Polygon changes review score...again

Why are you all caring so much about a score? When we should really be calling for their destruction? -_-

Kill Scores. Kill Metacritic.

Aside from this fiasco, and all the other fiascos they've had in the past 6 months...

They keep hiring on more and more people. Like, Polygon is huge. But their audience seems minuscule. Their forums are dead and their articles usually get less than 10 comments. It doesn't seem sustainable, unless they have a lot of readers that just aren't interested from a community perspective.

I just don't know how they can keep going like they're going for too long, which sucks because some of their long-form articles are amazing, even if they are hard to find in that weirdly designed site.

Server scores!

I love that policy. Its kinda genus.

We are going to put up a review as fast as we can... But if our review score is different from other reviewers we are going to change it so that people think we are just as reliable as the other nameless, faceless guy they get their reviews from.

Makes me wonder why they didn't re-review their Perfect 10/10 for Diablo 3 when it came out as well. Not too familiar with the site, but looking back at their previous reviews made me know I'd never follow them, ever.

No the majority don't

I can appreciate that they're trying to capture issues that have been plaguing the game's launch, but I don't think it will do much good in the long run. For me the problem isn't that they lowered the score, but the fact that people are so upset over it. Terrible launches are far too common, to the point where a game with a successful launch is the exception, not the rule. And people seem okay with this? How low are gamers' standards that "it's just launch day so don't expect to be able to play" is actually an okay excuse for developer/publisher incompetence? For me, any reviewer that reflects a botched launch in their review has earned at least a little respect.

Yeah, it seems sort of barren over there. I suppose they have enough money/backing for one or two years of building up staff and viewers before they even look at the numbers.

But what is this about a "weirdly designed site"? Dude, I love GB to death, but I think everybody has to admit that the Polygon site design absolutely stomps every other gaming site out there. Of course they don´t have as many site features as GB, but their overall design is freaking amazing and I´m able to find every single one of their written feature stories. Oh god and those stories.. those stories are a far cry from the blog-type stream of consciousness articles a lot of other gaming sites serve.

@superfriend: I think the site design is unique and appealing, but the fact that the site doesn't list stories in chronological posting order makes it so there are times when I'm scrolling past articles I read 3 days ago before I find something new that I haven't seen yet. I don't like that, because it makes me feel like I'm always missing things.

And as for the blog-type stream, they do that too, which seems a bit inconsistent with their goals, and clutters things up a bit more. I don't really want them to post a 5-sentence story about how Star Wars: The Old Republic will now require users to log-in with their User Names as opposed to their email addresses.

Like, who does that serve? If you play that game, you'll be made aware of it through the game. If you don't, it's irrelevant. The only person to benefit from that story is the writer, getting one more headline under their belt to hit their quota and collect a paycheck.

Yeah, that would probably be considered a news story then. They probably try to cover everything, although I have to admit that there are other, better sites for gaming news.

What I meant by "stream of consciousness articles" was something like this. A story that is mostly about how the author feels about a certain situation in gaming, backed up by very few quotes, let alone interviews that contribute to the subject. They do it because they want to write feature stories, but probably lack the time to follow through properly.

The end result is often something like another Tom Mc Shea "I´m gonna subject you all to my political agenda" article. It´s less an actual story and more of a vehicle to promote something the author feels strongly about. Which can have a place in journalism, but is far from the most important thing. Worse, it feels like something taking place on a gaming forum sometimes, with authors just quoting twitter and Neogaf or -even worse- getting actively involved in the latest twitter war.

@superfriend: Yeah, that seems more like an Editorial than a Feature; which is fine, I LIKE Editorials (like Alex's "Guns of Navarro", the type of thing all the GB Staff used to do more often which I miss). To be fair, though, that belongs in an Editorial section or in that writer's blog. I'll grant you that.

I was thinking about it and from their launch day moving forward games don't get worse. Sure occasionally there will be a new patch that breaks something and the dev scrambles to quickly revert to the previous version or something to that effect. What i'm talking about is how a game evolves over time with bug fix and balance patches and new content. In that sense games either improve, change or are simply left alone and stay the same forever. They don't get worse. Unless you hate the changes made to it. Examples of that would be WoW. Vanilla WoW is a very different game than WotLK. But generally the quality has improved. Maybe you don't like the changes but this is more subjective.

What i'm getting at is that from day 1 a game simply doesn't get worse, either it stays the same, gets better or changes. Seeing Polygon use their policy to lower the score looks a lot more like "shit we messed up you guys!!!" than anything else. It just proves the point of how stupid it was to publish the review before the game was out. You just don't do that when it's an online only game.

I'm not concerned about the change in score. What concerns me is how reviewers judge games based on the success of the launch. There are going to be launch/server bugs that do not reflect on the over all quality of the game but the overall game gets a score hit because of those bugs. Those bugs will be fixed in the near future, so why reduce the score just because of a temporary bug?

Seems like chasing your tail, either wait until a game is out to judge it or dont put a score on it until release. Also... what are they going to do when the servers are fixed? Change it again? This just seems messy.

you mean worse not worst. You're using the word wrong. I'm not usually one to correct spelling and such but I figured that it needs to be corrected here. Then again I might be wrong?

@jams: You're right and it's fixed. I woke up not too long ago and my brain hasn't activated the "Use proper English you French Canadian scumbag" function yet.

Cool. I didn't really want to step on any toes because I know I'm no savant when it comes to language. Sometimes I feel like giving up and just using animated .gif's instead of words.

The cool part about this: Polygon (McElroy) openly confirms if the server is back to stable again, the score WILL ALSO be back to 9.5

https://twitter.com/JustinMcElroy/status/309171615231524865

So THX U all for discussing and posting the review ALL OVER THE WORLD LIKE A HUMAN SPAM MACHINE

and by the way, a live polygon score tracker.

http://botherer.org/2013/03/06/keep-up-to-date-with-polygons-simcity-score/

I agree with people saying that reacting to launch day issues is unwarranted. If you wanted to try to rate a game based on its server issues, you'd need to wait way more than 1 day after release to do it accurately.

This tweet from Joe Juba, the reviews editor at gameinformer, is how I think reviewers should handle this game and look at reviews;

"I can't fairly analyze SimCity under the current conditions, but our review will be up eventually. Just not sure when at this point."

That makes me have a lot of respect for that site and its review process.

Polygon has good features - that XCOM story was pretty cool.

Polygon also has weirdly-uptight and super high-strung staff members.

I listened to hours of Justin McElroy on the E3 Bombcast, and he seemed NOTHING like the self-serious, fight-picking, almost... insecure dude on Twitter and on his site. They got a big ol' bundle of money to build what seems like The Atlantic of games journalism, but they seem to be taking the task so seriously they're falling up their own ass. I didn't get the impression of much levity, shall we say.

Choice example: Justin was going through CVs for a 'Game Critic' position and publicly mocked an applicant who professed his respect and admiration for 'game journalism', and was all "Learn what you're applying for, this is a critic position, not a journalist, grrrrr". I should probably find that tweet, just to make sure I'm not crazy.

This bleeds over into their moderators of all people. I posted on the actual review after getting pissed off about this independently, and a mod rushed in super defensive-like to defend the score system, and was a bit of a prick about it. I basically told him to fuck off, and then a "Community Manager" showed up to apologize profusely and tell me how awesome everyone is.

What the fuck? Why do you need a community manager for your video game site? You're not a publisher or a developer or whatever. Shouldn't EVERYONE at Polygon interface with the community, or are they spending all their time on pointless fancy video editing?

Also, it's gonna be super funny to see how Metacritic will respond to their flippancy with scores, or, more accurately, how they won't. They didn't do it with that Gamespot Natural Selection II review.

I like that they are willing to correct their scores. That takes guts but I feel we should understand because press versions of games will often be different experiences than release thanks to online DRM of today.

I like that they are willing to correct their scores. That takes guts but I feel we should understand because press versions of games will often be different experiences than release thanks to online DRM of today.

What? No. Plenty of people here, including myself, hate Polygon's layout and think it's incredibly shitty. When you get into a piece the layout is fine for the most part except for overly huge images, but the front page is a freaking mess in terms of design. It's a massive list you can just look at and scroll through without any clear definition and all of the stuff is divided up in a way that doesn't make one lick of sense. It's not even over-designing, it's just like they haven't even thought about how a person would actually use a website.

As a dude that does a fair amount of web design, not that that gives my opinion anymore weight than yours mind you, I think Polygon's front page is a total mess that doesn't make one lick of sense from a user perspective and they've failed in just about every category.

So no, not everybody has to admit that.

It's a little weird to change it with the justification they make, just because it kind of sets an expectation that this game is going to be followed, and the score again adjusted over time. I think they should reserve the right to do that, but I don't think they should set the expectation that they will.

For SimCity, the moment in time of the Polygon review has been expanded into some nebulous future. I think their system of updating reviews is better served by reflecting, and updating against, the recent past.

Especially, reading their notes on the subject, it seems the score adjustment is completely tied to the launch issues. It's even labeled SimCity Update 1, instead of just Update. This tells me, the reader, to stay on the watch for further adjustments to the score.

Quote from Polygon's update:

This likely-temporary scenario nonetheless affects our recommendation of SimCity, and we advise caution for the time being before diving headfirst into the game. - Arthur Gies, Polygon Reviews Editor

Does that mean between now and stability, the review will gradually rise to its former score?

I like the idea of a review system being able to re-evaluate scores that should be changed to reflect a changed product, without waiting for expansions, or DLC. I think there are cases where that's helpful. But I don't like what this use of that system does to the finality of the review.

I just don't get how you can change it to an 8. Either you rate it as an unplayable game (1/10?), you completely remove any score, or you keep the initial score and add a big warning in the beginning and end of the review that the game has launch issues and might be unplayable at the moment.

Someone justified by saying it's 8.0 because 80% of the people can play without problems. That is just the dumbest thing I have ever heard.

Not against a changing score in general though, should a reviewer stick to a certain game over a period of time and the quality changes dramatically either postively or negatively I wouldn't mind a re-review or addendum to the original review and a new score.

I was wondering about this myself. Someone I know here in Australia was hired and they moved over to San Fran to work on the ground full-time. Hopefully everything goes well and she isn't out of a job.

Anyway, just got my press copy of the game here in AUS and there are no server issues thus far. Having said that, it's only 9:31am and I'm expecting most people will be at work right now and not playing the game.

I think that a site you can scroll down and one simple dropdown menu make a whole lot of sense. Yeah, Polygon puts style over everything- but that´s okay. At least it takes a relatively simplistic approach to web design. It doesn´t hit you over the head with buttons and menus.
I don´t really think the front page is that different from what you find at other places, Giantbomb included. It´s a huge list of articles, news items, reviews.. a news feed, if you like. That´s their bread and butter. I don´t care if some random twitter feed gets a bit buried in there. Polygon just seems way better about using the actual screen real estate modern displays have. This comes down to personal taste, I know, but I´m freaking sick of websites that feel like they should be viewed on an old ass 4:3 monitor and those "overly huge images" help a whole lot.

Honestly, if Polygon´s front page doesn´t make "one lick of sense" to you, I think you´re trying real, real hard to hate it.

Jokingly, Star Wars Galaxies begs to differ.

Seriously, you are right. The game at launch is the game a year from now. There might be some patches that change minor things but ultimately the game is still the game.

It doesn't really put style over everything though because it's not the style that gets in the way, it just hasn't been thought through or somebody hasn't asked themselves "How do people actually want to use this front page on my website?". Not that different from other sites? Sure, but as Wright pointed out: None of the content that shows up there seens structured by date or anything, it just seems to show up in any random sequence which makes it very easy to feel like you're missing stuff. Why is an article from February 20 smack in the middle between articles from March 4 or 5? That's bad and that's exactly the part I was complaining about. I don't understand why the layout changes every 3rd or 4th row either, it feels like it doesn't know what it wants to be and just decides to move between 3 different structures. I understand having a header that stands out from the content beneath it, but to keep changing the structure is ridiculous.

Trying real hard to hate it? No, Polygon's front page doesn't really take a lot to hate from a user perspective. You're free to like it all you want, just don't say stuff like: "everybody has to admit that the Polygon site design absolutely stomps every other gaming site out there."

Anyone who gives Dead Space 3 a 9.5 (which Polygon did)...well, let's assume Dead Space 2 was a 10. I loved me some Dead Space 2, I personally would not give it a 10, but let's assume Polygon gave Dead Space 2 a 10.

That would make Dead Space 3 only 1/20th less of a game than Dead Space 2. That's throwing in the pretty bad weapons upgrade progression, the horrific ending, the way they F'd up the single player campaign at the expense of the coop in a myriad of ways. And, ok, I liked Dead Space 3, but I cannot openly fathom the idea that it is only .5 on their review scale from being a perfect 10.

My mind is a swirling vortex of questions I'd like to ask about certain substantial aspects and game mechanics in Dead Space 3 that I want to ask the reviewer how they glossed over to get them to a 9.5.

That's all.

Doesn't mean squat. Their first score is the one that gets registered with Metacritic.

There is no reason that any site should have had a review out before the game hit on Tuesday. When an always on connection is involved, you need to take that into account.

A lot of these places did not learn their lesson from Diablo III, hopefully now they will.

Welcome to the standard of games journalism for a number of outlets. I remember when Call of Juarez: The Cartel came out. I wrote a review, and gave it a generous 5 with a fairly scornful review. Posted the review, all is well, wake up to an email asking if I had lost my marbles in my CoJ review. I jumped online and my editors changed my score from a 5 to a 7.5, mainly because we were running an advertising campaign for the game at the time.

I took my name off the review and quit that day. While I'm certainly not suggesting that Polygon has similar practices, I'm just pointing out that journos can be under a lot of pressure to give things a better score etc. It seems most publications just give everything a 7 and anything that is halfway decent gets an automatic 9/10.

@mdnthrvst: I've also found Polygon's attitude strangely off-putting for people that seem fairly normal otherwise. Maybe part of that is just enjoying this site. I see getting caught up in a vision for your site and trying to raise the level of game writing, but most the time they seem extremely serious and self-important about the whole thing, with a dash of "you poor rubes" superiority in responding to any criticism. Like they're participating in mankind's greatest video game work not to be understood by mere mortals.

It's mostly annoying here since they're trying to make this all about their higher principles, the interest of their readers, and their vision of the ever-changing review. But really they just pulled the trigger on a review without waiting for launch, contrary to most other sites, because they wanted the page views. The review changing thing is just covering their ass in this situation. You can see that anytime they discuss the review changing idea, since they always are referring to TF2, MMORPGs, or other games that have wildly changed from what they were upon release. Not pre-release versus post-release.

The ability to actually play the game you paid for sounds like it's worth more than 1.5 points to me.

Yeah, if you can't play the game, how is it an 8? And not a, say, 1?

@warlockengineermoredakka: Exactly, everything should be based on a buy or no buy scoring system. Slightly kidding though. Numbers are really stupid, but I understand why they continue to exist. I think the entire internet would have to agree with getting rid of them for them to actually go away, otherwise they'll stay purely because of page views. Scores are apparently what the majority wants.

Anyways, luckily for me I've been able to play it and get on the same server with my cities whenever I've wanted to. Sucks though that other people haven't been able to. An 8 to me sounds like "well if you can get in, you'll have a great experience," which I agree with. It also probably suggest extreme optimism that you'll work soon.

I don't necessarily agree with the Polygon way of reviewing things ("the game is amazing though currently unplayable but an unplayable game doesn't merit an automatic fail because it's a crapshoot on whether your cash means you'll be able to play it at all" - obviously not an exact quote)...

But I find it equally interesting that Metacritic doesn't update review scores (or at least hasn't as of the time of this writing) either.

I think it's pretty dumb, it doesn't change the quality of the actual game. Server instability sucks but you know, that's not actually a problem with the core game. Just EA being fucking clowns.

It does however impact the whole experience and consumers shouldn't have to deal with a game they bought not working day one, it's ridiculous.

Well, it just means that I'm going to ignore Polygon's scores even harder from now on. I hope they'll learn from this mistake but it sure doesn't look very good. Changing the score is actually okay by me, but it just shows that they shouldn't have put up the review to begin with.

Sets a pretty weird precedent. I mean, where do you draw the line? Should we also expect these writers to revisit reviews after each patch, or 6 months after the launch of an MMO? It actually calls the whole preview scene into question - altering the score is pretty much an admission that a preview build doesn't reflect the quality of the consumer build, thereby diminishing the credibility of any preview content - for an online game, at least.

I think Polygon has been pretty forthright since the beginning in saying that a game's score is subject to change and they've also gone into great detail about why that is important. However I think Kuchera makes a fair point in saying that Polygon's solution to the permanence of review scores is not perfect and could already be outdated (with the rise in popularity of always-online, or heavily multiplayer-focused games). He then posits that reviewers should wait until a game is released in order to post a review but if you've seen even a single Jar Time, you'll know why that point of view is pretty naive.

There were so many goddamn outlets that cautioned people against buying this game on release because of EA's (and the games industry at large's) awful history of online launches and the always-online nature of the game but people went right ahead and pre-purchased anyways. If you pre-purchase a game, you bear the risk. Turning around after everything goes tits up and blaming review outlets for your overzealous purchase is stupid and illogical. So what, these people wouldn't have pre-ordered or bought the game if Polygon had initially given it an 8 instead? If all you care about, if the only thing driving your purchasing habits are single digit numbers or stars, then you are really just looking to justify your purchase.

@mdnthrvst: I have to agree that Polygon can be a bit uptight or even preachy over twitter. In fact, the whole review correction thing seems quite ironic really, since the day before the review went up Arthur Gies was saying over twitter that always online isn't a big deal and gamers who complained about it were 'entitled'. I joined in on the debate with him, basically replying with another guy who was much more vocal and ballsy than me that always online sucks for gamers.

That said, I do appreciate them sending a message that online infrastructure needs to be there if they force us to be online, although metacritic takes the first review score anyway, which is the score that matters for the publisher.

Wow Amazon took down the option to buy the game Via download.

What about people who read this in a few months and decide not to buy based on the score because the launch was shotty? Launch conditions have no place in a review, they belong in news/features surrounding a review, but a review should be about the game itself.

They haven't changed it again yet, I thought that was the point of their policy? Game still unplayable, now a 6.7

After 800 1 star review I'm pretty sure it is EA that removed it instead of Amazon. If nothing else if there are still stability and load problems they need to do something to stop new players from coming into the system.

I appreciate that they're willing to change the score to represent the actual product rather than the smokescreen EA gave them.