To me anything below a score of 5/10 is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how bad something is in the range of 1-5/10, it’s just bad. Every point above the average of 5 means you must be doing something right.
@Redoctober: Regarding what you say… I think that I am “suffering” from two different forms of “experience bias”… namely…
I very frequently see rating scales that go from 4 to 10, 1 to 10, 40 to 100, etc. In fact, I filled in a few such scales as recently as last week, relating to purchases I made and services I received / purchased. Additionally, two recent surveys had no numerical scales at all, they simply requested that I pick one or more options, which fit my views. They were not all even exactly yes / no as such, just “pick the the ones (maximum three) that applied MOST to your experience this time”.
For one I picked, if I recall correctly… Service was friendly (positive), problem was solved in reasonable amount of time (neutral) and solution felt expensive (negative). If the whole thing had been reduced to: “Did you get what you needed? (yes/no)”, I would have been forced to answer yes.
Second, in terms of gradients… If I am allowed enough variety of scaling, I have more options to compare things… As an example, I generally speaking like green, blue and black clothes. However, one of my all time favourite shirts is dark yellow. Even with that in mind, even if such things were easily available, I would probably not buy dark yellow shoes or pants. Now, if I were told to pick just yes / no without knowing, which specific part of clothing we are discussing, I would have to pick “no” on dark yellow. If I had options of yes / no / maybe, I could pick maybe.
If someone asked me to grade colours for pants at 1 to 10, I would probably score blue, green and black somewhere around 8 or 9 (but not 10, because I like more than one colour), dark yellow at 2 or 3 and pink at 1 (as in I am quite likely to buy blue, green or black pants, very unlikely to buy dark yellow pants and not interested in buying pink pants).
In a similar vein… Sure, a person CAN give BfA rating of zero… but in my opinion, there have been no WoW expansions that would have deserved a rating of zero. I also find it extremely unlikely that all those, who graded it at zero actually felt that it had nothing good / worth playing. One could ask, for example, how many people quit completely between levels 110 and 120? Possibly a few… but unlikely 90+% of those, who rated it zero.
For me, giving something a rating of zero indicates an opinion of “I can not play this, I regret buying this and I can not think of anyone who would like this, because this is one of the worst games I have ever played”. I do not think that everyone who gave a rating of zero is trolling, BUT many of them were, in my view, excessively harsh. Yes, I know, subjective opinion… but the fact remains that even simply replacing all zeros with ones would radically improve the average.
I usually pay no mind to online critic-scores like that. Mainly because
- Taste and preferences differs from person to person (case in point: I do not agree with the ranking order of expansions, nor their scores)
- Most people can’t be trusted to give an honest, reflected opinion.
Yes but that’s different, that’s for example when a company conducts a survey and they want to gauge public opinion of the features of their product. I feel we are talking apples and oranges right now.
The problems are these:
- that’s not your opinion that the rating of 0 indicates. It’s someone else’s opinion, that shockingly might be different from yours.
Really. Why is that? Because they don’t line up with your opinion? First of all, God knows how many gamers tried WoW at some point and really didn’t like it? I know I tried Guild Wars 2 when it first came out, played it for 3 days, got max level and then uninstalled and never touched it again, and I told everyone that asked me how it is that its garbage and not to buy it. That’s a solid 0 for me, I just didn’t like it. Was it an objective opinion? Hell no, but it’s how I feel about that game. Same for League of Legends, or Fortnite.
I certainly regret paying a 6 months sub in advance, and I would rate BfA a 4, not even 0. I don’t find it hard to believe that other people would find it a lot more appalling than I do.
Not radically. Let’s say half the negative ratings would become 1s instead of 0s, and calculate. We have 72% negative ratings, let’s say half of them are unwarranted 0s, that’s 36% of all the ratings that would improve by 1 point - that would make it what, instead of 3.7 it would be 4.1? It would still be in the red.
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While i find it super interesting to read these calculations (not sarcasm!) it leaves out the ugly question: Why is BFA receiving these ratings, trolls or not trolls? Something is causing it, what?
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The mere fact that any expansion is below WoD said everything i needed to know about the credibility of that site.
Besides, 1000 people sample?
Also, in the end it boils down to this: Do i enjoy it or not?
I do, so i keep playing and having fun.
Cheers
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@Redoctober: I think the main thing here is that I expect / hope people to post at least semi-objective ratings. Purely or excessively subjective opinions are prone to cause problems of one sort or the other. So, I think that the safest solution is to agree to disagree on certain aspects of this conversation? 
BfA is not a stand-alone game, most of those, who try it, have played WoW before at some point. It is also not the first expansion, so we have comparison points.
@Radium: I speculated shortly on a few possible reasons further above in the thread.
@Zyipp: That is the key question.
Speak for yourself ![:slight_smile:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")
Missing most of MoP is one of my biggest regrets in this game. I love the theme and the monk class (as it was at the time, less so now). Sadly my raiding guild had fizzled and I just couldn’t face looking for another one.
What I read on these forums suggests to me that many people were a bit unenthused in the early days of MoP, but that looking back with hindsight it had some excellent class balance and utility.
Stupidly I came back for WoD, which killed my desire to play before Legion even arrived, and now here I am in BfA, my favourite class’ dps spec so gutted that I took up healing instead. I’d sit out until 9.0 but I’m not quite certain we’ll get one…
That’s not how public opinion works. That’s the job of the critics, not the public. There is a separate section for those on metacritic. It’s an unrealistic expectation to ask the public to become critics. Think it through: if your city hall would propose, for example, that starting tomorrow they will repaint all the roads in your city pink, how many people do you think would instantly have an opinion on it? And do you think they would start debating it rationally and start from the middle ground? Obviously, the number of people that would have previously put any thought on whether or not roads should be pink is probably close to 0, which means that most people shouldn’t even have an opinion on the matter, certainly not a strong one. And yet, the issue would absolutely elicit a strong response and polarized public opinion (mostly based on who made the proposal, not what the proposal is).
Think, for example, how many people voted in Greece on a referendum asking them if the 1000 page agreement made with the Troika was to be accepted by their government. How many people could have possibly had an informed opinion on that, given it was not even translated in Greek? Public opinion is not rational. It is visceral, and it is polarized. That’s how it works.
As soon as MOP was announced there was a LOT of moaning about panda’s and it being made for kids and the Chinese. All a bit silly really for a 12+ game.
Once it launched the only complaints i remember were about the excessive amount of dailies required for rep and the profession patterns locked behind them.
All in all MOP deserved much better than a 6.0 rating (IMO) but i remember being underwhelmed with the dungeons.
WOD is difficult to rate as it was the first time ever i enjoyed the levelling process and i also made an absolute mint with the mission table and the old ore shuffle (mine/prospect/redgems/hotcakes) but it did get boring after 6 months.
We all like different things from different expansions so the ratings will be agreeable to some and total rubbish to others.
Tbh i never cared about Metacritic, for me BfA seems too low in rating, it’s hard to believe that this expansion is rated below WoD, wich had a major patch that was pretty much a twitter integration and a selfie cam.
Even if we don’t take WoD in account, the rating is too low anyway, BfA have some issues, indeed, but this rating should be reserved for a game wich have VERY BIG issues, and not just something like: “is not engaging like Legion” etc etc, BfA is far away to be a game that deserve a so low rating.
I mean, anyone can give their own vote, but in that case peoples aren’t really 100% honest here, the is a feature they hate and then gives 0 for the entire game, it’s something totaly doable on Metacritic, especially in the case of BfA where there has been some controversial situations.
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The fact that MoP is 5.0 and WoD is 5.9 discredits the entire rating
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Quite frankly, if MoP didn’t have the excellent class design, it wouldn’t have been worth much more. The actual content wasn’t all that impressive. The dungeons were some of the most shallow of any expansion, not to mention they were few. It had two raids hailed universally as good - ToT and SoO - but every expansion so far had good raids, it is Blizzard’s top specialization to make excellent raids. The world content of MoP before Timeless Isle was mostly a daily quest fiesta and 3 free kill world bosses. The expansion theme was the farthest they ever strayed from the core of Warcraft lore. Pandas were, understandably, not the best idea for many people, and even within the population that plays the game today are the least popular race on each faction (bar allied races, which are too new for now, and even some of these new allied races with less than one year of existence already have higher numbers than pandas). The first PvP season was one of the worst balanced seasons in history, probably the only worst one being S5 in WotLK.
So if you actually look at things from something other than your personal prism, there really wasn’t that much to make someone instantly fall for MoP. Sure, if you liked the class design and if that helped enough to get you through the first 1/3rd of the expansion, it probably would have grown on you, but if someone played it for a month or two and then quit, they would pretty much have been justified in doing so and rating it low.
You guys are claiming WoD was bad and all, and you are partially right - the twitter patch was a scandal, the cut content, the lack of anything to do ingame for the better part of the middle of the expansion, the 1 year long final tier… those were not OK. But compared to how MoP started, WoD was initially vastly superior: it had an established theme, with some of the most known lore characters in the Warcraft world; the leveling has honestly never been better, not before WoD and not since; the dungeons, which are the first instanced content you see, were far more imaginative and overall cooler than MoP; the class design, while watered down by the 1st round of prune, was still recognizable; the world was awesome, looked amazing, the treasures were a great addition that spiced things up, at least at first; it had top tier cinematics all over; it played hard on nostalgia for what is considered by many the best WoW expansion - TBC. In terms of first impressions, MoP would probably have been the lowest scoring expansion ever, while WoD would have been one of the top ones. Many people don’t rate things after 1 year and 9 month, they do it after 10 days or after 5 days.
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The problem with Metacritic is potential brigading and accepting new reports after the initial counts are disclosed - that amplifies initial reactions disproportionally (people are more likely to vote if they see that their vote coincides with the current perceived vote of the majority).
We don’t have a good external rating system. However, we don’t need it. We all see for ourselves how good or bad BFA is (I think it is bad) and if we want to see what others think, we have activity graphs - and they show that BFA has less people than Legion did, the decline continues full swing.
yeh now that u say it wod lasted a year yet it was way cooler than fluffy mop made for furries & weebs.
The wod cinematic was epic “Times change” this was also during the release of the Warcraft movie which fit the theme.
In the middle of WoD’s life cycle is when things really started to come out on the surface. WoW copied Wildstar with their WoW token which effectively eliminated gold sellers forever but impacted the economy in a pay to win way where you could now legally buy gold from Blizzard and not be punished for it. More mistakes were being made, lack of grind content, but in the beginning it was beautiful.
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Personally, I do not subscribe to this view. First of all, during WoD gold didn’t make you win anything in all truth, which is why the WoW token went up so much in value (this and huge inflation created by the garrisons) - most people who accumulated high amounts of gold pretty much only spent them on BMAH stuff or other cosmetic hyperexpensive ingame things. And even so, the same thing existed before the WoW token, it was simply not according to the ToS, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t exist.
Legalizing gold selling pretty much had the effect of greatly reducing if not eliminating shady dealing intermediaries. If I may be allowed a comparison to some IRL policy, it’s like the legislation related to light drugs or to prostitution. We can elect to bury our heads in the sand and act as if they don’t happen, but it’s not decidedly the best course of action.
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it’s akin to legalizing prostitution and mj’s is the best excuse they have. What it really comes down to is dollars and cents, and now Blizzard has the opportunity to dip into the gold market. Better the good guy profit on it than the shady 3rd parties amirite?
People are buying gold for 20 euros a pop in bulk. Whether its to pay for boost services or OP BoE’s. From what I’ve heard BoE’s are incredibly good this expansion especially the ones that RNG with good stats and high item level, they can go for millions of gold. Translating to 100+ if not more euros for a piece of gear. This pricing is insane and can be attributed to the root of all evil, the wow token.
I wouldn’t call Blizzard the good guy, but it is better for them to profit from it than shady dealers. At the very least, good, bad or amoral, they did put in the work to make the game, so it’s more fair for them to profit if there is profit to be made. Second, as amoral as we want to see them, they won’t scam players that use their services, nor will they compromise players accounts.
Its an unfair rating because this is from at the begining of the expansion when it had tons of bugs and such. Those ratings don’t give an overall judgement
I would say BfA is around 5 thanks to warmode
PvE is a bit worse, nothing quite new and exciting while PvP is a bit better than previous expansion
Pretty much, account hacking from my circle of friends all but disappeared since the introduction of the token. It was very common before.
The account hacks felt more impactful on my enjoyment of the game than some kind of perception of p2w from buying BoEs.
Think I said it before, but it’s essentially trading “integrity” of Blizzard in favor of less risk on your account, and that integrity as far as I’m concerned went down the toilet when sparklepony was introduced, so in that regard it’s a zero sum game for their rep but I get account safety in exchange, and the chance to pay for sub with gold.
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