Metacritic – It’s not that difficult to do several bad ratings, an indie dev team claims.

The three-member team of TurtleBlaze published a blog post on Gamasutra. They investigated how their game called Kunai went from an average user score of 8 out of 10 to a measly 1.7 out of 10. They found a Reddit post that was written by the „bomber.” The user has created two hundred (yes, 200) accounts to review bomb Kunai, as well as Insurgency: Sandstorm, only to see these two games have a low user average score… „I wanted to review bomb a random game that I thought I could bring down to like a 3/10 or 2/10,” wrote the bomber, who thus made this simply out of BOREDOM.

Unlike on Steam and Amazon, you don’t need to prove you have the product on Metacritic, and it doesn’t show if you own the game or not. Thus, there is no way to differentiate between legit and reasonable (!) criticism and hateful negative scores without playing the game. All you need is a temporary email address to register, review, and then log out to start all over. The user behind the negative scores revealed that Metacritic doesn’t flag IP addresses and fake domains, and they have no systems to track user activity and patterns.

Kotaku contacted Metacritic, who responded with the following: „Metacritic takes issues of potential score manipulation seriously and has a number of policies in place to maintain score integrity. Moderators regularly review the site and remove any entries that do not fall within our guidelines in addition to a moderation queue where Metacritic users can flag unusual behaviour. Moderators then review and remove any entries that violate our terms of service.”

It’s still PR talk. We wrote about what the issues are with Metacritic. If they keep these flaws alive, then they will do nothing to stop these negative scores, which could show up after deleting them. Steam and Amazon at least has that measure to limit such activities…

Source: PSL

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