Is meta-critic more harmful than helpful?

[Vault101]

Ok now I start by saying generally I look to reiveiws to make desicions on games,from different scources (Usually IGN, before you flame me its because if the score is low Its a sign to stay away, other than that I can use my own judgment)

I dont belive porffesional reveiws are crap eather (I trust them a hell of alot more than user reviews)

now as you can guess, yeah this is somwhat inspried by the whole dragon age 2/witcher 2 thing (which kinda baffles me)

anyway as we have seen it seems meta critic can just become another place for people to ***** about things they dont like (also see portal 2)

also it seems people take the scores VERY seriously, like homefront, or the issues with dragon age 2,

how reliable is meta critic anyway?

anyway I guess my point here is mabye they should adjust it so this stupid behavour doesnt go on, I have no Idea how its just a thourght

 

[Project_Xii]

I've never, ever used or taken Metacritic seriously, and really only ill informed gamers probably will. Reading reviews, talking to people who've played it, and perhaps renting it out is the only way you'll know for sure whether you'll like or hate a game. If you let Metacritic or any other site talk you out of playing a game, chances are you didn't really want to play it and were just looking for an excuse to tell people when they ask "So have you played it yet?"

 

[MercurySteam]

It's hard to take any website seriously. I sometimes use GameSpot, but it's very easy to tell when they're blowing smoke out of their asses. You need to check multiple sites and chose which ones to believe and which to ignore.

 

[RedEyesBlackGamer]

Of course I take it seriously. I can go there to be linked to a number of reviews. It saves me a lot of time. Unless the game is obscure. (No reviews for Arcana Heart 3? Come on.)

 

[Aarquus]

i'll often use metacritic for movie ratings and reviews, because there are far less fanboys in the movie world.
Looking at the game ratings is just gonna get me nowhere, when people ***** on about how one specific game is slightly different to theirs, and must be destroyed with numbers for that.

 

[veloper]

A low metacritic user score is the best warning against a bad game.
The bombing and hyping generally cancels eachother out.

Those links to the lowest official review of a game are also useful.

 

[Aardvark Soup]

I find the whole idea of rating a game on a scale from 1 to 100 (or even 1 to 10) pretty ridiculous and childish. Since Metacritic is based around this I'm not a big fan of it and I certainly don't see it as reliable.

 

[Pearwood]

I find the whole idea of rating a game on a scale from 1 to 100 (or even 1 to 10) pretty ridiculous and childish.

You need some reference point when you have tons of reviews because you need to tell at a glance what the general opinion is. You could write a short summary but it's easier and no less clear to just give a score.

I use Metacritic sometimes, it seems to have become a place for bored 4channers to rate up/down a game on a whim though.

 

[Keava]

It's internet, what do you really expect? If you let people say whatever they want you can be sure there will be quite noticeable part of the crowd that will do everything to make their own fun out of it.
Any site that allows users to review and score will be flawed. It's just internet's nature to be like this. For every troll that gives a game 0 just because they can you have fanbois that will give 10 because they fail to see that every game has flaws.

I never read the user reviews, i rarely read the 'official' ones and never do it before i actually play the game for good few hours. Scoring system itself is useless for ages, because someone at some point gave a crappy game a 7 so now everything below 8 is considered tragedy and compared to that 7 being the 'waste of development money'.

 

[Zhukov]

To hell with user reviews.

The kinds of people who sign up to post user reviews on Metacritic are simply not worth listening to.

 

[The Woolly One]

The critic reviews can be quite useful - it has links to pretty much all of them in place, including magazine ones such as Games?, which I otherwise would struggle to find. While basing my purchase of a game on one or two reviews would be silly I do sometimes base it on the Metacritic score because it collects pretty much all reviews of the game, allowing me to easily see the trend. It was what initially led me to buy the Orange Box.

I generally place little to no value on the user reviews as more often than not its either a 10 or a 0 depending whether they're a fan of the series of the console or the company or something else unrelated to the quality of the game.

I do also listen to what my friends say about games, and they generally listen to my advice, but it doesn't always work. One of my friends persuaded me to buy Bad Company 2 and I loved it, but he also persuaded me to buy Fable III which I didn't like at all. I persuaded him to buy the Mass Effect games and he now thinks they're incredible, but I also persuaded a few of my friends to buy Halo Wars which we all generally found disappointing.

Tl;dr - I place some value in the critic section of Metacritic as it allows you to see the overall review trend, but not the user reviews.

 

[Stavros Dimou]

Metacritic gives the average score of all reviews.
And has links where you can read each review that counted.
So you can read the article of the one that gave a game 98% and you can also read the article of somebody that gave it 38%.
It's a useful tool because you can find reviews easily.

When I'm interested in a game I usually read 4 reviews:
I read 2 reviews from some major reviewers that generally always give good points
and then I watch the reviews on Zero Punctuation and the Angry Joe Show to learn the real bad things of a game.

 

[Reaper195]

I never pay attention to reviews. No matter how much of an objective view the reviewer tries to take, it's still a personal opinion. Yes, you can call attention to glitches and whatnot, but telling people not to play it is a pretty dick move. I was told by pretty much everyone not to play the Kane & Lynch games, so I got them out of spite. I would play those over any Call of Duty game, or Assassins Creed any day of the week. I friggin' love the series.

OT though...not really harmful, and only helpful to those who want to play what people tell them is good, not finding something they like themselves.

 

[Kotep]

Metacritic is a decent tool but it's crap for making any kind of reliable metric about games.

It interprets different reviewing scales on the same scale, so if someone would consider a 4/5 stars a '90' it won't take that into account--it'll give that game an 80. On the other hand, you've got the aggregated 'courtesy score' of a game with a big budget compared against the fairly raw score that a lesser-known game would get.

It's useful as a quick indicator as to VERY general quality of a game and the blurbs are sometimes helpful. That's about it.

 

[ScoopMeister]

Any review, professional or user, needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. While they are often a good indicator of how good a game is, especially when a wide range of reviews is taken into consideration, at the end of the day, all of them are written by people with opinions. And, even though I know that this is big news for certain people, not everyone shares your opinion.
It is naive to buy a game purely because it has a good rating on Metacritic. Play the demos, read the reviews, talk to friends (if you have any) that have the game to get their opinion, etc. There's nothing worse than wasting thirty or forty quid on a game that turns out to be crap (in your opinion), despite having had a great Metacritic rating. Don't let that happen.

 

[Twilight_guy]

I don't believe in any institution that attempts to rarify the notion of absolute quality and comparability of games. Games can't be measured with numbers, they representing something too complex for that. It's like slapping and IQ number on a person and saying there intelligence is equal to this number. There is too much to fit into a number or single value. As such, I don't put much stock in reviews that just give things numbers of rankings on some absoluter scale. I prefer to hear a little more in reviews. I think the fetish with providing an absolute scale of games quality does more harm then good and as such don't really support the whole notion of metacritic. That said, this is an winnable battle and moot anyways. My feelings towards it as an institution are a great big "meh" I don't really care.

 

[Keepitclean]

If you want reviews to be 'reliable' you should find a reviewer that shares your tastes. That way they are more likely to 'get it right' in your eyes. An example of a reviewer that I like is MovieBob. We have similar movie tastes so to me his opinion carries more weight than the average user reviewer I have never heard of.

On the other hand professional game reviewers on sites such as IGN and Gametrailers don't influence me as much as most of the user reviews that are posted on this site because I know that they hand out 9s and 10s to things that I find bland eg MW2.

Also read the reviews rather than look at just the score. If it is written well the review will be more helpful than the score anyway.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

I think sites like MetaCritic, GameRankings, RottenTomatoes, etc. are are just a tool for you to use, and those sites can be misused just like any other tool. If you just go to one of those sites and write off games that don't get 9.0 or higher, then you're an idiot. If there's a game, movie, or TV show that seems like it has potential but I'm very skeptical about, then I'll check one of those sites just to see how most critics feel about it. Don't just look at the number because some things are just love/hate and people either hate them or love them and the resulting score will never look very good. With movies, I pretty much give any movie a chance if it got 40% or higher and if a movie gets over 80% or more (which is rare), it's probably a good movie. Also, I have a couple movie and game reviewers that I agree with most of the time, and if they say it's great or it sucks, they're usually right. Everyone needs to find their go-to review guys. For example, I think The Classic Game Room on Youtube does great game reviews. I even use Yahtzee's reviews (yes, Zero Punctuation) to help determine the quality of a game, if he's bitching about stuff that doesn't really deal with gameplay, then it's usually a good game. When I saw his Uncharted 2 and Bayonetta reviews, I could tell he liked the games even though both reviews were pretty negative. He then, at the end of the year, noted both Uncharted 2 in 2009 and Bayonetta in 2010 positively in his end-of-the-year gaming summations in Extra Punctuation.

It's not that hard to read between the lines as when you watch or read a review take note of the reviewers criticisms, and if the criticisms are things you can live with, then you'll probably like the game. If the criticisms are game breakers to you, then you probably won't like the game.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

Metacritic is as good as you can get, as long as you only follow critic scores. User scores tend to be strange.

This is pretty much the long and short of it. User scores are largely irrelevant. Critic scores with well written reviews attached to them are perhaps more indicative but should always be read with a pinch of salt. If a game is practically universally praised or ridiculed then it's probably reasonably fair to accept that it's for a reason. But when a game has many mixed reviews it's worth getting a couple of opposed opinions so you can corroborate the bits that match and ignore the rest. Then decide for yourself if those machanics and that gameplay is the kind you enjoy.

I tend to just use it rarely for unknown games, to springboard to one or two reviews on popular gaming sites, usually picking one red and one green one. I want to know if *I* would enjoy the game, I don't care whether or not a critic I don't know did or not.

 

[fierydemise]

The biggest problem with metacritic is that it sets everyone to the same scale regardless of how it is meant. For example a number of places using 5 star rankings internally calibrate the scale to be non-linear so 2.5 stars (a 50 by metacritic) is still considered a good game (70+). For metacritic critic scores to work all the review sites would need to sit down and provide metacritic a way to map their scale onto a 100 point scale so it could accurately be reflected but that undermines the value of having some separate internal calibration to begin with.

Rotten Tomatoes is better since it distills reviews down to exactly what they are, buy or no-buy recommendations. They aren't trying to exactly map divergent views onto a single scale, they just say what percent of reviews thought this movie was worth seeing.