Analysis: MW3 Review Bombers



How many people are review-bombing MW3 and Battlefield 3 on Metacritic? An IGN reader decided to find out.

 

On November 9, Sledgehammer Games' General Manager Glen Schofield jumped on Twitter and asked Call of Duty fans to help raise Modern Warfare 3's incredibly low user rating on Metacritic, saying, "It's suspiciously low. Be honest but help if u agree." He later deleted this tweet, but the point had been made.


After some investigation, I found that Schofield may have been on to something. Nearly 15% of Metacritic user reviews for both Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 were obvious trolling attempts. I only counted the ones very obviously scoring one game super-high, and another super-low, so that's an absolute minimum number.

As of this Monday, the critic aggregate scores for Modern Warfare 3 on Metacritic were 89 on Xbox 360, 88 on PlayStation 3, 81 on PC and 65 on DS on a 100 point scale. Their respective user scores (on a 10.0 scale) were 3.2 on 360, 2.8 on PS3, 1.9 on PC and 0.7 on DS.

On Monday I spent the evening trudging through over 1,500 written reviews of Modern Warfare 3 for PlayStation 3, reading each and every one of them. I tallied up the reviews of gamers who had written and scored both games.

Many users showed fairness, and gave similar scores to both games. What I had a hard time believing was that one game deserved a 9 or 10 review and the other deserved a 0 or 1, especially given that the critics' aggregate scores for Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 are 88 and 86.
The trolls had reared their ugly, ugly heads, and I decided to call bluff on the reviewers giving one title a 7 or above and the other a 4 or below.

Out of 1,508 reviews, 43 reviewers scoring both games leaned heavily in favor of Modern Warfare 3, giving it a score between 7 and 10 and Battlefield a score between 0 and 4. This means about 12.2% of Battlefield 3's 350 reviews are the result of what presents itself as wrongful trolling.

199 reviewers went the other way, meaning 13.3% of all Modern Warfare 3's reviews were trash-talked specifically from Battlefield fans. This number essentially equals out, though it's impossible to verify how many users only reviewed one game or the other specifically for score-dropping purposes and who had legitimate complaints against either game that had nothing to do with their opinion on the other.

Among the hundreds of zeroes and ones on Modern Warfare's review list, about 30 people admitted to either never playing Modern Warfare 3 or playing it for less than an hour. Another half dozen reviews were copy-pasted, character for character and typo for typo, from other users.

Dozens who didn't review both games (and thus weren't counted among Battlefield's 199 fanboys) said they were only scoring Modern Warfare 3 so low for reasons like spite for Glen Schofield's tweet, a dislike of Activision's business practices and so on. On the other hand, a similar amount of reviewers openly stated they created an account just to counter the zero scores that they believe Modern Warfare 3 doesn't deserve.

If gamers are sick of Call of Duty's formula or its success, or are trolling to stamp it out in favor of their other favorite games, it wouldn't be the first time Metacritic has been bombarded with scathing user reviews. In past incidents, it has found user accounts that have been created outside their terms and conditions and deleted them and their scores.

The problem lies with the long-term effects of those numbers and how they discredit a valuable system which should help gamers make informed decisions.



This article was submitted for publication by an IGN reader.


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