You would probably run into the problem of the “IGN score inflation” rather quickly though, people don’t really use the whole space a 1-10 score system gives. Far too many people are too likely to think that 6 is a bad score and we’ll only see 9s and 10s for “recommended” reviews and straight 0s for “not recommended” and so I think the binary system is probably just as good. It also cuts out people arguing about what specific score they think a game should be worth.
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Well, maybe I just wanted a neutral choice added to yes and no.
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What would a neutral choice really accomplish anyway?
I mean we keep calling them reviews but they were really not meant to be, they have never been intended to be anything but recommendations. You either think a game is worth recommending to someone or you think it’s worth recommending against and of course it’s nice if you have some sort of reason or arguments for your position.
So what would a neutral review/recommendation even be?
The response of the consumer looking at the recommendation is binary in nature, either they buy the game or they do not. Well sure they could add it to their wish list and buy it on a sale later but I’m not sure that’s what a “neutral” recommendation suggests.
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Good point, I concede. It would, in fact, not be informative or useful. I think people who give halfway marks tend to have more thoughtful commentary, 'tis all the reason behind my thoughts.
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They certainly do, you are correct. When looking for reviews of products, movies pretty much anything other than video games reading the 3-7s is where the good info is. Why that doesn’t seem to work very well with video games I do not know.
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I would have been highly annoyed if they made this update and forced everyone to “Comments: Off”, like they did with Profile Privacy settings. That would have meant hours of flipping through all of my 177 Steam reviews to check a box. Thankfully, this isn’t the case… any reviews before the change still have comments enabled by default.
Honestly, I’m indifferent. Discussion is half the fun. Nothing beats being able to go to a negative review over technical issues, explain the problem he’s having and a solution/workaround, and seeing it flip to positive a week later because they ended up having a great time after the game worked. That said, there’s a sizable amount of reviews written by people who don’t want a discussion, don’t want to defend their statements-- they just delete any kind of discussion-opening comments. This just automates the process. Other people may be sick of dropping a review and having it flooded by angry whiners that don’t even have any interest in the game but jumped on a hate-bandwagon, or on the flipside, defend the game to the death. Again, dealing with these frustrating comments is now automated.
I’ll never use the feature, but options are always nice.
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