Online review aggregator MetaCritic is being forced to seriously rethink its user registration procedure after an outbreak of fanboy mobbing. While game critics have been almost universally wowed by three of this year’s biggest games – Gears of War 2, Resistance 2 and LittleBigPlanet – their equivalent user reviews paint a completely different picture, thanks to spiteful users artificially lowering the average user scores.
Gears of War 2 has apparently been rated by over 3,600 users to give it an average score of 3.5 out of 10, compared to 94% as rated by games publications. Resistance 2 is rated in the high 80s, but has a user average of 5.3/10, and LittleBigPlanet is up at a stunning 95, while users apparently rate it at 6.1/10.
It’s not impossible that the reviewers’ verdicts are completely at odds with the opinions of the general public, but just in case you had any doubts, most of these scores have been posted before the games were even released to the general public.
MetaCritic’s games editor, Marc Doyle, left the following message on the hardest-hit Gears 2 review page:
“My advice for our faithful users is to focus your attention on the Metascore for this game and not the thousands of user votes, most of which have been submitted before said users have played the game. This is a gaming community, and if people want to stuff the ballot box, there’s not much I can do at this point.”
So it’s obvious who the culprits are: a bunch of bored teenagers who for some reason feel threatened by the existence of a games consoles which they don’t own.
Peculiar, and actually a little terrifying when you spell it out. To think, some of them might have been old enough to vote…
Does it really matter though? After all, MetaCritic, as the name implies, is about amalgamating ‘critic’ scores. What users think is of no real relevance.
However, if just one review can be so utterly compromised by malicious users, then unfortunately you can’t really trust any of them and you might as well drop the whole user review system entirely. MetaCritic isn’t going to go that far, but it will be “upgrading the registration requirements for participation on the site in the near future”.
And so MetaCritic will join the ranks of websites demanding a long and boring registration process to verify that you’re actually a human, not a pimply hate-riddled subspecies who believes their choice of games consoles somehow gives their lives meaning. Sad, really.
(via 1Up)
