Enough of the Metacritic nonsense right? Well, the story we broke a few weeks ago — the same one that so many sites forgot to source us on (it’s ok, we forgive you) — has apparently been eating away at G4TV host, Adam Sessler.

This installment of Sessler’s Soapbox features a relentless rant on the topic. So much so that I’m not even sure he stops to breathe. Check it out after the jump.

A few weeks ago, we ran a story about LittleBigPlanet’s Metacritic user score: a measly 6.3. We spoke to the site’s founder Marc Doyle about the matter and were informed that it was only that low due to rampant fanboys on the warpath, attempting to sabotage the PS3 and its games. This inevitably continued with more low user scores: Gears of War 2 and Resistance 2. Well, it seems that now, fanboys have started trying to influence the critic’s score, by flaming LittleBigPlanet on the site’s forums.

While posting on this thread, an unnamed Metacritic user and certified fanboy claims they were wrongfully banned for what the cite deemed “crude and rude” statements. The complaint was then carried over by the user as an attempted news post on gaming news site N4G.

In the Metacritic thread itself, a series of users voiced concerns that not every 10/10 score for Sony’s huge IP LittleBigPlanet had been posted to the site. The users kick and scream because their favorite system’s biggest game isn’t scored as high as they’d like — beaten only by GTA4. We spoke to Marc about the matter, and he summed up the idiocy neatly:

As long as I have a page for a game on Metacritic, I post every review for that game from the publications I track. It’s not an automated process and we’re human, so we will occasionally make a mistake on inputting a score or I’ll miss a review. But when it’s called to our attention, we post the review immediately. But it is our policy to post every review from every publication we cover, so long as we have a page for that game on our site. We don’t pick and choose which reviews we post.

In case you didn’t realize already, Metacritic only syndicates review scores from registered publications- ones that are chosen by Metacritic to represent the critical opinion of the games. If your independent blog gives LBP a 10/10, and you’re not syndicated on Metacritic, it’s not going to be on the list. This means it’s not going to be listed as a review on the game’s page.

While the very nature of reviews is to be subjective (it is the reviewer’s opinion, after all), Metacritic is certainly not biased towards one console or another. In addition to this, the site never claims to have an exhaustive list of reviews for any given game; it just does its best with the resources available to it (in this case, the publications signed up with Metacritic).

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.

I recently interviewed Metacrtic founder, Marc Doyle, about what many were calling a suspiciously low LittleBigPlanet user score of 6.3 on his site. Those unfamiliar with Metacritic need only to know that it aggregates the scores given by critics on various websites around the web into one “metascore” and also allows users to submit their own scores which are aggregated into a separate user score.

The total amount of users who had submitted a score for LBP at the time of my article was upwards of 2,200 and the result apparently motivated a group PlayStation 3 fanboys to retaliate. The current user score for the upcoming Xbox 360 exclusive, Gears of War 2, is a laughable 4.1 comprised of roughly 375 submissions.

Marc’s comment regarding the LBP controversy is applicable once again:

“Over the years, people have, by and large, not exploited the fact that you can vote early. Only recently have people started voting en masse for (and against) games like they’ve done with LBP.”

It seems that fanboys on both sides will continue to disregard the negative effect they have on individuals who actually depend on the user scores given by those they deem to be their peers. Marc spoke breify about the future of Metacritic, stating that they plan to include a more thorough registration process in hopes of reducing the fanboy effect. In the mean time, I think we could all benefit from a little more self restraint.

After reading about the suspiciously low Metacritic user score of 6.3 for Media Molecule’s LittleBigPlanet, I decided to dig into the story a little deeper. For those unfamiliar with the situation, allow me to fill you in.

Metacritic, who by and large is considered the main source for aggregated scoring on the web, offers two score flavors (one for critics and one for users). This is the case across most sites. The problem is, when you are considered the “go to” resource for pretty much anything, there’s a chance that people will make a big deal out of something on your site that they would normally overlook on another.

That said, this specific instance pertains to the scores currently presented on Metacritic for the LittleBigPlanet game. The first, a 9.5 at the time of this article, represents the aggregated score based on several well accepted gaming review sites such as GamePro, IGN, and EuroGamer. The second, more controversial score, is a 6.3, and is compiled via the average score given by a pool of 2,225 user votes.

Gaming news site N4G, which pulls related news from various websites around the web, features a blog post titled “Fanboys pull LittleBigPlanet’s Metacritic score down”, discussing this very topic. Reading some of the furious responses to the score piqued my interest, so I visited the Metacritic site to see first hand what all the fuss was about. Clicking on the “Read user comments” link near the overall user score brings you to the bottom of the page, where the following statement by Marc Doyle, the sites founder, awaits:

“My advice for our faithful users is to focus your attention on the Metascore for this game and not the thousands of user votes, most of which have been submitted before said users have played the game. This is a gaming community, and if people want to stuff the ballot box, there’s not much I can do at this point. When we upgrade the registration requirements for participation on the site in the near future, this type of thing won’t happen. We’ll post the full legitimate user reviews upon the game’s release. As always, thanks for using the site.”

This prompted me to contact Marc directly in order to get a more complete picture of the situation from his end. Specifically, I felt that gamers would want some clarity regarding the portion of his comment stating that most of the user reviews submitted for LBP were made “before said users [had] played the game.”

Firstly, I wanted to know if he would consider eliminating user reviews submitted before the full release of the game, i.e. reviews clearly submitted based on the open beta alone, or even worse, no experience with the game at all, to which he responded:

” … we won’t be clearing those old scores from LBP when it launches, but we will only post reviews from people who have clearly played the game. All the reviews from fanboys and haters who haven’t played it will just be left out. That is true for all products on Metacritic. Humans actually read all of those user reviews (so we can delete profanity, spoilers, etc.), and those humans are told not to post reviews from people who clearly haven’t played the game.”

He then added that the burden of proof they demand from users submitting reviews prior to a game’s release date is be much higher than those doing so after the fact.

Slightly confused, I asked Marc for some clarification as to how the game could have such a low score, if his team was manually looking over each user review submitted. He stated:

“All the [numeric] scores “count” in the overall user average and total votes tally, but we only post a subset of those as [written] user reviews.”

When talking about the future of the site, as well as other things they are doing to help eliminate this type of fanboy nonsense in the future, Marc had the following to say:

“There will be a Metacritic re-design in the future (can’t say exactly when), and as a part of that process, we’re going to beef up our user registration and community functions so that “stuffing the ballot box” won’t be nearly as easy.

The original idea behind allowing users to write user reviews (and vote on them) was to allow those people (like me) who see advanced screenings of movies and sometimes play games ahead of their true release date to write reviews and have them posted on Metcritic. That’s still the case now.

Over the years, people have, by and large, not exploited the fact that you can vote early. Only recently have people started voting en masse for (and against) games like they’ve done with LBP.

Metacritic’s primary “product” is the Metascore, which is the weighted average of scores from professional critics. We include user reviews for obvious reasons, but because that score can never be 100% reliable, it’s given secondary importance on the site. For example, you can’t sort or search by user scores for any products. That will likely change with the redesign.”

Marc obviously has a solid understanding of the space, its evolution, and the challenges that lie ahead. The fact of matter though, is that currently, anyone can visit Metacritic and leave an abnormally low user score, skewing the average, without necessarily saying anything of value at all. I asked him if this was something the site would be revisiting in the immediate future.

” … nothing should change in this regard until we do the redesign. That tally will remain a raw tally, and only the printed user reviews will be “vetted” as useful reviews from people that we think actually played the game … “

He closed the topic by adding that the specifics of “whatever [they] do with the voting system moving forward [have] yet to be established.”

With October 27th just around the corner, LittleBigPlanet is four LittleBigDays away from being officially released. So while the current 6.3 Metacritic user score has been getting most of the attention on the net, I (like Marc himself), kindly ask that you shift your focus to the 95 out of a 100 Metacritic score the game is receiving from the mainstream media. Everything else will sort itself out in due time.