This posting is meant to be directed at the GameSpot editorial staff.
I commend your recent change in your rating methodology that did away with the sub-scores in favor of one unifying score. The merit badges along with "The Good" and "The Bad" are wonderful and valuable additions that greatly enhance your reviews. I commend the change with one exception: I do not like the new coarseness of the available scores. Where before it was possible for a game to have a score with any digit immediately to the right of the decimal point, now that number is either zero or five. I didn't realize this was the case for several weeks after the change and don't remember it being mentioned in the new rating documentation. I believe the old system was better in this one regard.
The fundamental issue for me is that now a game will have one of 20 possible scores (assuming an actual 0.0 is out of the question) whereas before there were 100 possible scores. In some ways this makes sense, since the rating of games is so subjective; the scores are now much closer to grades, such as A-, B+, etc. But I actually find myself wondering if a 9.0 game just slightly missed being a 9.5 or did it just slightly miss being an 8.5? When the score was 9.3, this wasn't a concern. Obviously, you could take this too far (no one would appreciate scores like 9.37327) but there must be a sweet spot somewhere between a binary choice (good vs. bad) and a ridiculous level of specificity.
You already provide aggregate scores from your competition and from users, so I urge you to be more bold in your assertions and give us the extra significant digit back. I actually don't think it will have an impact on my buying decisions, mostly because your written and video reviews are so well-done as to render the actual score secondary. It just troubles me to think that if we retrofitted all the old scores into the new system that so many games would be lumped together. Halo's 9.7 and Escape from Butcher Bay's 9.3 would probably have both been 9.5, which wouldn't necessarily be bad, but my opinion is that the sweet spot should go far enough to give us the extra judgement and information of your old, and in one way superior, system.
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