The context and long-term relevance of scores as a means to refence quality

Extract from a now locked thread, whereby someone cannot deny that the most recent Divinity games combined user and critic scores are undeniably a mark of some kind of quality:

The combination of both critics and users, however, tells the better story, and when games are similar, that story tends to be more true than not.

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However:

When Divinity Original Sin 1 was released, the context of that release was after approximately 13 years had passed since the last commonly accepted 'good' and popular isometric RPG was released.

It was like a breath of fresh air. A group of dehydrated desert walkers, their last drop of water drunk 24 hours ago, who suddenly came upon a pond of what seems like fresh rain water.

And it's this context that matters fo the historical legacy of the game, not just its factual numeric.

The second game came out quite quickly after the first, on a wave of positive energy created by the first. The Divinity games suddenly became 'cool' enough for non-specialist gamers to play them as if they were the hot new AAA release that everyone was playing.

And while the Divinity games are indeed enjoyable, for the most part, computer games, it's easy to forget that the Divinity franchise has never been 'proper' RPG, in the sense that, even in a turn-based environment, one is still restricted to the awful diablo-style loot, the overly cartoonish nature, the overly long and usually many broken parts, and all that stuff - which all works well for Divinity, but doesn't usually carry well into the long-term.

If a 'normal' RPG is your meat and two veg dinner (or 'insert my local every-day dish'), then Divinity games have always been a McDonald's Happy Meal, or a Dominoes Pizza delivery. That thing you buy when you feel like something similar but a bit on the cheap side for convenience and comfort. But probably kinda regret at some point down the line for whatever reason.

Do the scores reflect the RPG perfection? I don't think so, I think they represent what people really wanted/needed at the time they were released.

Like old Oscar winners people look back on and think "weeeeeell, in hindsight that year actually had some much better films really, bit weird how that one won that time". Because that one won because it the zeitgeist of the day.
@Nereida; first of all as the creator of the quote replied to.

lackblogger said:

Extract from a now locked thread, whereby someone cannot deny that the most recent Divinity games combined user and critic scores are undeniably a mark of some kind of quality:


However:

When Divinity Original Sin 1 was released, the context of that release was after approximately 13 years had passed since the last commonly accepted 'good' and popular isometric RPG was released.

It was like a breath of fresh air. A group of dehydrated desert walkers, their last drop of water drunk 24 hours ago, who suddenly came upon a pond of what seems like fresh rain water.

Click to expand...

This is acceptable to some extent, but there are caveats. Firstly, the last commonly accepted "good" and popular isometric RPG before DOS wasn't 13 years in the past. DAO was released at the very end of 2009, practically 2010. It had still been a long time without a proper CRPG release, but not nearly that long. DAO in itself was a super hit back in the day. I remember nobody on the internet talked about anything else but DAO, its endings, its companion romance options, etc. It also racked a very high score that has aged well even as BioWare haters try to retrospectively sabotage it still over 10 years later.

So with that same premise, then PF:WotR should get a similar, if not better score than DOS. For a lot of people, PF games are the TRUE successor of BG, not DOS, not DAO, not even PoE (which was entirely built around filling the vacant BG niche). So if PF:WotR is the authentic CRPG, the lost Messiah that was promised and has returned to us, everyone must have been starved not 13, but 20 years. Why does it get so inferior scores to all DOS1&2, DAO and PoE1&2?

PoE was released shortly after DOS stole the CRPG thunder all for itself, so why does it rack significantly higher scores than KM and WotR? The CRPG fans were well sated by then, by your logic, they shouldn't be so excited to overpraise it. And where is the starvation "buff" for KM and WotR? It had been 20 years since BG, that's a lot of starvation. While being certainly good games, they received massively more discrete critics than this starvation theory suggests.

lackblogger said:

And it's this context that matters for the historical legacy of the game, not just its factual numeric.

The second game came out quite quickly after the first, on a wave of positive energy created by the first. The Divinity games suddenly became 'cool' enough for non-specialist gamers to play them as if they were the hot new AAA release that everyone was playing.

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This is also a comparable scenario. Owlcat's PF:WotR completely rode the wave of positivity created by KM, which despite all its flaws, was still highly regarded by most CRPG fans. I know several people that are not into RPGs but heard enough about WotR that they got pulled into it and were pretty hyped for its launch, despite having pretty much no idea of what to expect, simply out of good Owlcat PR skills and hype.

lackblogger said:

And while the Divinity games are indeed enjoyable, for the most part, computer games, it's easy to forget that the Divinity franchise has never been 'proper' RPG, in the sense that, even in a turn-based environment, one is still restricted to the awful diablo-style loot, the overly cartoonish nature, the overly long and usually many broken parts, and all that stuff - which all works well for Divinity, but doesn't usually carry well into the long-term.

If a 'normal' RPG is your meat and two veg dinner (or 'insert my local every-day dish'), then Divinity games have always been a McDonald's Happy Meal, or a Dominoes Pizza delivery. That thing you buy when you feel like something similar but a bit on the cheap side for convenience and comfort. But probably kinda regret at some point down the line for whatever reason.

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This is your personal opinion, which I do not share. I think DOS is a fantastic game, that managed to create a colourful, immersive world where you could dive in and get lost as you explored seamlessly, interacted with its various NPCs and sometimes with animals. The world felt alive around you, every area flowed naturally as you walked through it. The verticality and reactivity of combat to your actions, spells and abilities was unprecedented. The way you could manipulate the battlefield in real-time to turn the tide in your favour. The boss fights that felt truly epic and impactful, the ambiance and the music that matched every situation.

It's funny that you would mention diablo-style loot. PF loot is not colour coded, but sure as hell I could use getting less cold iron longswords or chain mails, and more things that are actually worth looking through.

You see, you have your opinion on this, and I accept that you do. I believe you're painting a strawman of all the grandeur that DOS actually achieved, because that's where your preferences lay, but both critics and players could appreciate it above most other games, even when it does not necessarily align with your particular tastes.

lackblogger said:

Do the scores reflect the RPG perfection? I don't think so, I think they represent what people really wanted/needed at the time they were released.

Like old Oscar winners people look back on and think "weeeeeell, in hindsight that year actually had some much better films really, bit weird how that one won that time". Because that one won because it the zeitgeist of the day.

@Nereida; first of all as the creator of the quote replied to.

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I feel that while you are certainly onto something, and generally there is some true in that different gaming eras or timeframes are judged differently, the cases of DOS and WotR pertain to a same root. It's not as if, as someone in their trolling attempt mentioned in other thread, we're comparing Gran Turismo with Super Mario and saying "GT had 93, Super Mario had 96, so Super Mario must be a better game."

I am talking here about four games that all belong arguably to a same style, the story-rich isometric RPG, the "Baldur's gate-like", you can call it, that all belong to a same gaming era. Or at the very least they belong to a same gaming generation: DAO, PoE(1+2), DOS(1+2) and Pathfinder (1+2),and the critic and public reception, the rating they all received, are there for all to see. I actually had to double check right now to realise that Kingmaker has a 73 critic score, while all the non-pathfinder games in that list are above 90.

I feel like you're trying to defend the fact that to you, Pathfinder games are better than the others, which is good. There's nothing wrong with that, and I am glad that you feel that way and have your own set of preferences. I believe your only mistake is trying to spin that around arbitrary facts to make it seem as if your preference is the universal one, despite the fact that all data contradicts your claims.

There's quite a lot to unpack in your post, so if no-one minds, rather than make one long post responding to all, I'll take each paragraph and reply in a separate post to each.

The overriding theme to each will be that you've made way too many assumptions and seem to be replying to words I haven't said, but in a slightly different way in each paragraph.

Anyway, onto the replies in further posts.

Nereida said:

This is acceptable to some extent, but there are caveats. Firstly, the last commonly accepted "good" and popular isometric RPG before DOS wasn't 13 years in the past. DAO was released at the very end of 2009, practically 2010. It had still been a long time without a proper CRPG release, but not nearly that long. DAO in itself was a super hit back in the day. I remember nobody on the internet talked about anything else but DAO, its endings, its companion romance options, etc. It also racked a very high score that has aged well even as BioWare haters try to retrospectively sabotage it still over 10 years later.

So with that same premise, then PF:WotR should get a similar, if not better score than DOS. For a lot of people, PF games are the TRUE successor of BG, not DOS, not DAO, not even PoE (which was entirely built around filling the vacant BG niche). So if PF:WotR is the authentic CRPG, the lost Messiah that was promised and has returned to us, everyone must have been starved not 13, but 20 years. Why does it get so inferior scores to all DOS1&2, DAO and PoE1&2?

PoE was released shortly after DOS stole the CRPG thunder all for itself, so why does it rack significantly higher scores than KM and WotR? The CRPG fans were well sated by then, by your logic, they shouldn't be so excited to overpraise it. And where is the starvation "buff" for KM and WotR? It had been 20 years since BG, that's a lot of starvation. While being certainly good games, they received massively more discrete critics than this starvation theory suggests.

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Regarding DAO, it was popular and well received, but this game itself came after a long drought. And it had virtually zero competition. If you were an RPG fan in 2009 then you basically had no choice but to take on DAO and make the best of it.

Like many, I wasn't a hater of it, but neither was I lover of it. It was what it was, a stop-gap of acceptable quality.

It's main problem was that it wasn't really a 'proper' isometric RPG in the vein of what fans of the genre had come to expect, at least if your expectations were character building and party creation and mechanics and all that in an isometric world.

No, DAO was verging on a third person action game, as was the want of the console generation and pretty much all the RPGs from that era. Divinity Dragon Knight Saga included. An awful lot was sacrificed to make it console friendly, enough to render it not really much of a thirst quencher.

It was only really the big fans of the Bioware trope, that of romances and the primary hero chosen-one power-fantasy, that held it in connection to the past. The actual character classes, building and levelling up and skills and the like left a huge amount to be desired.

To which the new era of games, DOS, PoE and then PK, all then offered a much more specific and PC-based return to the Isometric format. And, as you say, all had their own unique claims on the title of 'True Successor'.

But, of course, each is different enough and has it's own quirks enough to warrant all of them not quite exactly what people were expecting. I would think PoE garnered the better critic and review scores above PK simply because it tries to straight up copy BG in every visual and stylistic way, whereas PK went the whole kingdom management route. And, of course, stability is very much an important factor for early reviews.

My own view is that none of them are true successors, but then that doesn't really matter much because no-one wants the same thing carbon copied, they are all three just forking paths from the original design. And me personally, I was never overly fond of Bioware's style and tropes anyway, BG wasn't the only RPG drawing in the fans back in those days, it was merely the most successful, or, most mainstream.

Nereida said:

This is also a comparable scenario. Owlcat's PF:WotR completely rode the wave of positivity created by KM, which despite all its flaws, was still highly regarded by most CRPG fans. I know several people that are not into RPGs but heard enough about WotR that they got pulled into it and were pretty hyped for its launch, despite having pretty much no idea of what to expect, simply out of good Owlcat PR skills and hype.

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When WotR released a week or so ago, its environment was one in which we are literally awash with RPG choice. It's actually quite rare to find even dedicated RPG fans who have actually played, enjoyed and completed all of the epic PC RPG that have released since 2015.

So while it's release is comparable, in that it follows on with a growing fanbase from the first game, it's timing is not comparable because its diving into a packed swimming pool, not a relatively empty one.

Even PoE2 came too late to ride the drought wave. The longevity of PoE 1 was so bad that even in a couple of years the sense of need had waned enough that RPG fans could look at PoE 2 and think, meh, maybe when I've cleared my backlog a bit.

Nereida said:

This is your personal opinion, which I do not share. I think DOS is a fantastic game, that managed to create a colourful, immersive world where you could dive in and get lost as you explored seamlessly, interacted with its various NPCs and sometimes with animals. The world felt alive around you, every area flowed naturally as you walked through it. The verticality and reactivity of combat to your actions, spells and abilities was unprecedented. The way you could manipulate the battlefield in real-time to turn the tide in your favour. The boss fights that felt truly epic and impactful, the ambiance and the music that matched every situation.

It's funny that you would mention diablo-style loot. PF loot is not colour coded, but sure as hell I could use getting less cold iron longswords or chain mails, and more things that are actually worth looking through.

You see, you have your opinion on this, and I accept that you do. I believe you're painting a strawman of all the grandeur that DOS actually achieved, because that's where your preferences lay, but both critics and players could appreciate it above most other games, even when it does not necessarily align with your particular tastes.

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I haven't said yet what I think of PK's loot, so most of this paragraph is fairly useless communication, because your entire narrative is based upon something that doesn't exist. It's mostly speculation. Poor speculation at that.

You personally might well really like DOS, but that's no different to me, I really like some aspects of DOS, but the facts are the facts, there's no strawmen in facts, it's flaws as a traditional RPG are plain to see.

And here's where you contradict your own reply in the original thread and repeat in this post, that we're only comparing like-for-like. The level of enjoyment is not a factor when comparing like-for-like. The loot issue is pointing out that the game is different. It's not a complete like-for-like is it. DOS was also, don't forget, heavily designed towards co-op play, a factor that impacted it's popularity completely separate and unrelated to it's RPGness.

It has nothing to do with my tastes. If you want my opinion on the quality of loot in all three games we're talking about, I've been disappointed with all of them in this regard, all in their own unique ways. However, Diablo-style loot is something very specific which is a different concept, factually, to simply 'poor' loot systems & that difference is that with Diablo-style loot then loot isn't character building loot, because it gets out-levelled almost as quickly as you find it, however, in a 'normal' RPG the loot can and usually does last many levels and is usually upgraded by a similar build-matching upgrade.

Nereida said:

I feel that while you are certainly onto something, and generally there is some true in that different gaming eras or timeframes are judged differently, the cases of DOS and WotR pertain to a same root. It's not as if, as someone in their trolling attempt mentioned in other thread, we're comparing Gran Turismo with Super Mario and saying "GT had 93, Super Mario had 96, so Super Mario must be a better game."

I am talking here about four games that all belong arguably to a same style, the story-rich isometric RPG, the "Baldur's gate-like", you can call it, that all belong to a same gaming era. Or at the very least they belong to a same gaming generation: DAO, PoE(1+2), DOS(1+2) and Pathfinder (1+2),and the critic and public reception, the rating they all received, are there for all to see. I actually had to double check right now to realise that Kingmaker has a 73 critic score, while all the non-pathfinder games in that list are above 90.

I feel like you're trying to defend the fact that to you, Pathfinder games are better than the others, which is good. There's nothing wrong with that, and I am glad that you feel that way and have your own set of preferences. I believe your only mistake is trying to spin that around arbitrary facts to make it seem as if your preference is the universal one, despite the fact that all data contradicts your claims.

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I have no ball in the game of which of those 4 is 'better'. None of those 4 are my preferred personal taste as I prefer games with total party control, not a single hero surrounded by dev-lolled nob-heads.

Why PK and WotR get hammered at release is usually bugs from what I can see, and, to a lesser but equal extent, the seemingly unnecessary kingdom management side-games, which add a lot of padding-time as well as bugs to the game.

However, my personal opinion is that, in the long term, people probably will look upon Pathfinder more fondly than either Pillars or Divinity, because bugs can be ironed out, Kingdom management can be modded/optioned out of, dull or silly gameplay can't be.

However, most of the meaningful reviews tend to come out in the first few weeks of release, to which DOS is fine and even great for the first 40 hours, and PoE was alright enough for the first 30 hours, to get all those front-loaded happy faces. PK on the other hand has so many character options that I think, in the long term, people will still be trying out new stuff many years from now.

Phew! All done.

Alright, if I requote and rebate again all you said it'll take a while, but it all feels to me again like excuses to bend facts with arbitrary parameters to support your preferred opinion, because you can not reconcile with the fact that WotR is not as widely accepted as a great game (and never will, even past bugs) as the other similar games that have been published in the last decade.

It's a might exercise of mental gymnastic to remain in denial, much as a religious approach. Which again, if that is what you believe, it is all good. It works for you, and that is great.

All the games in that list had pretty buggy launches, all were anticipated (perhaps the one to be LEAST anticipated was DOS1, really, nobody expected it to be that magnificent) and all were judged with generally rose-tinted glasses in a starved niche genre.

Yet again, the scores are there for everyone to see. You think this is not the reality because you choose to see only good things in your preferred game, and see less good things in the others, while you ignore that PF games are a mess, and here is a few reasons.

- Incessant repetitive battles against incessant repetitive enemies with incessant repetitive inventory clogging loot drops. Areas are absurdly overpopulated with "trash" encounters that add nothing but tedium. That is accentuated by random encounters while traveling that don't give you a chance to "buff" your party before tackling them (is that really necessary?).
- Massive memory leaks every time you open an inventory window/map/anything or even when pressing the quick save button, that causes increasing stuttering and adds to the general poor optimisation.
- Endless loading times for every tiny transition that contribute to the previous flaw even more glaringly.
- Clunky, boring, amateurish C-quality realm management/army battles that don't belong to the game.
- I'm not even gonna list Turn-Based related issues. I really need to finish this post today.
- Too many party members that are poorly written and add nothing to the story, including a talking weapon that was sold as a massive stretch goal and is basically a forgettable filler (I literally forgot I had it until it suddenly spoke to me at the end of act 3, 40 ingame playtime hours after the last interaction).
- Graphics are simple, dated, and dull.
- Cliche story, "the chosen one", that they didn't even write, and took it from a book owned by Paizo.
- Moral choices neither are moral nor are choices. The game has a very rigid idea of what alignment is, with no nuance, and no way to customise your actions. This is normally not something I'd expect to be better, but because the game is trying to sell it as a massive positive, it's fair to say that it is not.
- No UI scaling. Every element is huge, the chat is huge, you hover over anything and the tooltip takes the whole screen. Feels like a game made in 800x600 for another era.
- 3 weeks after release, they keep creating more game-breaking bugs than they fixed. This is after months upon months of paid alpha/beta test. Was the release dishonest, or are they really just that bad?

And that's just scratching the surface. I also miss things like a stat page to track stats or events that every RPG has had and RPG players love (at least I do) like time in the party, damage done, etc. Even Baldur's Gate 20 years ago had this. But KM/WotR are rushed messes that needed to fit in all the scuffed stretch goals they could, so it would be too much to ask them to add features that people playing RPGs on their Windows 98 OS enjoyed back in the day.

In the end, you can spin it and just say "Well, whatever, to me PF games feel better". I am fine with it, I am never going to debate that. I will just keep pointing out the fact that amongst all of the CRPGs released in the last decade, PF ones are the worst in terms of quality and general customer satisfaction and the scores they received is a clear sign of it. It's not 2 or 3 points difference, it's 10+, in every case, both for critics and users.

Because we have no standards and they have no competition, we still think that's good enough and we have to celebrate that games like this are still being made, but in a properly developed market with fierce competition, PF games would be forgettable rabble.

You still haven't grasped the fact that my opinion isn't involved & that your projection of my opinion is not based on anything.

Your reasoning for why you think PK is rated lower are the same reasons I gave.

lackblogger said:

You still haven't grasped the fact that my opinion isn't involved & that your projection of my opinion is not based on anything.

Your reasoning for why you think PK is rated lower are the same reasons I gave.

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What Nereida hasn't grasped, or at least seems willing to work around, is that in all discussions you view your opinions as facts and expect everyone else to accept them as such or, by extension, in your view they're working from a flawed foundation. Nereida is of course welcome to make her own decisions about how long to bang her head against that brick wall, but if I were her, I'd move on to less recalitrant pastures.

Well, you clearly stated that you think that PF games will be remembered more fondly in time, they just had a "bad buggy start", and the other games had deceivingly good 30 first hours which inflated their scores. You don't know if this is true, you have no clue or evidence about it. You "feel it", halfway between futurologist and tarot card reader.

That is a fallacious argument that makes a tremendous amount of unproven assumptions just because it is your chosen story.

Someone with a different set of beliefs could say that the day WotR released it was crescent moon, and by her astrology hunches, that causes people to vote 10 points less in average, thus WotR would actually be about the same score as PoE. It would be yet another fallacious claim that does not correspond with reality or poses any valid evidence.

When making claims about a subject without evidence, the most acceptable answer is always the one that does best when put against Occam's Razor.

I won't convert anyone, I know in which site I'm typing. But I can bring a pinch of reality to Wonderland.

JFarrell71 said:

What Nereida hasn't grasped, or at least seems willing to work around, is that in all discussions you view your opinions as facts and expect everyone else to accept them as such or, by extension, in your view they're working from a flawed foundation. Nereida is of course welcome to make her own decisions about how long to bang her head against that brick wall, but if I were her, I'd move on to less recalitrant pastures.

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Yes, I would hope RPG fans are good with stats:



It ISN'T MY OPINION.

The fact that you think comparing the number of positive reviews on Steam for three completely different dates for three games that had been out for completely different lengths of time means anything is mind blowing.

JFarrell71 said:

The fact that you think comparing the number of positive reviews on Steam for three completely different dates for three games that had been out for completely different lengths of time means anything is mind blowing.

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The graphs show the entire history of all there games except the short-lived Div Os classic, which as you can imagine, has a huge postive spike in it's first month & then goes small again, you can look that up.

The highlighted section which shows THE SAME DATE RANGE for all three games, which indicates LOCKDOWN and a point from which all of the games had an equal up-tick in interest, refers to the discussed issue of LOGEVITY.

To which PK is PROVING to be a consistently better seller.

That is NOT me having an OPINION about Pathfinder or any of the other games, it is me LOOKING AT THE STATS as they are RECENTLY in the context of the topic of the thread, being that initial SCORES are not necessarily RELATEABLE to LONG TERM POPULARITY.

If there's any MIND BLOWING here, it's your UNHELPFUL IRRATIONAL dislike of someONE.

But, please, don't let your personal biases prevent you from talking complete shit about someone communicating in GOOD FAITH.

I can tell, if your argument is failing, is not for lack of wanting.

If you are going to cherry-pick, at least don't debunk yourself. Using your same chosen media and data, which I suspect is trimmed enough for you to think that it's playing in your favour. All sorted by "recent". Maybe it's not obvious in the screenshots, but anyone can check for themselves.

Kingmaker - 77% positive
DOS - 86% positive
DOS2 - 93% positive
PoE1 - 86% positive
PoE2 - 87% positive

So, first there is the manipulation attempt of leaving DOS2 out while having about x10 the number of positive votes that KM has, which is underhanded, but I thought maybe you think that game is "too recent" to have gone into the "remembered fondly" area that you "feel" with your esoteric powers (despite the fact that DOS2 was released before KM, but again, let's not expose you too much).

Then there is the manipulation of only highlighting positive votes and making sure that negative ones go unnoticed.

Unfortunately for you, it takes more than that to fool people, and the only reason that KM has ever so slightly more positive votes than the other games you cherry-picked to compare it against (not more than DOS2 definitely, as you can see) is that it has been reviewed more often than the other two games, and has also vastly more negative votes than them.

Now, do you think this could have something to do with the fact that WotR has been about to release, and more people have picked up KM, which has been offered at a great discount and at times even for free during the last few months, so they could warm up with the prequel, or do you think it's because your tarot cards showed fuzzy warm feelings about this game aging particularly well, ignoring the fact that still consistently gets 10-15% worse ratings than its competitors, even when compared in equal recency?

I will let you answer that one, because

IT'S YOUR OPINION

Nereida said:

I can tell, if your argument is failing, is not for lack of wanting.

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I can tell, if your argument is failing, is not for the lack of wanting.

Nereida said:

If you are going to cherry-pick

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No cherry picking, all three games, max stats. Sorry about that.

Nereida said:

at least don't debunk yourself. Using your same chosen media and data, which I suspect is trimmed enough for you to think that it's playing in your favour.

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Nothing is trimmed, it's all there.

Nereida said:

All sorted by "recent". Maybe it's not obvious in the screenshots, but anyone can check for themselves.

Kingmaker - 77% positive
DOS - 86% positive
DOS2 - 93% positive
PoE1 - 86% positive
PoE2 - 87% positive

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And that's fine, last 30 days is ok, I went with a larger data set precisely because I wanted as little trimming as possible. Last 30 days would have worked fine for me.

Nereida said:

So, besides the manipulation attempt of leaving DOS2 out, which is underhanded,

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Underhand? Or just, you know, the obvious fact they're each the first game in their series. You know, not everything is as DEVIOUS as you wish it was.

Nereida said:

but I thought maybe you think that game is "too recent" to have gone into the "remembered fondly" area that you "feel" with your esoteric powers, there is the manipulation of only highlighting positive votes and making sure that negative ones go unnoticed.

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I didn't highlight only positive votes, so I have no idea what you're talking about, all positive and negative are there to see. This comes across as complete gibberish.

Nereida said:

Unfortunately for you, it takes more than that to fool people, and the only reason that KM has ever so slightly more positive votes than the other games you cherry picked to compare it against (not more than DOS2 definitely, as you can see) is that it has been reviewed more often than the other two games, and has also vastly more negative votes than them.

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My picture doesn't differentiate between positive and negative, the numbers show are total number of reviews, both positive and negative. The pop-up tool-tip numbers are merely to highlight the numbers that the lines represent, in case people are too lazy to look at the axis numbers and only see big line and small line.

Nereida said:

Now, do you think this could have something to do with the fact that WotR has been about to release, and more people have picked up KM to warm up with the prequel, or do you think it's because your tarot cards showed fuzzy warm feelings about this game aging particularly well, ignoring the fact that still consistently gets 10-15% worse ratings than its competitors, even when compared in equal recency?

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WotR was not about to release in Nov 2019, but for your last 30 day stats, sure, that's why I didn't only focus on the last 30 days, because PK's last 30 days would indeed be affected by the release of WotR.

Nereida said:

I will let you answer that one, because

IT'S YOUR OPINION

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No dear, no.

Stats.

You're version of popularity is simply the percentage of positive reviews. However, numbers play a very big part in longevity.

There are many an obscure game that goes by with very high percentage scores, but are soon forgotten. Tyranny, for example, (and should I lambast you for leaving that out as you do me?) has wonderful last 30 day stats, well into the high 90s.

But that's because not many people are playing it. That game's stats 'destroy' every game we've mentioned - if - and only if, we go solely by your chosen criteria. Would you argue that Tyranny is a factually better RPG, both at release and in the long term because 'some people' are playing it and giving it good scores?

Or do you think that in 10 years time, the site will be populated by people who remember the 2019 - 2025 era as "Hey, yeah, that was the Pathfinder era wasn't it, what a classic, lol".

In terms of numbers. Say 10 people join in 2030. 4 of them will be PK biased fans, 3 will be DOS biased fans, 2 will be PoE biased fans, 1 will be that Tyranny guy.

You get what I'm saying?

Just a few closing statements on my part, else this will just go in circles of denial forever more.

- The data doesn't change in the last 30 days or the last 600. KM always gets 73-77% positive votes, PoE and DOS always get 85-90% positive votes. The margins are not closing, and are consistent at all stages. KM is plainly and flatly, a considerably worse game, in the short, mid, and long term.

- Your logic about "positive votes" doesn't even merit commenting on it. Hey, in November 2020, Fallout76 had 2270 positive votes. It must be a better game than all others combined (never mind it has a 56% rating). It's just staggering how far you can try to stretch reality to cling to an argument that has already failed.

- The fact that you have to resort to this "I was comparing the first game of each franchise" as another reality-twisting excuse as if that mattered in any way to compare the quality of the games, just says that at this point you're just trying to convince yourself, which you don't need to. You've always been free to believe whatever you wanted.

- Tyranny is definitely a better game than KM, by a fair margin, and it is consistent with the stats. It gets a 80 Metacritic score, which is below PoE and DOS games, and considerably above KM. All peachy. I don't know what you are talking about.

In any case, I deem my argument concluded, at this point it's obvious you are deluded because you have chosen to believe your own fabricated fallacy, and I am content with the exposition of my argument, with nothing much else to add at this point.

You seem more determined to keep telling me I've failed than to actually explain why I've failed, which is indeed an apt conclusion to your posting style.

You seem to be happy to repeat the fact that you think percentages of positive reviews trumps number of players, regardless of the number of players, which we all get and understand, but at no point do you even try to address the issue of the relevance of number of players.

And you are right, number of players, by itself, is irrelevant, that is obvious. But then it should also be obvious to you that percentage positive, by itself, is as equally irrelevant to long-term popularity.

There is no circle being debated here, my circle is fully rounded. PK has the numbers and ENOUGH happy players. DOS has good numbers but slightly more happy players, PoE has MUCH FEWER numbers, but more happy players.

The obvious conclusion should be obvious.

The 'endless circle' you talk of is simply you completely disassociating SCORE from all other data inputs.

I say again, do you understand what I'm talking about? Because if you don't understand then you're not really going to be able to communicate in anything other than circles, are you?

If I may @lackblogger;, I think LB's argument can actually be well-summarised by posting the RPGCodex' Game of the Year results and some examples below. Hopefully this helps clarify.

https://rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=11612

The scoring is not only based on the actual rating, but also on the number of people have actually played a certain game. For example, Nox Archaist has a 87% positive score, but is only in tenth place, whilst Wasteland 3 came 1st.

This was because the number of people who played Nox was only 3% of respondents, versus 48% for Wasteland 3.

For an extreme example, Cyberpunk 2077 which only had 57% positive reviews also came ahead of Nox, because the amount of people actually having played the game was 20 times higher.

Essentially, % score isn't the be all end all is my understanding of LB's position.

Obviously, LB, correct me if that's not what you meant.