Metacritic Changes Its User Review Policy To Combat Score Bombing (engadget.com) 68
Just hours after The Last of Us Part II's release last month, some gamers posted ultra-low scores for the title on Metacritic. Since the story unfolds over 20 to 30 hours of gameplay, it was hard to believe the reviews pouring in after just a few hours. Metacritic took note of this score bombing and quietly changed its policy. Now, users have to wait 36 hours after a game's release before they can post a review. From a report: When you visit the Metacritic listing for a brand new game, you'll see, "Please spend some time playing the game," followed by the date and time that reviews open. This appears to be Metacritic's way of ensuring that users actually play a game before they review it and don't rely only on their biases, leaks or streamer playthroughs. "We recently implemented the 36 hour waiting period for all user reviews in our games section to ensure our gamers have time to play these games before writing their reviews. This new waiting period for user reviews has been rolled out across Metacritic's Games section and was based on data-driven research and with the input of critics and industry experts," a Metacritic spokesperson said in a statement provided to Engadget. The change was first noticed about two weeks ago, but it's getting more attention following the release of Ghost of Tsushima, the first big launch since the wait period was created.
Gaming journos don't do full playthroughs (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should the users?
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So they have to wait 36 hours or the paid shills' story has no impact?
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You don't understand. People are expressing unapproved opinions about a game. That's Serious Business. They can't allow that sort of thing on a review site.
You need to trust the trusted reviewers to tell you what you want. That's why this is called "review bombing" instead of "review inflation" when the trusted reviewers completely disagree with the audience.
I mean, just compare it to food reviews: if someone tried to sell you poop brownies, you should only trust the reviewers who savored every deliciou
Good I don't like per paid review that are there t (Score:2)
Good I don't like per paid review that are there to sell the game with no real review happening.
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Yes and no. It seems that even the early reviews complained about the story. When you pickup the book and the first couple of chapters are garbage, what are the odds that the same writer suddenly redeems themselves a bit further on?
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So then you wait until hour 37 to tell how much you hated the first couple of chapters. But be honest and say you didn't "read" the whole thing. Then I'll wait until hour 38 to decide whether I'm going to buy.
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But be honest and say you didn't "read" the whole thing.
Actually many of the reviews flat out said they didn't play past the first few chapters.
Again, don't see the problem here. If someone is going to review bomb something for shits and giggles then the delay won't change that. If someone hates the game, the delay won't change that.
Re: Good I don't like per paid review that are the (Score:4, Interesting)
Complaining about people not finishing the game before reviewing is like complaining about people who gave bad reviews that walked out of Affleck's Daredevil(went and watched Phone Booth instead, which was at least decent) giving poor reviews of it. It's a completely bullshit position especially given the 20+ hour length of the game. This is especially true of a narrative heavy game whose characters' actions are entirely by the wants of the author and not what would make sense for any of the characters to do in a given situation. Out on patrol for raiders that like to kill your fellow townsfolk and having made a fuckton of enemies on your past? Just go right ahead and give your name and place of origin to a completely unknown, heavily armed group that you've just met and let surround you. Hear someone loading a shotgun right at your back in a supposedly safe place? Turn around like an idiot without even preparing to defend yourself. In the middle of a knock down drag out fight with the person who killed your father figure and she just bit your fingers off? Spend time daydreaming and then decide to let her go. The story was a complete mess.
Re: Good I don't like per paid review that are the (Score:2)
Oh, and I forgot that the critic reviews were barred from reviewing major portions of the game. So your "They should have to complete the game first" idiocy doesn't even stand up under scrutiny in the first place.
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Wait, wait.
I was not aware one has to FINISH a game before expressing their opinion on it. If I don't like a game after 1h of playing it, I should be able to say so. On Steam, next to your review, people see how many hours you played it.
And there's one more thing, refunds on Steam are applicable if you played the game for less than 2h, or bought it less than 2 weeks ago. In the past there were deliberately crafted games which made you realize they stunk after sinking more than two hours into playing them (e
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Wait, wait. I was not aware one has to FINISH a game before expressing their opinion on it. I
No, that only applies gamers. People who support the right politics are able to post a review even when they aren't allowed to finish the game.
To be perfectly honest, I've posted poor reviews of movies, books and games after sinking an hour into them and being disappointed; of course, I always get accused of wrongthink anyway.
When is #WrongThink going to start trending on twitter? Because unlike #learntocode, shutting down that tag exposes the actual 1984-esque power that these monopoly powers wield.
Gun X Sword is one of my top 5 anime (Score:2)
Games can open up drastically as new weapons become available. Monster Boy & the Cursed Kingdom is pretty basic until 2/3rds into the game when you've got all the Mechanics unlocked.
Dragon Quest 7 has one of if not the slowest burns in human history.
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Just to be clear we're not talking about a game that takes a while to get going. We're talking about a sequel shitting on the previous story (based on all the reviews I've seen). You can't really fix that later.
But I wonder if you just don't understand what it is that makes something engaging. Take Evangelion. You said it's run of the mill mecha anime. So what, did you just watch it because you were bored? Personally I watched it since from about episode 2 it started developing characters. It had intrigue f
To be fair we're talking about a review blackout (Score:2)
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You're not going to achieve that with a delay.
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You're not going to achieve that with a delay.
Arguably, you might. It's not going to stop everyone, but it will stop a lot of people that don't actually care.
People are lazy, and also impulsive. There have been plenty of times where even a 10-min wait on saying my piece was enough for me to decide I didn't actually care enough to say it.
You'd be surprised (Score:2)
After someone's played the game then they're likely to calm down and not rage post. Hot takes generally suck. As for story, go watch Noah Antwiler's review of Final Fantasy 8. I played the game and liked it when I was younger but when you lay the story out point by point it's insanely terrible.
Video
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to prevent people who haven't actually experienced the story from reviewing it based on inflammatory posts they've read online.
Most of those reviewers literally said they only played for a short while and it was crap. Why is that not a valid review?
Some people read only a book chapter before deciding it's crap. Some see 1/4 of a movie before deciding it's crap. Some see only the pilot of a series before deciding that it's crap. Why are you making an exception for games?
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But I don't think that it will help a lot to delay the ability to write reviews. The underlying issue is that they just allow everyone to write a review, which allows organized groups to push their agenda on the review and likewise counter groups who respond to the other group and so forth.
What you may end up with can be a useless shit show, like user reviews for The Last of
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When there are a lot of reviews only a couple of hours after the release, you know that something probably isn't quite right there.
Indeed but usually they are rants about the developers or SJW pandering or some shit. These reviews seem to be about plot, specifically a lot of them seem to call out the plot shitting on a beloved character from the previous game. Sometimes the thing that isn't quite right could be the game itself.
After all fans just reacted really well to the start of the last Jedi where their favorite character receives his light saber back and joins Rei enthusiastically in the fight against evi... oh wait no he just tos
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It's not one of the games I would spend money on anyway, because in my eyes it's essentially a movie with a bit of interaction. So I watch it on youtube for free like I'd watch a TV series on TV where I can concentrate on the story. Hence I'm aware of the story.
Spoilers perhaps:
Yeah, I've read those about "ruining the characters" as well. And I have to think to myself that those
Re: Good I don't like per paid review that are the (Score:2)
You're right, we did know it might come back to haunt him. But we expected for it to do so in a sane fashion where he wasn't acting like a complete fucking moron. Instead he's giving his name out like a party favor to a group of heavily armed unknowns in a strange place in the post apocalypse. Does that sound like the actions of someone who has survived in the nastiest conditions for 20+ years to you? The writing in the game is a hilarious zig-zag between trash tier bullshit and good.
Then you have the secon
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The first big risk they took was to use a time skip between the end of the last game and the beginning of the new one.
If you do that you leave a blank that is up to the consumer to be filled until you do it for them by employing some kind of flashback device that explains how things have developed that way. I'm not through with the story, so I can't judge whether they do that properly or not. But from where I am right now, I can still give them the benefit of a
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The problem is with reviewers who just rant rather than providing detail, and people who assume that any review is objective rather than the opinion of an individual based on a variety of influencing factors.
A review which says "i played this game for a couple of hours, found it boring and gave up" is honest and factual. Many players want to start enjoying the game right away, they don't want to have to spend hours or days grinding away before they receive any enjoyment from the game. Many people simply don
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But my hypothesis here, for such cases where you have hundreds of reviews just minutes and hours after the game has been released, makes it rather unlikely that they actually bought and played the game.
Of course that's also just a guess. Because maybe those people bought and played right away. Highly unlikely, but technically possible.
The user reviews lack transparency on Metacritic, which is one of the reasons why Metacrtic
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Wha
36 hours later... (Score:2)
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From the article.
There’s no silver bullet to stop people from blasting their baseless opinions online
Nothing and no one is pretending it fixes anything. When posting an opinion is cheap expect cheap opinions. So one may ask then, "why the change?" Again from the article.
This new waiting period for user reviews has been rolled out across Metacritic's Games section and was based on data-driven research and with the input of critics and industry experts
The industry was just getting tired of it. There's no real solution, so Metacritic is just tossing some new rule in there to appease the industry and keep getting ad dollars and moral support from them. In short, it's the appearance that counts. But yeah, everyone knows that folks wanting to bomb the reviews, are goin
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Maybe the real solution is the industry can start making better games that aren't atrociously broken or completely unplayable?
I mean, I know that would take some form of effort and reform for the industry, but it could be a possibility worth looking into.
Re:36 hours later... (Score:5, Insightful)
By delaying the start of reviews, you change the composition of the initial reviews to include more legitimate reviews, thus decreasing what percentage of those initial reviews are by trolls. That decreases the influence trolls have on the game's initial rating, and hopefully discourages them from trolling.
The presumption here is that the number of legitimate reviewers will vastly outnumber the number of troll reviewers. Which is probably true in most industries, but I'm not so sure about gaming.
Re:36 hours later... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well the presumption here is that the reviews are trolls and not legitimate hate. Trolls and angry pissed off fans are hard to tell apart sometimes, and you don't need to play through an entire story to form an negative opinion. Heck a few reviews even seem to point out they didn't bother continuing to play after a certain point.
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Trolls and angry pissed off fans are hard to tell apart sometimes
They aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. A lot of fans have a hard time differentiating between "This is garbage and nobody should touch this" and "I didn't like this, but that's just my opinion". You often end up with "I didn't like this, and that means nobody else should either."
you don't need to play through an entire story to form an negative opinion
I think their point is that the positive reviews from the fans aren't as likely to come out until they've finished the game. As such, the ratio will be distorted until they've had time to finish.
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They aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. A lot of fans have a hard time differentiating between "This is garbage and nobody should touch this" and "I didn't like this, but that's just my opinion". You often end up with "I didn't like this, and that means nobody else should either."
Well that's the fault of people who don't understand what a review is...
A review is ALWAYS someone's opinion, based on the individual preferences and other influencing factors that person has. Their review may be perfectly valid and accurate, but you disagree with it because you have different opinions on what makes a great game.
A good review will make it clear what parts of the game they do or don't like, and explain exactly why. If you read this review objectively you may decide that he has a valid point,
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I think their point is that the positive reviews from the fans aren't as likely to come out
There's a well known consumer behaviour trait which I once knew the academic name for that basically says that this is true regardless of the additional qualifiers you added to the end of your sentence. A consumer with a bad experience is in the order of 10x more likely to share that experience and do it on a public forum. You'll never get a user review site with a representative view of people who liked something and people who didn't, and delaying this outcome won't change that.
Actually as a complete side
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Gives time for honest people to play the game and put in a real review.
It is very difficult to overcome 10,0000 good reviews, but if you bomb when they have 10 reviews, it looks like everyone hates it and you never get 10,0000 players to put in real reviews.
Re:36 hours later... (Score:4, Informative)
By then enough copies will have been sold to the "must have it now!" crowd that it doesn't matter.
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Wrong solution.... (Score:2)
Uh, you don't give a date/time when a poll will open on the web, you'll have all the bombers show up then. Better, take reports but don't open the display until a good result set has developed. All from one IP, all from competitors, or haters of the concept should be reasons to filter and non-count results.
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All from one IP isn't a good metric, CGN is extremely widespread so thousands of legitimate customers could all originate from the same source address.
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I'm aware that countries late to the Internet party have widely deployed carrier-grade NAT to work around IPv4 address exhaustion. The practice isn't quite so widespread for wired connections in countries with a larger IPv4 address allocation. To accommodate the disparity, a review site can take two steps:
1. During the first week after a game's release, adjust the review weighting threshold based on how prevalent carrier-grade NAT is in a particular netblock. /56s, so
2. Deploy IPv6 already [whynoipv6.com] and count unique
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Regarding myanmar and ipv6:
https://blog.apnic.net/2020/06... [apnic.net]
they're still the only provider so far.
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All from CGN is still a bias...
Slashdot needs this... (Score:3)
That is, if they ever want anyone to RTFA (or even the summary).
As a game journalist... (Score:3, Funny)
Just Performative (Score:3)
This new waiting period for user reviews has been rolled out across Metacritic's Games section and was based on data-driven research and with the input of critics and industry experts
I'd love to see what data exactly. I have to imagine "critics and industry experts" are organizations such as Sony and Naughty Dog. This is merely performative, it's only to make it look like they're doing something...which really isn't anything.
While yeah, a lot of games you probably can't grasp what it is or how good it is that early, TLOU2 had a bunch of leaks that revealed major plot points. You can absolutely critique the game with that level of knowledge.
Reading through the reviews, it's pretty universal that the graphics, animation, sound, and music are awesome. This game really comes down to the story. There are some glaring character and plot issues I found, and I'm honestly baffled to see how many people joyfully empathize with one of the characters you play as. Some people, both who give it 0s and 10s, clearly have an agenda (the 0s include anti-LGBT/women topics or hate about what happens to one of the characters, and the 10 seem to want to merely elevate a game with LGBT characters or want to be contrary to the 0s). But a lot of the lower scored reviews go into detail about why they dislike the game.
Gotta give it to Druckmann. I think he's a gigantic asshole, but he's played this beautifully. Even if a ton of people think the game is horseshit, it's sold extremely well, and Naughty Dog's future is looking successful.
Re:Just Performative (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder how many people are going to avoid Naughty Dog's games in the future because of this, or at the very least, look more critically before buying? Despite being a fan of the Uncharted series, I can assure you, I'm going to look veeery carefully at user reviews for any of their future games, given this game's controversial storytelling. I apparently can't trust the "professional" journalists to represent my views (maybe except Angry Joe). It's no different than for Bioware, one of my previously favorite companies, who seemed to spiral down into mediocrity over their past few games.
The vast majority of negative reviews I read said nothing at all about LGBT characters. I saw LOTS of people talking about hating the oppressive story, not liking the Abby playable arcs, and the lack of any satisfying resolution. Besides this, the game's presentation and gameplay are almost universally rated as superb.
Angry Joe gave a very thorough (and as always, highly entertaining) review explaining exactly why the story and characters were seriously flawed, and said almost NOTHING about the LGBT aspects. And of course, he STILL got called sexist and homophobic by other members of the gaming press. I have a suspicion that a lot of the "professional" gaming journalists were simply afraid to tell the king he had no clothes on, precisely for fear of that sort of backlash. We certainly ended up with a massive number of sites giving the game 10/10 scores, despite the rather glaring narrative flaws that many have pointed out.
Users were (half) right (Score:3)
The professional reviewers were barred from rating the second part of the game, or even speak about it:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/e... [forbes.com]
And that is where users would have a strong opinion. The gamers seems to be divided. They either love it, and find it the best thing happened to them. Or they would revolt to what they have been subject to. I will not spoil it, but there is really some valid criticism if you had some certain expectations (at least if you played the first game).
The 0/10s might not be the right score, but I think the overall 5/10 range it currently floats actually reflect the average sentiment.
It doesn't take that long to know it sucks (Score:3)
The cries of review brigading are generally false. It is just a company whining that they turned out shitty content, and people are letting others know. People don't trash stuff for the helluva it. They do it when they are angry.
Why not... (Score:3)
Just put a big red line between reviews pre and post 36 hours?
That way itâ(TM)s obvious who is jumping the gun, and if they are frequent fliers in the sub-36 hours band and hence far less likely to be of value - a simple prat detection system
They don't give a shit about Ghosts (Score:1)
Professional "Critic" == paid shill (Score:2)
We should just "trust" the critics -- because they would never [rottentomatoes.com] change their opinion [rottentomatoes.com] on anything, right!? /s
Instead of listening to paid shills, maybe should listen to film critics who can actually see both the good and bad [youtube.com] points or other YouTubers [youtube.com] who can point out why Last of Us 2 is shit.
Why did it take so long for Meta-Critic to change their policy??
Metacritic bowed down to publisher (Score:2)
If they really wanted to eliminate review bombing, (Score:2)
Specifically, take the average for all scores except 0 and 10. As well as remove all duplicate review strings. Of course, that would require actual work on their part to improve their site code, and so won't happen.
Leaks and DMCA (Score:3)
I'm surprised no one else mentioned this, but the biggest thing I know about TLOU2 have to do with what happened just prior to its release. Apparently someone at Naughty Dog leaked information about the story before the game was released. I follow some YouTube channels that sometimes talk about such things. Naughty Dog (and possibly their parent Sony) tried to suppress the leak information by sending "false" DMCA copyright strikes against channels that had videos with titles that might be discussing the leaks. I put "false" in quotes, because as any good /.'er knows, all a DMCA complaint requires is that the complainer assert that they own the copyrighted item in question (or are an agent of the owner), and Naughty Dog (or their agents) certainly were. What was false about them though, is that many of the videos had little to no actual copyrighted material in them. The nature of leaks is such that there isn't really a lot of actual information, more rumors to spread than actual content. Some might have had a screenshot, but even then a fair use argument could be made that this is news (lame news but still news).
In any case, the monetized channels stood to lose (or were losing) actual, real revenue and viewed these as personal attacks. Thus they started speaking out against these actions. It didn't help Sony/Naughty Dog very much that the story of the game that was leaked did not paint the game in a very good light story wise, and has apparently been proven fairly true since the game was released.
So, I personally think that a large majority of the low user reviews are more due to the behavior of the game studio than any particular social issue. Maybe still not fair to the game itself, but the publisher's behavior likely brought it on.
What's really interesting is how few (in any) game publishers bring up this aspect. It's probably their underlying pro-copyright bias that is found in almost every mainstream reporter.
Which side? (Score:2)
If You Really Hate It ... (Score:2)
You won't mind waiting 36 hours to bomb it. If you don't remember to do that, obviously it didn't make THAT bad an impression.
Although there'll always be players who will disagree:
- Install new game and fire it up (naw, don't bother reading the instructions)
- Decide after 2 minutes play: "Well, this sucks!"
- Post ultra-low score on Metacritic
To be honest, I'm not all that much of a new game player. But I must confess I've done #2 of the above. I usually don't blame the game though.
Except for "Lea