Metacritic Removed 'Suspicious' Death Stranding User Ratings

Metacritic has removed over 6,000 negative Death Stranding user ratings due to suspicious behavior.

[dazsarge]

Yes, Metacritic did the same for Astral Chain
http://www.nintendolife.com...

[Tross]

Interesting that they didn’t do it for the latest Pokémon games. I guess it doesn’t count as review bombing if it’s fans of the IP doing it.

[NonPartisanGamer]

Well it’s not review bombing if the game legitimately sucks.

[Tross]

@NonPartisanGamer Agreed, but Pokemon fans get super sensitive about any implication that a Pokemon game could be less than perfect so I've started phrasing things a little nicer. Fans of something don't generally rip into it unless there's a very good reason. It's the non-fans who review bomb to troll.

[Profchaos]

I'm all for this review bombing is a real disappointing trend that's taken off as a way of venting anger regarding anything from pricing to business practices and never take into consideration the quality of the game that people dedicate years of their life creating.

[TKCMuzzer]

I'm amazed individuals have the time or energy to waste contributing to such a pointless act.

[KeenBean345]

Boggles my mind how some people create multiple accounts just to bring down a games score, like how do you not have anything better to do

[aaronaton]

Says a guy posting on an online forum.

[Stay-Toasty]

@Aaronaton Yeah on one name...just like you, yourself are doing, which is in no way is comparable to making multiple accounts to review bomb a game.. Nice try on being a smartass though. Stupid, but I guess it was a worthy effort. You just don't have the "smart" part down yet. You'll get it one day....hopefully

[Stanjara]

I actually agree with that move.
It's better to write some thoughts and give a 4/10 score, rather than write "trash" and give it a 0/10.

[TheKingKratos]

They should do this for every game

[DuckOnQuack35]

Yep this is the only thing that really bothers me about this. Why does this game get special treatment? I'm sure there's hundreds of games that this happens to

[Saijahn]

Nothing is more suspicious that saying how bad a game is and giving it a 9/10 anyway. Yet that’s not removed?

But people swear by metacritic though 😂

[chiefJohn117]

Lol facts

[IanTH]

Don't think people swear by Metacritic user reviews though lol

[ShadowWolf712]

lol that was half the critic reviews too

[PlayableGamez-]

I didnt know how to feel about this about this but I believe Metacritic detected some irregularities in the consistency of negative reviews which probably came from newly made accounts with DS being their first review which is why I think they removed them.

[TheOptimist]

I wonder if they will censor unnecessarily positive reviews. hmm.

[galmi]

nah they wont, you can go see the user reviews and you will find out that too many 10/10 with no real review not reason for it. In all honesty, metacritic just lost more credence in my eyes

[TheOptimist]

Implying it has ever had credence since after 2010 or even before tbh *Looks at God Hand*

The average of reviews by shit journalists is going to be a shit result.

[AmUnRa]

If i remember it well first there where massive 0/10 scores al over the place. As a reaction to that the 10/10 reviews came out to counter the ridicoulus 0/10 scores.

[MrVux000]

They did remove some positive and mixed reviews FYI.

[WeaseL]

All reviews with 0 should be removed and voting 0 should be disabled

[Tross]

That would just lead to a spike in 1s. People who review bomb will continue to do so as long as user scores open to literally anyone are a thing.

[chiefJohn117]

Meanwhile the suspicious 9-10/10 won't be removed

[Mithan]

Good, need to do this overall though.

[XtaZ]

Oh so only the negative reviews are fake but none of the perfect 10 reviews are? LOL. The game is actually boring garbage and cherry picking reviews like this make the entire site completely worthless. It's also funny that they didn't manage to get the user score above 7.3 even by tampering with the reviews to boost the score, so that says a lot about how bad the game actually is.

[MasterCornholio]

There was definitely tampering to lower the score. And something like this is easily detectable especially if someone was using bots post fake scores.

[P_Bomb]

If a 70% was *that* bad, the world would be out of business.

In some circles, 30% gets you top of the leaderboard http://m.mlb.com/stats/

[Sayai jin]

Do they do this for all games? Remove suspicious reviews? That's a good thing IMO. My problem is that they don't this for every game. Seems off.

[SPEAKxTHExTRUTH]

If they do remove suspicious reviews from DS then they need to go back and do it for EVERY game that had been effected by this. Why should DS be the exception? Let’s not pretend this hasn’t been happening long before DS. Seems suspicious to me that DS is getting special treatment in that regard. Remove fake reviews from ALL games on metric or don’t remove any I say. Fair is fair.

[rainslacker]

No. They dont really need to. They didnt even need to do it here. Hard to take user reviews seriously nowadays, so what purpose would it serve taking all that time to fix up the process? Meta, and most others dont seen to care about the ethicacy or accuracy of the reviews or meta anyhow, and after the initial hype dies down, no one cares anymore.

I'd rather meta try to make a more reputable review system overall, than worry about trying to weed out "suspicious" reviews

[Z501]

"Why should DS be the exception?"

It's not. See, Astral Chain.

[Donnie81]

It’s crazy how metacritic is going out of it’s way to keep this games score up. To the point they have removed 3 very low scores for no reason. I’m talking about legit well written reviews from legit sites. The fame is just not for everyone. Some people are gonna love it others are not. Metacritic has lost a lot of credibility in my eyes

[IanTH]

MC has never had credibility anyway, mainly just because they are an aggregate site. It's still only basically useful for getting a quick take on a game and then allowing you to decide if you want to look into more reviews or not.

So take a slight amount of comfort in the fact that even if they remove a few top or low end reviews off any given score - ignoring the ethical implications - it would only move the overall score maybe a point or two in either direction. Not enough to take a game from "super excellent" to "inexorably garbage" or anything.

Use it to get a sense of a game, use it to decide if its worth looking into reviews for a game - NEVER just use Metacritic to buy a game. That score has little meaning without the nuance of actual reviews.

[Donnie81]

Great response!

[waverider]

It was easy to see. So many after it was possible to post...

[TheMutator]

Good! stupid haters

[MasterCornholio]

And metacritic keeps proving why user reviews are not really trust worthy.

PS I still don't trust user reviews even after the deletion of review bombs.

11/8 - 6.2
11/9 - 6.8
11/10 - 7.0
11/12 - 6.7
11/15 - 6.3
11/18 - 6.0
11/21 - 5.6
11/23 - 5.5
11/30 - 5.2
12/2 - 5.1
12/5 - 5.1

After seeing the score plummet it's pretty obvious that someone was using bots to decrease the scores.

Again further evidence on why user scores can't be trusted.

[Spartacus10]

If you're annoyed enough to leave a 0/10 review, you're probably also annoyed enough to use another website instead where you can leave 0/10 reviews and not be called suspicious.

Metacritic have shot themselves in the foot with this one I think.

[IanTH]

Losing the traffic from trolls would be statistically insignificant for them when they are getting millions of page views. User scores can be counted in the hundreds or thousands, and troll reviews would only be a fraction of those - they won't miss them.

Especially as it would make the overall scores more in line with actual public perception, and would lead to less people putting in faker 10's to "offset" the fake 0's. I think the minor loss in traffic would justify that trade off for them.

[Sophisticated_Chap]

What a joke! Gee, I wonder if they erased any of the suspiciously high user ratings? The amount of cover that the gaming media and now Metacritic have run for this game is totally unprecedented. I don't think I've ever seen an industry fix, on this kind of level, for any other game.

[IanTH]

If they're all in on it, they've done a pretty incompetent job by keeping the game at an 82 media and 7.3 user score on MC lol. I mean, if they were going to go all out on all fronts to make this game look better than it is, why stop there?

[Sophisticated_Chap]

What was the user score before Metacritic deleted the negative reviews yesterday, 5.7?

[Wasabi]

@Sophisticated Chap

***"What was the user score before Metacritic deleted the negative reviews yesterday, 5.7?"***

5.1

[willdoom]

Olha vejo com maus olhos esse tipo de atitude por revisores da metacritic excluir a negatividade dos users em meio a apresentação da game awards que esta pra acontecer, isso é suspeito... Teremos Kujima Game Awards !!! KKKKKKKKK inuteis não querem a falencia da Sony.

[MasterCornholio]

"Look I see with bad eyes this kind of attitude by reviewers of metacritic exclude the negativity of users amid the presentation of game awards that is about to happen, this is suspicious ... We will have Kujima Game Awards !!! "KKKKKKKKK useless I do want the bankruptcy of Sony."

I know I ran this through Google translate but your obviously just trolling.

[Wasabi]

@Master

***"I know I ran this through Google translate but your obviously just trolling"***

He's not trolling buddy, he's regurgitating a theory from one of the alt source articles in the submission header, please note - below is not my personal opinion.

***"As “argandg” notes, on the current trajectory, the game is not too far from falling into negative classification:

Next week are the Game of the Year Awards. And if it had broken down below the 5.0 mark, its classification would have changed to ‘mostly negative user reviews’.

According to him (argandg), this is the likely reason for the sudden boost"***

[MasterCornholio]

@Wasabi

He said he wanted Sony to become bankrupt and he's accusing Sony of manipulating metacritic so the game can win more awards at the GOTY Awards show.

That's clearly trolling.

As for whether or not it was justified to remove those reviews just look at how quickly the score plumetted.

11/8 - 6.2
11/9 - 6.8
11/10 - 7.0
11/12 - 6.7
11/15 - 6.3
11/18 - 6.0
11/21 - 5.6
11/23 - 5.5
11/30 - 5.2
12/2 - 5.1
12/5 - 5.1

There's no back and forth between the positives and the negatives it's just a quick drop with no slow down insight. That in itself is pretty fishy looking and I don't blame metacritic for looking into it.

P.S Also if he wasn't trolling he wouldn't have made his post in Portuguese to hide his comments from most of us who don't speak that language.

[Wasabi]

@Master

No need to post the Reddit numbers buddy, it was me that linked them in the submission credit URL so I've already had a good look at them.

What the Reddit post also says is that whilst every day since release there has been 250 suspicious negative ratings for DS, on the flipside each day the game has received 200 questionable positive user ratings, the issue people seem to be having is that whilst the negative ratings have all been removed, the suspicious positive ratings have gone largely untouched.

As for the trolling, because I don't speak Portuguese and Google translate can be a little too literal I think it's difficult to call it either way, but it does beg the question that if Willdoom's intention was to troll, why would he do it in a language that hardly anyone here understands, sort of defeats the object don't you think?

[MasterCornholio]

@Wasabi

"if Willdoom's intention was to troll, why would he do it in a language that hardly anyone here understands, sort of defeats the object don't you think?"

Because it would reduce the amount of reports that his comment gets and he can always blame Google translate for the translation. It's a way to keep him out of trouble.

"has been 250 suspicious negative ratings for DS, on the flipside each day the game has received 200 questionable positive user ratings,"

Well it still wasn't wrong to remove the negatives. Now somebody has to really push forward the removal of the bot generated positive reviews.

[theshredded]

Good riddance. I still remember the score going down from 7.9 to 6.3 in a few hrs on the first day.

[william_cade]

I give this one a pass because it's Kojima.

[Hardiman]

You telling me people actually go on Metacritic to post negative reviews that in most cases they haven't even played! Say it ain't so .

Next your gonna tell me they create multiple accounts just to review bomb. God some people just don't have a life!

[HaVoK308]

This is only going to end bad for the customer.