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This still seems super gross to me. Why are we putting the number for what Polygon-as-a-Whole thinks of the game, on the review written entirely by one reviewer? If we want the number to match the review, just ask the writer to make a number they think reflects the text written, instead of some board. If we want to know what Polygon-as-a-Whole thinks, then why not have Polygon-as-a-Whole do a review, instead of tacking their number on somewhere else?

 

Because readers and Metacritic both interpret whatever number is put down as a number for what Polygon the institution thinks of the game. Please let me know exactly how you'd recommend an institution writes the text of a review as a group (of course with every single person who contributes to that written text having also played said game), unless you're using that suggestion rhetorically.

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Because readers and Metacritic both interpret whatever number is put down as a number for what Polygon the institution thinks of the game.

 

The more I think about it, the weirder a thing that is. What does it mean that that's what Polygon thinks of a game? Just that it's the average of the opinions of everyone at Polygon who played it? Why is that important? I ask non-rhetorically, if everyone mistakenly assumed the reviewer's opinion to be representative of the Polygon average, in what way would that be bad?

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I think the idea is to approximate a particular viewpoint on games, so that you can respond consistently to each score a game gets from Polygon. If you didn't make these efforts then you'd put out an inconsistent review response and erratic scores.


As a way to work with the existence of metacritic I get why it's an effective system but I'd ideally just... not have the metacritic system?

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I loathe scores in general.  If I were to ask a friend who's playing a game what he thinks of it, I really don't think they're going to respond with a score unless I ask them to.  Every time I see a discussion about scored reviews it just makes me want to do this idea I've had forever for a user driven website where the only score is a "yes you should play it" or a "no you shouldn't play it" along with a list of games the reviewer likes or dislikes so you can compare tastes.

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Because readers and Metacritic both interpret whatever number is put down as a number for what Polygon the institution thinks of the game. Please let me know exactly how you'd recommend an institution writes the text of a review as a group (of course with every single person who contributes to that written text having also played said game), unless you're using that suggestion rhetorically.

 

Regardless of what Metacritic and the readers interpret, the score goes under a writer's name, attached to a piece that they've written. Having that score be determined separately by a board of editors, hidden somewhat, in order to enforce a specious "consistency" across all reviews borders on ridiculous, especially since the writer is expected to revise their own work if they don't find appropriate the score that the board determines. It's all too reminiscent of every single Eurogamer review having a few "Reads like a 7, not a 8" comments after it, which were broadly considered to be the most annoying and tedious part of Eurogamer reviews.

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Regardless of what Metacritic and the readers interpret, the score goes under a writer's name, attached to a piece that they've written. Having that score be determined separately by a board of editors, hidden somewhat, in order to enforce a specious "consistency" across all reviews borders on ridiculous, especially since the writer is expected to revise their own work if they don't find appropriate the score that the board determines. It's all too reminiscent of every single Eurogamer review having a few "Reads like a 7, not a 8" comments after it, which were broadly considered to be the most annoying and tedious part of Eurogamer reviews.

 

I think this assumes that "Reads like a 7, not an 8" is equally (in)valid when stated by commenters versus the editorial staff of the publication. I get why that'd be an annoying thing to hear from readers, but I don't think it's pointless when you're trying to achieve "consistency". Now, I think you could argue whether or not that consistency is valuable, but I do think that if you assume Polygon is trying to achieve some form of collective voice then it's logical for an editorial board to interpret an individual written review in some way.

 

I guess what this comes down to is what Polygon's vision is. Other publications/websites have chosen not to have their scores (or lack thereof) represented on Metacritic, but Polygon has chosen to do so. When this is what people see:

 

4mJx6br.png

 

They're not seeing the score next to the reviewer's name, they're seeing it next to Polygon's name. When you go to Polygon's website, you see the score at the very bottom of the review and the text has clear priority. I think this is a valid way to adapt to conform to honoring the reviewer's intent on the website and Polygon's "consistency" on Metacritic.

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I guess what this comes down to is what Polygon's vision is. Other publications/websites have chosen not to have their scores (or lack thereof) represented on Metacritic, but Polygon has chosen to do so.

 

I guess we're going to have to disagree, because I think it is ridiculous to let how your content appears on another site, entirely unconnected to you except as an aggregator, dictate how you edit and present content on your own site. I cannot get over how weird it feels to me for the number at the end of a review with a byline to be the final decision of someone besides the person in the byline, just so that a hypothetical person who reads Metacritic but not Polygon, thereby giving the latter no traffic, finds that number consistent with other numbers.

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I guess we're going to have to disagree, because I think it is ridiculous to let how your content appears on another site, entirely unconnected to you except as an aggregator, dictate how you edit and present content on your own site. I cannot get over how weird it feels to me for the number at the end of a review with a byline to be the final decision of someone besides the person in the byline, just so that a hypothetical person who reads Metacritic but not Polygon, thereby giving the latter no traffic, finds that number consistent with other numbers.

 

I don't really understand why this even matters. If practically everyone on this forum agrees that score is insignificant, why does it matter what the site decides to do with them? Score only seems to matter to aggregators like Metacritic and the person who looks at the front of the box and says "oh cool Polygon gave this a 9/10 I gotta get it!" I'm just saying that if some part of the audience is only going to care about the score as it pertains to "what Polygon gave it", I don't see why Polygon as an institution shouldn't have some control over what that number is. Ultimately, if a reviewer cares that the score next to their byline is not what they want (which they can even fight for if they choose to), they should find some other outlet to write for.

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I don't really understand why this even matters. If practically everyone on this forum agrees that score is insignificant, why does it matter what the site decides to do with them? Score only seems to matter to aggregators like Metacritic and the person who looks at the front of the box and says "oh cool Polygon gave this a 9/10 I gotta get it!" I'm just saying that if some part of the audience is only going to care about the score as it pertains to "what Polygon gave it", I don't see why Polygon as an institution shouldn't have some control over what that number is.

 

At this point I admit I'm speculating about hypothetical people, but I can't imagine anyone who looks at Metacritic scores in precisely enough detail to care that a score comes from Polygon, but doesn't care which reviewer it came from. I agree that the thing you're pitching, Polygon as one numerical "reviewer" with known tastes, has a theoretical use, I just can't imagine the market for it.

 

As for why it matters, I can give two reasons. First, it's a system that encourages the reviewer to modify their review towards the Polygon score, which compromises the review. Yeah, they can fight for it, but Polygon undeniably has more pressure to modify their opinion than the normal system. Secondly, it's just gross. There's a number attached to the review, which implies that it reflects the writer's opinion. I'm not sure if I should call that disconnect "lying" or just "scummy", but it's not great.

 

 

Ultimately, if a reviewer cares that the score next to their byline is not what they want (which they can even fight for if they choose to), they should find some other outlet to write for.

 

"If you don't like, you can always quit" is a pretty terrible defense of a practice.

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At this point I admit I'm speculating about hypothetical people, but I can't imagine anyone who looks at Metacritic scores in precisely enough detail to care that a score comes from Polygon, but doesn't care which reviewer it came from. I agree that the thing you're pitching, Polygon as one numerical "reviewer" with known tastes, has a theoretical use, I just can't imagine the market for it.

 

As for why it matters, I can give two reasons. First, it's a system that encourages the reviewer to modify their review towards the Polygon score, which compromises the review. Yeah, they can fight for it, but Polygon undeniably has more pressure to modify their opinion than the normal system. Secondly, it's just gross. There's a number attached to the review, which implies that it reflects the writer's opinion. I'm not sure if I should call that disconnect "lying" or just "scummy", but it's not great.

 

"If you don't like, you can always quit" is a pretty terrible defense of a practice.

 

I think the market for it is people who read a NeoGAF review roundup thread that has all the review scores of each publication and submits a comment like "all 7s, I guess I will buy this when there's a Steam sale". I don't think that this is a theoretical, rhetorical person. Why I'm asking if it matters is because I don't think there are many Thumbs, at least, that prescribe to that way of thinking.

 

"If you don't like it, you can always quit" isn't my defense. I don't think that the ability to quit as a means of protesting the system is a good option, I'm just saying it exists. I think I've sufficiently stated that the reviewer has plenty of room to veto a score they don't agree with and I don't think that changing the wording of their review is their only method of doing so. Maybe I'm just more willing to accept this direction having listened to every episode of Quality Control, their podcast hosted by Justin McElroy where he interviews a reviewer about their review so that they can talk about their process. I've never detected any degree of animosity towards a chosen score.

 

I just don't understand the revulsion of someone saying "this is the score that your text reads like". I've tried my hand at writing game reviews and damn if it isn't hard to crystallize my opinion into a readable format let alone tag it with a score that is supposed to be the sum of my thoughts. I think that the system has practical, business-y reasons for existing like the Metacritic thing, but I feel like I'd appreciate it as an editorial tool. What staff reviewer would outright reject the input of other staff to bolster clarity and consistency?

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I just don't understand the revulsion of someone saying "this is the score that your text reads like".

 

The involvement of the extra person seems unnecessary. Surely the writer is better equipped than a reader to assign a number to their experience. The part that I object to is the idea that the score assigner's number trumps the writer's number, should the two differ (after all, if the writer's number took precedence, surely they would just ask the writer and not spend time making their own number which must be reviewed and potentially shot down by the writer).

 

Maybe it's just a weirdly designed system and the writer gets the final say regarding the number, in which case I don't have anything against it. But it looks an awful lot like a system where that's not the case.

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ON A DIFFERENT TOPIC

 

I feel like Nintendo basically confirmed what I've been saying forever with the newly-released Pokémon Shuffle: that if Nintendo were to move to mobile devices, you would get mobile games first and Nintendo games second. By all accounts, it's basically just Pokémon Trozei with some reprehensible microtransaction bullshit thrown in. It almost feels like a point-blank "fuck you" to the idiot investors who keep telling them to add microtransactions to make Mario jump just a little bit higher.

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ON A DIFFERENT TOPIC

 

I feel like Nintendo basically confirmed what I've been saying forever with the newly-released Pokémon Shuffle: that if Nintendo were to move to mobile devices, you would get mobile games first and Nintendo games second. By all accounts, it's basically just Pokémon Trozei with some reprehensible microtransaction bullshit thrown in. It almost feels like a point-blank "fuck you" to the idiot investors who keep telling them to add microtransactions to make Mario jump just a little bit higher.

 

Yeah, from everything I heard it's basically Trozei + Candy Crush Saga. I'd say that the ideal F2P Nintendo game would be a Nintendo Puzzle & Dragons, but that is actually happening weirdly enough and I feel like since it is a boxed game it won't be F2P in its design.

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I'm not sure if any of Nintendo's games can be monetized without making them into games they are not. The closest they get is A Link Between Worlds, since that had an in-game "spend rupees to get dungeon items sooner!" thing going on. That could easily be a dollar real-world transaction.

 

It makes me think back to when Capcom put Mega Man X on mobiles. Their monetization structure was literally just paying for shit you find in the game regularly, most of it without much effort. The bonus was that it was a TERRIBLE port. Look up the videos sometime. It's astoundingly bad.

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Tri-Ace has apparently been purchased by a japanese cellphone company and is being restructured as a tablet and smartphone developer. Not quite the end for them, but it's hard to see a way it can really turn out well for anybody who liked what their games were in the past.

They've been a reasonably well liked and fairly prolific studio, but, speaking personally, i never had any particularly strong feelings towards their output beyond Resonance of Fate, which ended up being probably one of my favorite RPG's out of that entire last console cycle, i just absolutely loved that game. So, even if only for that, i'm a little bummed to hear this news.

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I'm not sure if any of Nintendo's games can be monetized without making them into games they are not. 

 

Just imagine if you could pay to make Mario jump a little higher.

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Imagine for a second the nightmare that a free to play Animal Crossing could be.

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Imagine for a second the nightmare that a free to play Animal Crossing could be.

"Hi I'm Tom Nook, I pretty much own every house in this town. Would you like to see your new home?"

- yes

"Thanks! That's $10,000 down payment, leaving you with just $490,000 left to pay off! Enjoy Animal Crossing!"

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Imagine for a second the nightmare that a free to play Animal Crossing could be.

 

"Congratulations on paying off your public works project! It will be built tomorrow...

Or pay $5.99 for Tom Nook to build it now!"

 

 "Canberra is moving in tomorrow! Pay $10 for a cuter villager!" (Oh god I'd waste so much money on this)

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But Nintendo would do it way weirder, like pay 50c to have Tom Nook change his stock instantly! And it would be bizarrely insidious.

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Pay a few bucks for the privilege of having a store open early, or stay open late.

In fact, why wait for anything to happen? You can pay to have Crazy Redd show up now!

Oh, but you've been playing for too long and run out of stamina for the day, but you can pay to have Brewster make you some coffee so you can keep playing!

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 "Canberra is moving in tomorrow! Pay $10 for a cuter villager!" (Oh god I'd waste so much money on this)

 

Man, people don't like Canberra even when they name an Animal Crossing villager after it

 

Haaaaaarsh

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Man, people don't like Canberra even when they name an Animal Crossing villager after it

 

Haaaaaarsh

 

 
this is never not relevant:
 

Fv9T27t.jpg

 

Although you did write below:

 

It's an ironic name because Canberra the city is really striking and very unpopular

 

I've never been to Canberra, but now I really don't want to go after having this ugly fuck in my tent like 3 times. It's even moved into my village twice. He's like the ugly plague! 

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