Why do metacritic users rate games so low?

I guess it has a lot to do with Metacritic's overall popularity. Nowadays almost anyone who is interested in scores, checks the Metacritic, but not everyone checks the individual sites for reviews. And the user score is right nex to critic score, so that anyone can see it as well.

Besides, maybe it has something to do with the competition between the mags themselves, but I have never seen one magazine posting an article about low user scores on any other magazine's website than their own (very rarely) or Metacritic's (still rarely but more often than 1st one). That means that low user scores on MC generally get much more attention, since they are the only ones, that are mentioned outside of the site, they are on.

So, I would say that if somebody wanted to make a point with the low scores, it would be probably smarter to do it on MC.

Also, isn't Metacritic more lenient when it comes to low user scores? I've heard that Gamespot for example used to delete too low scores (might have been just a rumor tho) and they've restarted Mass Effect 3's scores at least once for example (might have been for different reason tho).

Metacritics user reviews do tend to be from people who dont know the first thing about games or just hate the game in question and have probably never played it. Well alright maybe thats a bit over the top but I kind of lost faith in metacritics user reviews after a while.penpusher

Why do I get the feeling that you're saying that as if professional reviewers know what they're talking about?

Seems it's been pretty well covered. Basically, when you have a site that lets users give their own scores, with no criteria for making sure they're even reasonable, that's what you get. Legions of fanboys who hate some game they've never played because it's not on their favorite system rush to metacritic in droves, and rate 0 with a one line review that says, "gaem sux". Even if professional reviewers don't have the best opinions (and they definitely don't), at least they take the time to actually play a game, make observations about the pros and cons, and offer up a justified, albeit debatable, opinion. Very few random users on Metacritic do that. Easily 90-98% of the users on metacritic are fanboys/trolls who do nothing but rate perfect 10s on their favorite games, and 0s on whatever the opposing fanboys happen to be hyping at any given time. That's why Diablo 3 had hundreds (possibly thousands) of "reviews" rating the game 0, within half an hour of the servers going live. Loads of people with nothing better to do bought D3, had some issues with the midnight release, so they got frustrated and logged into metacritic so they could say "cant logon. severes r sh!t f*ck blizz gaem sux". Metacritic user scores are completely meaningless, and can't be legitimately referenced in any context.

If you actually care at all about review scores, then find a couple of websites/magazines, make sure you actually look at who's doing the reviews for certain games, and find someone who seems to have similar opinions to you. That way you can be like, "well, GS rated this game 6.5, and Kevin VanOrd (or whoever else's name you want to put there) wrote the review, and I've agreed with most of his reviews, so he's probably right".

Why do you care?

It's just other peoples opinions, does it affect yours in anyway at all? No. So just ignore it?

But to answer your question, a lot of people on there are trolls or fanboys who rate down the games of the cometitive system. Usually it's PS3 because all people that don't have a PS3 want a PS3, but they can't so they have to make rate it's games lower to try and convince themselves they are happy with their system, but alas they are not.

Others are just people with really picky taste in games, kind of like Edge magazine. Pretty bias and they rate games very low.

ShadowMoses900

:lol::lol::lol:

I don't pay attention to the Metacritic User scores because it's too open to abuse. I was looking at the user ratings for Flight Simulator X: Acceleration. Some idiot gave it a 0 because he felt it should be free. He felt MS owed him because of a promised DX10 patch in Acceleration. Perhaps if he paid attention, he would've known the DX10 patch was also included in a separate free download. For every fair user review, there's multiple idiot reviews.

[QUOTE="Wasdie"]

Because gamers are mad all of the time. They scream and cry like babies because it's never good enough for them.

Jebus213

Why do you care?

It's just other peoples opinions, does it affect yours in anyway at all? No. So just ignore it?

But to answer your question, a lot of people on there are trolls or fanboys who rate down the games of the cometitive system. Usually it's PS3 because all people that don't have a PS3 want a PS3, but they can't so they have to make rate it's games lower to try and convince themselves they are happy with their system, but alas they are not.

Others are just people with really picky taste in games, kind of like Edge magazine. Pretty bias and they rate games very low.

ShadowMoses900

Fanboys, trolls, baddies.

Why do you care?

It's just other peoples opinions, does it affect yours in anyway at all? No. So just ignore it?

But to answer your question, a lot of people on there are trolls or fanboys who rate down the games of the cometitive system. Usually it's PS3 because all people that don't have a PS3 want a PS3, but they can't so they have to make rate it's games lower to try and convince themselves they are happy with their system, but alas they are not.

Others are just people with really picky taste in games, kind of like Edge magazine. Pretty bias and they rate games very low.

ShadowMoses900

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_EsxukdNXM

Shock value, alot of people visit metacritic and the user score is right next to the reviewers score.