Before I respond, I would like to point out that without reading through the "sub-conversation" that this post was related to, my statements may seem like I'm saying something that I'm not.
The sub-convo started with "
*LINK*I dont even think you played civ 3 when it came out the game was ten times better than civ 5 for its time." -cman2010
Gist: The conversation continued with me accusing cman2010 of throwing around arbitrary numbers, then calling them statistics, THEN using these "statistics" to justify his position. (The peeve being: If you want to argue your point, that's fine. If you disagree with me, that's also fine. To use false statistics to justify a position is lying; and I was calling him out on it.) Someone said that they were waiting on proof that Civ3 was 10x the game Civ5 was "when it came out".
Going by the stipulations of the comment, I grabbed the Critic statistics- obviously, on the Civ3 page, there are ratings that are dated to 1980; I assumed these to be typos, since Civilization ONE wasn't out at that time. I converted all of the numeric Critic ratings to percentages, and averaged them- giving a kind of baseline between the two games.
Overall, the two games scored in the same ballpark with critics; close enough that I'm satisfied that "Civ3 was NOT 10x the game Civ5 is." The ratings seem to show that Civ3 and Civ5 rated fairly close to each other. Even the User ratings are pretty close.
/Gist
The reason I demonstrated two examples of why I wasn't averaging the user ratings as well, was in case it wasn't obvious by the sheer number of reviews (I don't care enough to average thousands of reviews, honestly). I demonstrated two examples of user reviews. The first being an actual criticism; ratings are subjective- but the
author of that review wrote a 5 out of 10. Maybe he's experienced some games even MORE awful than you have, and those became his baseline for 1. For an example of some of those, look up AVGN.
I then posted the first criticism- the author of which made it clear that, although the game had a lot of potential, he felt that it fell flat. After
several hours of play; and then
described why he felt that way. Followed immediately by the second criticism, a 3.5 out of 10, which had no critical information at all. It literally had
nothing to say. It was just some guy raging at the game. It's a jumble of thoughts, and he admits that
he played for one hour and then started raging at it. I would suspect (Note: Pure Speculation) that he immediately went to post a negative review that amounted to "1 star because I don't like it!"
I then offered that Author1, who played the game for several hours and provided descriptive criticism as to why he dislikes it, has an opinion which should be weighted heavier when rating the game than Author2, who admits to playing the game for 1 hour TOTAL and immediately began raging at it.
I agree that ratings will be distorted- but this is because they are opinions. This is why I took the average of all the ratings on the pages I provided- given they were numerical ratings. I completely ignored the letter grades. The results of the average indicated that the games are, actually, rated very closely. Civilization3 rated higher with players and lower with critics- but close enough that it really doesn't matter. It's not like Civ3 got a 100% and Civ5 got a 10%, as cman2010 was suggesting.
