May 30, 2011

Meta-Score Meta-Games

Witcher 2 and Meta-Critic tomfoolery
For months I was waiting for The Witcher2: Assassins of Kings to come out.  I jumped on Metacritic to check the scores and reviews.  The critics were rating the game nicely, but as I don't always get along with professional critics, I was more interested in the user scores.

To my great surprise, many of them were 0's!  I soon discovered why.  The reviews bashed Witcher2 and spammed/plugged/hyped Dragon Age II.  Very Curious.

More Metacritic controversy after the jump

It just didn't make any sense.  A game that was getting praise across the board was getting 0's?
Here's an example along the lines of the insightful reviews that were popping up on launch day:














With many identical user reviews, all spouting about what garbage Witcher2 was, and how we would be blessed upon owning Dragon Age II, my mind started spinning conspiracy theories.  It was even stranger that some of the reviewers had names like "Bioware" and "Bioware_intern."

I decided further searching was in order, and so started delving into the character of each reviewer.  One click away, and I could see what other reviews the "User" in question had made. Many of them had given Dragon Age II a 10 with no other reviews.  Could this be an example of counter-marketing against a competing game?  Or maybe just a few fans mucking about?

The conspiracy engine didn't stop there, I wanted to see if there were any meta-mixups with Dragon Age II.




















A hefty critics review score, and a failing user score? What's going on? Did the gaming critics get paid off?  Apparently not all of them, as a few lower scores dropped Dragon Age II from the upper 90's. Why was it in the 90's soon after launch, even though users thought it was terrible all together?

With a reputation as an impartial third party due to their conglomerate ratings, Metacritic has been a go-to site for myself and many gamers to get a gist of how good a game really is. But, unless there are some wild coincidences,  It looks like even Metacritic's data could be open to manipulation.

Metacritic responded to some of these ultra-biased scores in the case of Witcher2 by deleting them,  unfortunately also ridding the internet of the evidence of this tomfoolery.  After these searches I now have more questions about game quality and ratings than I did before.  Are the corporate marketing conspiracy theories real? Can I trust even a conglomerate rating system?  Are a bunch of fans just fooling around? Maybe I should just go play some games...

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