First off, take a step back and try to read that post you just made from an objective person's point of view, you have to admit it reads like a conspiracy theory.Zaik said:danpascooch said:Please answer my question, I'm not saying your theory is wrong, but that's primarily because I have no idea what your theory is, please tell me what your theory is for why Dragon Age 2 is receiving these low scores.Zaik said:http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/dragon-age-ii/user-reviewsdanpascooch said:I guess you could do that, but you won't really be able to, you can't see individual scores that aren't attached to reviews, and I only see a dozen or so actual full user reviews, which really is too small a sample size.Zaik said:*shrug* At this point we're talking maybes. I think there is, you think there isn't. I can't prove there is, and you can't prove there isn't. We can argue all night, but it won't get either of us anywhere. So, I propose we try something that might sound a little less dumb.danpascooch said:How does the number of reviews Oblivion have matter? It doesn't reduce the review count on Dragon Age II. The volume of quick responses can be easily explained by the fact that people who are angry or feel betrayed by a low quality game are motivated to take action to hold the developer accountable (IE leave a negative rating) while people who are satisfied don't feel the same sense of urgency and often don't bother.Zaik said:Well folks, I just looked up Oblivion's metacritic page out of curiousity and, lo and behold, it has a grand total of 1413 ratings between pc/xbox/ps3. I'll stop pulling the fanboy irrationality card if you'll admit that it's a little odd to compare a game that's been out 7 years that has less reviews than a game that has been out for two or three days depending on where you live.danpascooch said:Metacritic was out 5 years before Oblivion, Dragon Age Origins just came out not too long ago and it has good ratings, care to explain this "guarantee"?Zaik said:Was metacritic even around when Oblivion came out?Chairman Miaow said:And yet oblivion doesn't have user scores in the 3's and 4's?Zaik said:Nerd raging fanboys. I mean, honestly, look at the reaction. I'm not saying your 7s, 6s, hell 5s are wrong. I'm saying your 1s and 2s are just nerd raging fanboys spamming the site because they haven't been this mad since Oblivion added fast travel.Chairman Miaow said:And who would willingly do that for 5 hours? Who would even spend an hour doing that?Zaik said:Nope, but let's say maybe me 20 other people put up an average of 7 an hour for an average of 5 hours a day, and you've got... 700 per day. Total reviews on all consoles = 1569 right now, that's two days and a few legitimate reviews.danpascooch said:Sure, and you would put up 5-10 out of over 1000Zaik said:You keep citing metacritic user reviews, but you know I could put 5-10 of those up an hour if I wanted to, right?
It's not all trolls, the denial has to stop, when's the last time Game Informer has given an 83 to a major Bioware RPG? It's not a coincidence that it's scoring badly, it's not a paradox, the universe is not imploding, it's just not very good.
I don't know, but having seen the Morrowind loyalist base firsthand, I can guarantee that if Oblivion was released today the same thing would have happened.
Occams Razor, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one, there is no conspiracy here, it's just not very good and people are angry because of it. Not liking the reason behind the result doesn't change the reason.
Then again that was my doing so I guess that would put us at square 1.
Explain to me why it's odd, what about the Oblivion rating count damages the legitimacy of the Dragon Age II rating? Given that trolls can be all but ruled out since they aren't attacking other new releases and the sheer volume of negative reviews is too much to be accrued by trolls, and that's not even considering the fact that nobody has any motivation to attack this game's ratings for no reason.
I'm gonna go through and average up every user review score for Dragon Age 2 that isn't a 0, 1, 2, 9, or 10. I think that clears up all the bias, right? 3-8 will be acceptable numbers to be averaged. Then I'll come back and post what an average without trolling and countertrolling ends up being, and we can argue about what that means.
You mentioned that you "think there is" but my point is that I am at a loss for what "there is" means, what are you implying? There is a troll movement against the game? There is a database glitch that caused its score to be swapped with another game? What do you mean by "I think there is"?
http://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-360/dragon-age-ii/user-reviews
http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-3/dragon-age-ii/user-reviews
If you want to look through them yourself and see the rationale of the average poor rating, you're welcome to, all the actual written reviews are there.
I'm going to concede. I've got nothing but theory on what's going on.
My theory is that there were a smallish number of people who liked Dragon Age: Origins a lot, and somehow came to the conclusion through accident or fanboy rage goggles or whatever came to the conclusion that Dragon Age 2 "sold out", and became some sort of button mashing Gauntlet clone, and therefore decided to hop on guerillamail.com to make some quick disposable emails to register a ton of throwaway accounts that were used to give DA2 a 0-2 rating.
Like I said, it wouldn't be difficult to do 5-10 of these on your own in an hour. Let's say out of everyone who was mad about this, 20 people were mad enough that they decided to spam 0-2 ratings and reviews up just because they didn't like it so much.
I'm not here to argue over whether or not the game is good or bad or the reviewer was paid off or not, I was just saying that 20 people could have engineered the entire metacritic rating in two days, so it's not really remotely reliable of a system to use as evidence.
Secondly, you'll remember Mass Effect 2 having the same "sell out anger" over its inventory system and exploration, people were pissed, nerd rage peaked, and yet somehow it has a user rating of 9/10.