Topic: IGN Changes Scoring System--Irritating Arguments Cease Forever

Well, maybe not. But IGN's scoring system (and any site with a 100 point scoring system, really) has been one of the more controversial scoring systems around for awhile. Games would get say, a 7.9 or an 8.8 (out of 10, of course). This brought up irritating debates about what the difference between, say, a 9.5 and a 9.6 are, which is not only pointless, but it distracts from the actual review. Well, no longer. They've made a change for the better--a .5-scale scoring system. 8, 8.5, 9.0 etc.
http://wii.ign.com/articles/111/1110229p1.html

I would also like to thank Nintendo Life for never having such a stupid grading system.

Sounds good, but I don't really go on IGN anyway. They are biased with Nintendo (in my opinion).

The fewer possibilities, the better, I say. I'd be happy with as few as three possible scores: bad, decent, good. Let the review say the rest.

I'd whole-heartedly agree. Heck, I prefer reviews that don't give scores because then I have no excuse but to read the whole review (or at least skim more carefully), allowing me to find faults or areas where I wouldn't agree with the reviewer. With scores, I'm more likely to skim down to the summary and look at the score and just make my opinion right there.

I only really payed attention to IGN's video reviews when they point out pros and cons, and when the grading the game on individual categories like graphics, sound, etc. So I don't really mind because the final score was just an average of those categories.

How about "Recommended", "Hmmmmm" and "Grumble Grumble"? =)

On a side note, i really hate when people respond to a game with like an 8/10 with "How can you rate this so low! It's definitely a 9!" I really need to stop reading IGN board-comments.

I would like: "Great" (9-10) "Good" (7-8) and "No" (>6)

Anything barely above mediocre is not worth my money, so anything bellow isnt either.

Thank you. I mean look at Rolling Stone--what does their scoring system even mean any more? Their reviews are still fine, but all people care about is that Miley Cyrus got 3/5 stars and how proposterous that is (I mean, it IS, but that's not the point). I think critics need to stop letting metacritic rule their lives, and start paying attention to what really matters--the review

Awww. I liked IGN's scoring system. It was how GameSpot's review system used to work, and I liked it. But now, IGN has done what GameSpot shouldn't have.

All of this is irrelevant if IGN doesn't get some editors that actually know how to review games in the first place. They could start rating games on a 5-point scale at this point and I wouldn't care. They're changing something that really doesn't need to be changed while ignoring the giant elephant in the room, which is that their editors suck. They have probably two editors left (Craig Harris & Charles Onyett) that have credibility as game reviewers.

QFT.

Not so. The Final Score is their score overall. The individual scores of each category has nothing to do with the final score.

NOOOOOOO! Seriously, I hate the way NPower does downloadable game reviews. It's pretty much completely worthless when trying to make a purchasing decision.

Speaking of which, scores DO have a purpose. I can go to Metacritic and read the highest and lowest scoring reviews to try to get a handle on what might be right or wrong about the game. If none of the reviews were scored, I'd have to read through ALL of them to try to get the same info! Plus, I don't know every review site in the universe, and Metacritic links me to new guys all the time. No scores = fail.

You only need, like, 1 or 2, or maybe 3 reviews, since all you're really looking for are a "Recommended" review, a "Hmmmmmm" review, and a "Grumble Grumble" review, just in number form. You don't really need a score to figure out which one's which, just the summary.

I welcome this and feel it's about damn time. When I was working for a couple years with AMN/Kombo doing DS and GBA reviews (and prior running my own GB/C site) I/they had a full 100pt system but I refused to use it, I did what IGN finally caught onto the half point system. When you get into a 100pt scale it gets just too dicey and in a way confusing to a reader, let alone the reviewer too. I mean how do you justify giving 2 games of the same general quality effort, same style, etc say a 9.7 on one and a 9.8 on the other? Why the hell would really just a tenth of a point really make a deal of it anyway? It's nothing, seriously nothing in the scheme of things. When you use a half point scale things get much clearer. If something deserves a 10, it gets one, but then you don't get the confusing well it's nearly omnipotent, let's give it a 9.9 type mentality, you instead get a 9.5 which is much clearer in that it's not quite a 10, but it's a bit better than an outstanding 9 where just a few teeny issues held it back from the 'perfect' game numbering. The half point scale effectively drops it down to a sliding scale of 20 choices above 0 which nothing should get no matter how bad it is. Also, it helps stop a lot of the reader whining and fanboyish arguing over tenths of a point.

@Mickeymac: That's really entirely too generic, though. I would recommend both Soul Blazer and Illusion of Gaia, but I would DEFINITELY say pick the former if you can only choose one. Therefore, if I'm looking for the one person who's MOST enthusiastic about a game, only the highest score will do. Otherwise, I might still have at least five "recommended" reviews to wade through.

Which is the entire problem I have with the NPower system, of course. When I see two games of vastly different quality both recieve equal "recommended" ratings, it bugs me. A LOT. As game reviews have an intrinsic comparative value to them, it gets needlessly confusing when you try to downplay that element. This, coming from the guy who strongly believes in rating a game on its own merits. I'm complicated.

There is no intrinsic value because they're taken from thin air. The person who is most enthusiastic is not always going to be the person who gave the game the highest random number. I highly doubt it'd even be most of the time because the number aren't measurements. You cannot directly compare them. If I give a game a 9 and you give it a 8.998457, it doesn't mean I like it more. It just means that I put less stock in random pseudo-metrics.

@Adam
Absolutely. Scores are completely arbitrary, and when you think about it, almost entirely pointless in IGN's case. Look at their scoring system--anything in the 7-7.9 range is decent/good, anything in the 8.0-8.9 range is great, anything in the 9.0-9.9 range is superb, and a 10 is masterful (anything below a 7 probably isn't worth playing anyway). That little label is the most important thing, I'd say. The score is simply a way to appease metacritic.

Usually I won't read a review without a score. Too many times scoreless reviews do a poor job of properly summing up their feelings about a game/album/movie in a precise way. The scoring system takes care of that nicely.

@ Kid A
Yep. And if you think of the ranges as representing some kind of adjective, then each decimal point essentially the word "very." If 8 is great, 8.2 is very very great, 8.5 is very very very very very great, etc. Technically, you're intensifying the score / praise, but not in any quantifiable or practical manner.

And I agree, if someone is giving a score below 7, he's basically saying it's not worth playing. Sure, 6 is above "average," but there are a million bazillion games that can be given a stronger recommendation than that, and anything worse... we don't need to know how bad a game is to know it's bad. So it really just leaves a few ranges worth looking at: 0-6.9 or "bad" (you don't want to play this), 7-7.9 "decent" (enthusiasts of the genre or developer may want to take a look), 8-8.9 "good" (you should look into this), 9-10 "awesome" (unless you hate the genre, you want to play this).

(My choice of adjectives and interpretations, by the way. I know that's not what NL uses or what other sites use, but that's how I'd use the score if I used it at all. Personally, I just read reviews of games that look cool. By the time I get to the score, I know what the reviewer thinks anyway.)

That's why I like the old VC Reviews star system. Of course, we can clearly extract the same information from the score if we care about score at all, so it's not like the score hurts, so long as you're wise enough to ignore comments complaining about and nitpicking the score.