As I reported, Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 have a lot of troll reviews from Battlefield fanboys who are making the community look bad and vice versa. However, Glen Schofield of Sledgehammer Games, wrote on his twitter to ask fans to help the score.
Why is this a violation of ethics? Imagine if say Justin Bieber told his army of followers to give something a good review, people who haven’t even heard of it would dogpile the subject as soon as it came up. Even if the metacritic score is quite literally ruined beyond all repair as it would require straight 10s from twice as many 0ers. I honestly can’t say what’s less ethical, deliberately giving something a bad review to ruin it, or asking people to pump up your numbers. Either way it throws the numbers out of whack.
All I can see this accomplishing is having the Battlefield fanboys getting up in arms and ruining the score down to a 1, with COD fanboys trying to do the same. Meanwhile I’m sitting here playing Etrian Odyssey 3 and not causing drama.
Rian Quenlin
Manipulating the review scores of anything is quite a major taboo when you think about it. I get exactly what he wanted to do but that’s hardly the way to go about it when he is such a prominent figure.
It also seems he deleted the tweet sometime between when I saw it and published.
Chris Hernandez
That was silly of him to even consider asking such a thing. It just shows that people in the industry put way too much emphasis on scores.
Those who even know how to access and use Metacritic are already aware of how good or bad the game is, it sold millions. They shouldn’t care about a couple hundred people who are too dumb to think for themselves.
Jay McCallum
Yeah, if Jack Nicholson asked his fans to give some money to a failing charity to boost its numbers, nobody would complain for a second. The ethics are circumstantial at best, and in such an unfair situation, I’d probably do the same thing he did.