let's just take a look at the 5's for this year.

Dragon Age: Origins
GTA IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony
Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time
FIFA Soccer 10
Forza Motorsport 3
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
Halo 3: ODST
Mario and Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story
Need for Speed: Shift
IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey
Shadow Complex
Wii Sports Resort
Fight Night Round 4
Boom Blox Bash Party
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 Wii
inFamous
GTA: Chinatown Wars
Street Fighter IV
GTA: The Lost and the Damned
Killzone 2

Every platform but the PSP is represented here. To be fair, the PSP does have quite a few fours, but whatever. That's beyond the point. When you drop the worth of the 5 and you condense the scoring, you allow the review within to speak for itself as opposed to arbitrary 9.3 and 9.4 differences. To further prove my point, the only games to get 1's are shovelware, and 2 and up is reserved for games worth playing of different individual qualities. This hasn't fixed other problems that would be fixed with no scoring system, but it's a start.

Yeah, maybe it could work.  But I think on certain sites, like IGN and 1up, they'd have to get new reviewers as well, heh.  Someone like Bozon would be giving every RPG and Anime game a 3 by default.



Six upcoming games you should look into:

 

  

Onyxmeth on 04 November 2009

One more thing that bothers me, but this is only about certain sites, including this one. I hate individually scoring each category and then creating a wacko score based on the three that isn't even averaged out. If you're going to go through the trouble of diving in so deep into every aspect of a title like gameplay, replay value, sound, graphics, etc. then why not let the user decide what is important?

Individualize the scoring. Let's say I use this scoring, based on IGN's scoring system:

Wii Fit

Presentation 7.0
Graphics 5.0
Sound 6.0
Gameplay 8.0
Lasting Appeal 9.0

Final Score 8.0

Now not only is this not an average, but some might even say they're not valuing the final score correctly because this is a fitness game and some things just shouldn't count for much. Why not have a cool little interactive review system? Each category is individually weighted by a percentage out of 100 which would be individual to the reviewer based on whatever genre he is reviewing. This in turn, accompanied by the numbers creates an actual average score, albeit a weighted one. You then allow the user to adjust the value of each category and recalculate the scoring themselves based on their own ideals. Don't care about graphics and sound in your fitness game? Put their weight to the average at 0. Care most about the gameplay and lasting appeal? Give them a heavy weight in the average. Press enter and see a new score pop up that works for you, the individual.

Allow all your saved scoring go under a profile so it can be saved for you, and allow yourself to return to the default score if you so wish. I think it's a novel idea. It wouldn't fix some of the earlier problems, but it would be a hell of a lot of fun to use, and may help you better at making purchases.

A search engine to find games based on their individual category scoring couldn't hurt either. Want to see only the 360 games that have a gameplay rating of 9.0 or above? Bam, a new list for you ignoring final scoring to help you find games based on a category that interests you.

 



Tag: Became a freaking mod and a complete douche, coincidentally, at the same time.



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Kenryoku_Maxis on 04 November 2009

Personally, I've always thought someone should make a 'review' site where the main reviewers only write regular main text reviews, with no scores. Then, they encourage regular people to write their own reviews with scores connected to each games review.

I know most sites have this system now, but they all have their own scoring system and most people just ignore the fans review score for the 'main' review score. If you take away that main review score and just allow the fans review score...you have a much more accurate measure of the populations opinion. Cut off the top and bottom 5% and you have your avg.



Six upcoming games you should look into:

 

  

forest-spirit on 04 November 2009
Onyxmeth said:

One more thing that bothers me, but this is only about certain sites, including this one. I hate individually scoring each category and then creating a wacko score based on the three that isn't even averaged out. If you're going to go through the trouble of diving in so deep into every aspect of a title like gameplay, replay value, sound, graphics, etc. then why not let the user decide what is important?

Individualize the scoring. Let's say I use this scoring, based on IGN's scoring system:

Wii Fit

Presentation 7.0
Graphics 5.0
Sound 6.0
Gameplay 8.0
Lasting Appeal 9.0

Final Score 8.0

Now not only is this not an average, but some might even say they're not valuing the final score correctly because this is a fitness game and some things just shouldn't count for much. Why not have a cool little interactive review system? Each category is individually weighted by a percentage out of 100 which would be individual to the reviewer based on whatever genre he is reviewing. This in turn, accompanied by the numbers creates an actual average score, albeit a weighted one. You then allow the user to adjust the value of each category and recalculate the scoring themselves based on their own ideals. Don't care about graphics and sound in your fitness game? Put their weight to the average at 0. Care most about the gameplay and lasting appeal? Give them a heavy weight in the average. Press enter and see a new score pop up that works for you, the individual.

Allow all your saved scoring go under a profile so it can be saved for you, and allow yourself to return to the default score if you so wish. I think it's a novel idea. It wouldn't fix some of the earlier problems, but it would be a hell of a lot of fun to use, and may help you better at making purchases.

A search engine to find games based on their individual category scoring couldn't hurt either. Want to see only the 360 games that have a gameplay rating of 9.0 or above? Bam, a new list for you ignoring final scoring to help you find games based on a category that interests you.

 

I think this would be a fantastic system.



Onyxmeth on 04 November 2009
forest-spirit said:
Onyxmeth said:

One more thing that bothers me, but this is only about certain sites, including this one. I hate individually scoring each category and then creating a wacko score based on the three that isn't even averaged out. If you're going to go through the trouble of diving in so deep into every aspect of a title like gameplay, replay value, sound, graphics, etc. then why not let the user decide what is important?

Individualize the scoring. Let's say I use this scoring, based on IGN's scoring system:

Wii Fit

Presentation 7.0
Graphics 5.0
Sound 6.0
Gameplay 8.0
Lasting Appeal 9.0

Final Score 8.0

Now not only is this not an average, but some might even say they're not valuing the final score correctly because this is a fitness game and some things just shouldn't count for much. Why not have a cool little interactive review system? Each category is individually weighted by a percentage out of 100 which would be individual to the reviewer based on whatever genre he is reviewing. This in turn, accompanied by the numbers creates an actual average score, albeit a weighted one. You then allow the user to adjust the value of each category and recalculate the scoring themselves based on their own ideals. Don't care about graphics and sound in your fitness game? Put their weight to the average at 0. Care most about the gameplay and lasting appeal? Give them a heavy weight in the average. Press enter and see a new score pop up that works for you, the individual.

Allow all your saved scoring go under a profile so it can be saved for you, and allow yourself to return to the default score if you so wish. I think it's a novel idea. It wouldn't fix some of the earlier problems, but it would be a hell of a lot of fun to use, and may help you better at making purchases.

A search engine to find games based on their individual category scoring couldn't hurt either. Want to see only the 360 games that have a gameplay rating of 9.0 or above? Bam, a new list for you ignoring final scoring to help you find games based on a category that interests you.

 

I think this would be a fantastic system.

Of course it's a fantastic system. All the shit that comes out of my mouth turns to gold.



Tag: Became a freaking mod and a complete douche, coincidentally, at the same time.



bugrimmar on 04 November 2009
Onyxmeth said:
Khuutra said:
Onyxmeth said:
Khuutra said:
Onyxmeth, would you say that the ideal scoring system - at least in theory - would be to drop a scoring system altogether?

Absolutely. That would fix almost every problem. It's not that scoring is a bad thing either. It's just that the people in this artistic field(if gaming truly is an art) are not responsible enough to be dealing with numbers. It would have to be something many publications were in agreement with though. Having one or two sites do it would be useless.

We are in general agreement, then.

Though I do disagree on one point: get two or three sites that are big enough, and when they change it will make a difference.

Well if it's IGN, Gamespot and Game Informer, I suppose that could be enough to spark some change. If we're talking about Giant Bomb, VGChartz and Eurogamer though, not a shot in hell.

if we can make vgchartz big enough, we could cause a revolution in the reviewing system..

http://www.vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?id=91268&page=1



forest-spirit on 04 November 2009

@bugrimmar
Vive la revolution?