When will it end? Shortly after we talked to Metacritic founder Marc Doyle about LittleBigPlanet’s low user score, the wrath of Sony fanboys was unleashed upon Gears of War 2’s user score as a revenge hit. It now appears that the 360 fanboys just wouldn’t stand for that, even though they seem to have started this in the first place, and have retaliated by butchering Resistance 2.

I really don’t understand the point of all of this. It seems that the whole idea of abusing user ratings really took off when people slammed that dumb bitch who misrepresented Mass Effect on Fox News, busting the rating of her book on Amazon down to under one star. These fanboys misusing Metacritic, however, don’t seem to understand that while Metacritic offers them the ability to voice their opinions, the reality is that the user reviews don’t really matter.

This is very much the opposite of Amazon’s system where the user reviews are the only reviews on the site. Low user ratings on Amazon make much more of a negative impact on buying decisions than low user ratings on Metacritic simply because Metacritic features the Metascore, aggregating reviews from actual industry professionals.

If you look at this logically, which I’m sure is beyond the abilities of the common fanboy mentality, you will see that trying to wreck a game through the Metacritic user score is not going to work. The average user is smart enough to know that these scores are bullshit. While Metacritic itself is an excellent source for consumers to get the general consensus about a game, the user scores are no different than user scores anywhere else on the net, which unfortunately means they are susceptible to this kind of pettiness.

I know you fanboys may feel some sense of accomplishment or that you are helping your side win the console war, but you’re wrong. You are only hurting yourselves and your peers, and you make the existence of the user review mean less than it should. You are the belligerent, fist-fighting hockey dads of the gaming community, and quite frankly, you should be ashamed of yourselves. Please, just stop.