Why would you remove a sensible sort option? (Metacritic)

[naihan]

I don't get it. Metacritic score is a perfectly reasonable thing to sort by. Why remove it?

[GimmeDemBrains]

Because Metacritic scores are useless.

[naihan]

No one's way of browsing games is right or wrong.

[jm_]

Useless or not, more information about the game is better than less. More options to sort is better than less too.

[🍉🐺]

Metacritic is bad, has a lot of very biased users who vote 0/10 simply because the game is on a console they don't prefer. It's gone down hill over the years and is basically seen as a terrible place to find proper criticism on a game. I do believe this is the final nail in the coffin, as steam already implemented their own platform to replace it. That should basically be the full explanation of why it's removed, good riddence.

[Gutted]

"Because Metacritic scores are useless."

And a column of thumbs up icons are more useful?

[🍉🐺]

Originally posted by Gorey:

"Because Metacritic scores are useless."

And a column of thumbs up icons are more useful?

If you hover over the side it will give you a percentage of how many people liked the game, which should be 1-10 enough for most people. Steam replace metacritic with their own platform that isn't rated from external sources and isn't fed by "fanboyism" and utter garbage. While people's comments under their rating are joking, pointless, or utter trash and sometimes do not hold any value toward your opinion of the game what-so-ever, Metacritic is known to be far worse at this, and users like and dislikes still stand and will provide averages and give a good reference of the quality of the game.

If you went to Meta to see the reviews, you would know they're more garbage than steam, if you just want to see the pretty number that tells you the rating on the game, Steam's system does that effectively.

[Gutted]

I'm not going to hover over every thumb icon in the list. Sorry, that's just not going to happen.

[🍉🐺]

Originally posted by Gorey:

I'm not going to hover over every thumb icon in the list. Sorry, that's just not going to happen.

First world problems, sort by user review score.

[Gutted]

I also don't care if 97% of people "liked/thumbs upped" the game. Because that is not an indication of HOW MUCH they liked it.. which is what i want to know.

I "liked" both Bioshock Infinite and Hitman Absolution, but if i had to rate them i'd give Infite a 95 and Absolution an 80. HUGE difference there when you compare the score to the price of the game in question.

[🍉🐺]

It doesn't make much sense that you would base your opinion off a single person you don't know's bias of the game, a collective audience makes much more sense. It's still of course an option to read the reviews. The percentage is effectively the same thing as a Metacritic score, it just has a percent sign.

[Gutted]

The meta score is an average. The hater's and fanboy's cancel each other out. It's not as flawed as you think it is.

[🍉🐺]

That's effectively what steam also does. Metacritic scores still exist on store pages, if it really aches you that bad, it doesn't seem steam has cut out the partnership with them as of yet.

[Gutted]

You still don't get it. When im looking at a list of 50 games, I'm not going to click on each one or hover over each element to read a review. There should be enough info in the list to quickly narrow them down to just a handful that's worth my time.

That is what has been lost.

If developers don't like the way i dismiss their games on such terms, then they should make better games.

[Gus the Crocodile]

Originally posted by Gorey:

I also don't care if 97% of people "liked/thumbs upped" the game. Because that is not an indication of HOW MUCH they liked it.. which is what i want to know.

An aggregate Metacritic score doesn't tell you how much anyone liked it either, though?

Originally posted by xBlueXSkulkx:

It doesn't make much sense that you would base your opinion off a single person you don't know's bias of the game, a collective audience makes much more sense. It's still of course an option to read the reviews. The percentage is effectively the same thing as a Metacritic score, it just has a percent sign.

The collective, by nature, includes huge amounts of people whose tastes are completely different to yours. Why would you want to include them in your dataset at all? Aggregate scoring only "makes sense" if you consider your tastes to be about the average of the population. Perhaps you do, and that's fine, but many won't.

And the choices you have aren't just those two extremes: one single person or the entire population. You could, instead, examine multiple reviews (/videos/whatever) from people you find good at articulating their thoughts about a game, perhaps even people that you've discovered have tastes similar to your own.

Personally, I find aggregates like Metacritic entirely useless and never pay the slightest bit of attention to it, but it does nonetheless seem strange for Valve to have removed the option.

[🍉🐺]

Originally posted by Gus the Crocodile:

Originally posted by Gorey:

I also don't care if 97% of people "liked/thumbs upped" the game. Because that is not an indication of HOW MUCH they liked it.. which is what i want to know.

An aggregate Metacritic score doesn't tell you how much anyone liked it either, though?

Originally posted by xBlueXSkulkx:

It doesn't make much sense that you would base your opinion off a single person you don't know's bias of the game, a collective audience makes much more sense. It's still of course an option to read the reviews. The percentage is effectively the same thing as a Metacritic score, it just has a percent sign.

The collective, by nature, includes huge amounts of people whose tastes are completely different to yours. Why would you want to include them in your dataset at all? Aggregate scoring only "makes sense" if you consider your tastes to be about the average of the population. Perhaps you do, and that's fine, but many won't.

And the choices you have aren't just those two extremes: one single person or the entire population. You could, instead, examine multiple reviews (/videos/whatever) from people you find good at articulating their thoughts about a game, perhaps even people that you've discovered have tastes similar to your own.

Personally, I find aggregates like Metacritic entirely useless and never pay the slightest bit of attention to it, but it does nonetheless seem strange for Valve to have removed the option.

I don't look at reviews and ratings when purchasing games, I never said I care for reviews and ultimately I don't care for either rating system or base any of my purchase decisions on them. What he's saying is instead of taking the time to actually be interested with a game, he'd just like to see the score, which is tasteless and doesn't tell you anything about the game at all.

I was just pointing out that Steam has their own platform they're making to replace the metacritic system, they will probably not restore it and will probably phase them out completely. They have every right to do so and their rating platform from what I see works just as well, if not better than the Metacritic platform. That would be why they're replacing it.

If he's that passionate about actually looking up Metacritic reviews, he could currently on the store pages, or on the actual website.

Again in response to him, sort by user reviews or take the brief half second it takes to put your mouse over it, again, first world problems. If valve is going to bother they'd likely show the percentages without highlighting, and not bring Metacritic back.