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Comment by surgical_fire | Hacker News Reader

> This is not very meaningful unless you filter the plethora of 0s and 1s out of games that clearly don't deserve then

Only if you filter out the plethora of 10s that games that "clearly don't deserve them" either.

Who is the judge if a game deserves a score when the aggregator purpose is to normalize it anyway?

If a game sees a bunch of 10s and 0s it means that something in the game is polarizing. The fact that Clair Obscur has such a high rating means it pleased everyone across the board. Nowadays that is quite a feat.

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When Astro Bot won GotY, a bunch of idiots who thought that Black Myth Wukong should have won started review-bombing BG3; since Astro Bot is a PS5-only game and you can't review games on PSN, they decided to go after BG3 since their CEO was the one who presented the GotY award to Astro Bot.

You don't often see people review-bombing games positively that they've never played, so the skew is going to be towards the negative and not the positive.

> If a game sees a bunch of 10s and 0s it means that something in the game is polarizing. The fact that Clair Obscur has such a high rating means it pleased everyone across the board. Nowadays that is quite a feat.

100% this. Clair Obscur, by every metric I can think of, is going absolutely nuts. I find it hard to imagine many upcoming games which might compete with it for GotY.

> When Astro Bot won GotY, a bunch of idiots who thought that Black Myth Wukong should have won started review-bombing BG3; since Astro Bot is a PS5-only game and you can't review games on PSN, they decided to go after BG3 since their CEO was the one who presented the GotY award to Astro Bot.

And that is valid information and context.

If I see a bunch of user reviews that gave a zero but no textual information on that zero (or the textual reviews that gave it a zero contained bullshit), I can ignore those as irrelevant for me and pay attention to the game.

> You don't often see people review-bombing games positively that they've never played, so the skew is going to be towards the negative and not the positive.

That absolutely does happen. Fanboyism is a thing.

How can you be a fanboy of something you haven't played?

You'd think that, but it's a common enough phenomenon that satirical articles joke about it [1].

[1] https://hard-drive.net/hd/video-games/huge-earthbound-fan-ex...

People are told what they should be a fan of and what they should hate by content creators, usually on youtube. Playing the game itself is often a mere distraction from the more important business of internet comment section PvP (ahem)

Sure, user reviews are totally useless across the board, not disagreeing with that. My point is that if a game gets exceptionally good critical reviews then a 0 is almost always a hissy fit, not a serious assessment. And often the only thing that is "polarizing" is the game's financial success. (Edit: see my prediction about the game winning awards and seeing its user score knocked down accordingly.)

Funny you say that, I think user reviews are the only useful reviews for me to measure if a game is worth playing. I find professional reviews less than useless - those are essentially trash.

Start with a quantitative analysis. A game has a 7. Is it a bunch of scores around 7? A bunch of 10s and some zeroes? Those will inform you some.

Then do some qualitative analysis. See what people are praising or complaining about. Check if the complaints matter to you. If they don't, you should try it.

> My point is that if a game gets exceptionally good critical reviews then a 0 is almost always a hissy fit, not a serious assessment

Hard disagree. Critical reviews are pure marketing. I played games that are aggressively mediocre that were critically praised before.

Speaking of bad faith... really seems like you're shifting the goalposts here. I specifically mentioned Baldur's Gate 3 as a game I didn't care for, I would have given it a 7/10. A 0/10 or 1/10 is preposterous. This is the specific problem I am talking about: absurdly low reviews driven by resentment.

Is there a single game that averaged >80/100 on Metacritic which you would have given a 0?

> I specifically mentioned Baldur's Gate 3 as a game I didn't care for, I would have given it a 7/10. A 0/10 or 1/10 is preposterous.

Preposterous to you. You sound awfully judgemental of other people's opinions. Are your tastes inherently superior?

I didn't play BG3, mostly because I don't like D&D. If I played BG3, I would most likely not like it very much due to my predisposition to dislike it, due to my dislike of D&D. If I gave it a low score, you would dismiss my score as resentment? Sorry, this is bullshit.

This is hypothetical of course, since I didn't play nor rate BG3.

> Is there a single game that averaged >80/100 on Metacritic which you would have given a 0?

Me, personally? No, but that is more related to how I rate games. The games I played that I disliked the most got like a 3 or 4. Zero would be reserved to games that are fundamentally broken.

What I suspect has happened is that it is neither "conspicuously woke" nor "conspicuously anti-woke". Probably because it's French. Therefore it has avoided organized review-bombing campaigns, as well as being an extremely good game in a neglected genre.

(re: review bombing, a funny/stupid example of this was when Genshin Impact gave out anniversary freebies that the fandom deemed inadequate. So they started review-bombing it. Google removed the reviews. So they review-bombed https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... instead)

And review bombing is alright. I have no idea why people get so obsessed over it. Which is why people should actually read the words of user reviews.

Are people that gave it a zero complaining only that the game is woke? If that does not matter to you, you may want to try it.

I enjoyed games that were review bombed before, as the reasons why people were review bombing it didn't matter to me.

I would suggest a causal correlation there. They were able to focus on making the game good, rather than focusing on making the game political, and thus failing to make the game good, as the dozens of recent AAA(A) commercial failures have done.

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