Something struck me as completely odd the other day, when comparing the review round-up both on StarTrekOnline.com and on MetaCritic. Now, I understand that developers want to keep the game image clean and fresh, and that unfavorable reviews aren't usually showcased (such was the case with Age of Conan). However, in this case, Cryptic has posted their negative reviews.
Of course, the featured reviews on the main page are not the unfavorable ones, like GameSpot and IGN's reviews for example. But they did indeed list them. The problem at hand is not whether or not the negative reviews were given screen space, but instead the average review percentage.
On the STO website, they list a "Total Adjusted Score" of 72% out of 100%.
This doesn't match up with the same exact round-up on MetaCritic, who estimates an average "meta score" of only 63, and a user rating of 6.4.
So, are the folks at Cryptic fudging the numbers a bit? Is the MetaCritic scoring system just weird? What would YOU score the game personally? Let us know in the comments thread below, and stay tuned for my "review" of Star Trek Online coming over the weekend.
metacritic is using an weighted average+normalisation as there scoring method. Since its not made public how the weight different reviews, its hard to reproduce there scoring
Source here:
http://www.metacritic.com/about/scoring.shtml
While cryptic just is using the normal arithmetic mean. Cryptics exact score is: 71,87804878% which is rounded to 72%
No fudging, no number screwing, ist different methods.
Posted on 9:45 AM