Do you want user Game ratings?

Do you want user game ratings?

  • Sure, let's have it.

    Votes: 56 70.0%
  • No way

    Votes: 9 11.3%
  • I don't care

    Votes: 15 18.8%

  • Total voters
    80
I'd like to vote yes but like others have said before popular Big budget RPGs will get bad user scores. You just have to read the Bethesda, and BioWare threads to see the trend.

This is just one reason why I never visit metacritic anymore.

I have been quite vocal on those subjects.

MEA was really bad compared to ME 1-3, it does not deserve a 1 but certainly nothing above 6 or 7.
Fallout IV has been also a disappointment compared to the games I have played before from Bethesda. I own all those games, and played them.

EA does not care anymore for SP games. Their interest is on micro-transaction and so it means investing in MP for them.
Bethesda has been living on its reputation for years and CDProjekt is doing better games.

People cannot complain about that?

You are comparing people discussing a topic they love and their disappointment about the present policy of some companies with a glorious past and Metacritic?
It makes me think than maybe you should be the kind of guy not getting any vote.
 
I actually think Bioware and Bethesda titles would get higher scores than you think. Sure there are those who will put 1's out of principle, but I like to think the general opinion is a bit more nuanced.

I can't think of a single game I wound rate that low, because that would mean not getting any enjoyment at all from the title. I don't play games I don't enjoy.
True but I just laugh at the 1/10 reviews from gamers who supposedly still played the whole game despite hating everything about the developer & publisher to begin with.
I have been quite vocal on those subjects.

MEA was really bad compared to ME 1-3, it does not deserve a 1 but certainly nothing above 6 or 7.
Fallout IV has been also a disappointment compared to the games I have played before from Bethesda. I own all those games, and played them.

EA does not care anymore for SP games. Their interest is on micro-transaction and so it means investing in MP for them.
Bethesda has been living on its reputation for years and CDProjekt is doing better games.

People cannot complain about that?

You are comparing people discussing a topic they love and their disappointment about the present policy of some companies with a glorious past and Metacritic?
It makes me think than maybe you should be the kind of guy not getting any vote.

It's money that matters and the Dragon Age and Mass Effect Series has made plenty for them. So now I could write a more lengthy reply, but I wont so have a good day sir.

Though I'll part with saying it's better you move on if a developers games are not for you anymore. As they probably don't care about what someones say on a forum anymore.
 
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True but I just laugh at the 1/10 reviews from gamers who supposedly still played the whole game despite hating everything about the developer & publisher to begin with.
1? If only.
Metacritic is full of 0/10 user scores.
 
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I like it. We can post a mix of big reviews (maybe with pictures/vids in them) and simple 100-word reviews all in the same topic. Then the curator entry on Steam could point to the topic for more detail.

I'm wondering if we just need three options (good, bad, and so-so). Keeping the number of options small should limit the 'dork factor' of lazy folks just giving the minimum rating for anything they don't like and the max for anything they do like. It also takes away the "5/5 = perfect" craziness - nobody is going to think a simple thumbs up implies perfection.

For those nay sayers, again I repeat we did it before and it was pretty good, except for those idiots who think Gothic is somehow better than Ultima ]I[
You mustn't blame them - they probably just haven't gotten over the bitter taste of getting killed by the floor. I'm sure they will come around some day.
But again, to reiterate a point, I bought Final Fantasy 7 based on the reviews, and possibly the score, on RPGDot. Boy, was I ever disappointed.
I don't blame you - you probably haven't gotten over the bitter taste of getting killed by that giant serpent just south of the initial city. I'm sure you'll come around some day. :devil:

Edit: How much chit chat would be allowed in the review topic? As you can see here, we do tend to... uhhh... explore side issues in some detail.
 
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I'm wondering if we just need three options (good, bad, and so-so). Keeping the number of options small should limit the 'dork factor' of lazy folks just giving the minimum rating for anything they don't like and the max for anything they do like. It also takes away the "5/5 = perfect" craziness - nobody is going to think a simple thumbs up implies perfection.
Have to agree, less options, better the overall result. But less doesn't mean awsome/rotten toggle choice steam system does, for plenty of titles I can say those are neither brilliant nor garbage but are somewhere in the middle.
Edit: How much chit chat would be allowed in the review topic? As you can see here, we do tend to… uhhh… explore side issues in some detail.
I suggest one post per user. Enough to state what your opinion is, if someone doesn't like it, ah well, tough luck.
 
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You will enter your game rating and supporting text using a different entry point than the forums. It will also only support doing that. You cannot enter two ratings for the same game, but you can edit your original one. There will be no option for chit chat in that way.

However, we do have a games comments section on the forums. What I am thinking about at the moment is to transfer a rating and the comments as a post to the relevant thread for that game. It will just be the first post or added at the end of the thread. It will show the person rating the game, the rating and the comment belonging to it. The person responsible for that game rating will not be able to edit that post. The only way to do that is to go to the game rating section, as mentioned above.
As it is a thread like any other, people can respond to a review.
 
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You mustn't blame them - they probably just haven't gotten over the bitter taste of getting killed by the floor. I'm sure they will come around some day.

I had the last laugh on Exodus, and I still think Gothic is better. ;)
 
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Maybe, If there was some way to verify that the person rating the game has played it for a decent amount of time to form an educated opinion. I guess, even then I wouldn't trust them though.

We already have too many people popping in to threads of games they've never played to say how terrible they are because they don't like the dev, publisher, it has season pass, it has people that aren't straight, It's trying to be profitable, It's not the remake they wanted of a series they're passionate about, etc.
I'm not exactly sure what your talking about since there's not an example but I've got absolutely no problem with anyone downvoting a game from a shitty publisher or developer.

Personally I don't play ea games anyone more, since the ME2 dlc scam. Iirc the only ea game I've played since was DA:Origins and I've never installed ea origins even to get free games. Oh, I haven't played any ubi games since Far Cry 3 for reasons based on the publisher. Or eidos, since Deus Ex: Human Revolution, so no Thief or DX:MD. I sure they hell don't play any rockstar games either, because they treat PC gamers like shit and are a bunch of dicks. So after at least 25 years of PC gaming, I mostly only support indie games now.
 
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Why are you arguing? You're both right.

The topic is not about frauds nor evil publishers however. You two brought up a great question though.

Should we rate a vanilla game or, in some cases, hotel owner editions with all kinds of additional content priced as if were made of physical gold.
A nonRPG example, if we were rating GTA5, would it be only about the content we got through the initial price, or we should buy everything possible in that game with microtransactions first?
 
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Well, we can always rate DLC separately - maybe just as text in the review itself.

Mods can get trickier. If you mod-out a game, you can make it quite a bit different than the experience that the reader will have (especially if the mod ends support). For instance, the Long War mods make the new XCom games pretty different than the vanilla game. Some games like Saints Row 2 or Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines are practically unplayable without mods. Again, I'm thinking the review text needs to explain. The possibilities are too varied to try and code in. (At least in a decent time frame.)
 
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Mythos, are you going to display the number of votes a title gets? I think that says a lot more about something than the ratings does sometimes.

One of the most popular PW's on NWN took forever to get on the Hall of Fame because of all the low scores it was getting. I don't know if it even made the HoF. However, I took notice of it simply because of the votes.

Now in that case only a specific number of titles in each category made it to the HoF on the Vault so it had an endemic problem of people downvoting from who never played on our server just so their's could get in that month.

You mustn't blame them - they probably just haven't gotten over the bitter taste of getting killed by the floor. I'm sure they will come around some day.

stupid floor - biting the hand that waxes you

I don't blame you - you probably haven't gotten over the bitter taste of getting killed by that giant serpent just south of the initial city. I'm sure you'll come around some day. :devil:

Don't remember that. That's how much I loathe the game. I've got a mental block.

Edit: How much chit chat would be allowed in the review topic? As you can see here, we do tend to… uhhh… explore side issues in some detail.

This is an excellent question.

Would it make sense to keep threads in the Information section of the games database? Is that possible, Myrth?
 
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I just want to second Zloth's rating idea. Having a positive, average, and negative rating system is easy, it reduces abuse from people trying to unfairly promote or drag down a game, and is fairly easy to display (for example 35% positive, 30% average, 25% negative) and could be displayed conveniently like any other poll on this forum.
This system would remove a lot of my concerns. How positive or negative a game is can always be described in the 100 word user post.
 
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With every rating system there will be requests to make the rating more accurate. I can live with a 3 point rating system however. There are certainly advantages to it.
That said, people do like lists and making a list of high ranking games will be more difficult to make in this case as it is not numeric anymore and any attempt in making it numeric will have its shortcomings.
 
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You could still have a list of high ranking games. For example maybe an all time great like Baldur's Gate 2 would have something like 75% positive, while the next best game would have 73% positive. In fact you could make all sorts of ranking lists: most liked (highest postively rated), least liked (highest negatively rated), leasted hated (lowest negatively rated) and least liked (lowest positively rated).
 
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With every rating system there will be requests to make the rating more accurate. I can live with a 3 point rating system however. There are certainly advantages to it.
That said, people do like lists and making a list of high ranking games will be more difficult to make in this case as it is not numeric anymore and any attempt in making it numeric will have its shortcomings.

Every system will have advantages and disadvantages :D

Like you say, making it numerical will always have some shortcomings, but I guess the decision on having user game ratings on its own will always have them.

Even simply numerical has disadvantages as using average scores can be horribly biased, and using medians may also not tell the whole story :)
 
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I think having this information instantly might ultimately contribute to lower forum activity because people will just check the user_score and not create a thread for discussion.

If I made a post "Is Baldurs Gate 2 any good?" I can be sure my answer will be in a much richer form than a numerical value which is loosely open to personal interpretation. Is 80% a good score? What about 70%?

Just keep it oldschool. Change with the times too much and pretty soon the site will be about cell phone RPG because that's where the industry is heading.
 
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Yes, this appears to be a done deal, but I'm still not too keen on the idea. I think from some of the comments that people misunderstood my concern. I don't care at all if the members review bomb certain games because they've got sand in their crack about one thing or another. My concern is that it will attract pests, in the form of either shills or trolls, seeking to influence the scores. That's to say, I don't care about the score at all, but just about attracting nuisance posters keen to affect it.
 
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You could still have a list of high ranking games. For example maybe an all time great like Baldur's Gate 2 would have something like 75% positive, while the next best game would have 73% positive. In fact you could make all sorts of ranking lists: most liked (highest postively rated), least liked (highest negatively rated), leasted hated (lowest negatively rated) and least liked (lowest positively rated).
What I mean is how do you value several games that have a 70% positive score. Are they all equal? What if one has 30% negative and the other 40%. Are they still equal? If not, in what way are neutral votes counted?
And if they are not equal how is the list ranked with a game that has 70% positive with 40% negative vs a game that has 69% positive with 10% negative?
 
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Yes, this appears to be a done deal, but I'm still not too keen on the idea. I think from some of the comments that people misunderstood my concern. I don't care at all if the members review bomb certain games because they've got sand in their crack about one thing or another. My concern is that it will attract pests, in the form of either shills or trolls, seeking to influence the scores. That's to say, I don't care about the score at all, but just about attracting nuisance posters keen to affect it.
They do need a minimum number of posts before being allowed to vote though.
 
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They do need a minimum number of posts before being allowed to vote though.

That's what worries me, if you see what I mean. I don't care how they vote, or what the final score is, it's that we'll attract more people that are more motivated by influencing a score, than people that are interested in participating in a genuine discussion, which I think is one of the strengths of the forum.
 
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