Rating vandals!

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I was looking over on Gamerankings and found dark avatar. But noticed that the user review average was only 7.3.

So I clicked on the list of votes:

http://www.gamerankings.com/itemrankings/showvotes.asp?itemid=934081

2 people gave it a 1 and another gave it a 3. That's vandalism. Even someone who doesn't like GalCiv can be honest enough to admit it's not a 1. And it takes 1 person to vote a 10 just to get that average up to 5.

People look at these ratings. I know I do before I buy. If you think GalCiv and Stardock deserve better, join me in going to the link and casting a fair rating.

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thats why i only pay attention to official reviews. Gal civ2 is to heady for some gamers, that or its just not their genre. I know its no reason to bash a game just on that... but some people r like that.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2410

I just checked that out for myself.

That is a bit disappointing that someone would do that. Normally, people rate something a 1 when they think the overall score is "way too high" (which I don't agree is a good thing to do even then).

But in this case, a couple people gave it a 1 right off the bat which does seem to be kind of crummy.

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Well, some people love to rate things a 1 just to be obnoxious..

It's a classic case of "relative scale," and one of the reasons that I shy away from public-rated things (public-rated game reviews, restaurant reviews, etc..). The 1-10 scale just doesn't mean the same thing to everybody. For some people, the 10 is almost unattainable, to be used only on the most godlike things (i.e. never). For some people the 10 just means "this is as good as could be expected." For still others, it means "relative to other offerings at the same level, this is one of the best." The same is true for the 1 on the scale; for some, it indicates something that is so completely and totally useless/horrible that you should run, screaming the other direction. For others, it means simply that whatever they're rating didn't meet their expectations -- not that it was horrible just disappointing.

People also approach the rating process with different philosophies. Some people tend to give every rating within the 5-10 range, where 5 really didn't meet their expectations. Still others think a 10 can never really be given, and tend to give on the 3-8 scale.

Finally, some people thing of the 1-10 scale as a method of protest/support voting. They give a 1 in protest of some minor thing, not really saying that the product is horrible, simply that they're irritated by something about it. They give a 10 if they support the product, even if they don't think it's perfect.

The sad thing is that most people don't realize how far even a single "1" vote takes down an average. Look at it this way: for every "1", you need 3 "10" votes to bring the average almost back up to 8...

It's also unfortunate that even though a lot of people are cavalier about voting on these ratings.. these same people will use the overall rating of a product to gauge whether they want to buy it..

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2410

If someone goes on and sees a game they didn't like that is averaging say a 9.9, they might be tempted to give it a 1.

But in this case, we're talking about a handful of people who went on before there were other reviews and gave it a 1. That's malicious.

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