Opinions on how TCR & FG are dealing with AAMFP criticism

[Diango12]

@Paddy
Err, if I'm correct, the mean score for all these 90 reviews is somewhere around 7.3 /10.

The score itself isn't the point I was making; the fact that there are 90 reviews from professional reviewers which aren't taken into account on MetaCritic's AAMFP page shows just how meaningless a MetaCritic score is. The existence of at least twice as many reviews elsewhere calls MetaCritic's value into question.

If it turns out that even with all 90 of those reviews taken into account the consensus is still around 7.3/10, it would be a happy coincidence, not evidence of MetaCritic's worth or prescience.

I agree that Metacritic is not always a reliable source of gauging media reception, but it does have numbers, and it does aggregate sentiment. Someone else here made the point that 'only professional reviews are really valid'. This is a terrible opinion to have.

You have huge conflicts of interests in the review industry. Never mind the sycophants but you often have wide disconnects between popular review from players and 'professional' reviews from journalists. Colonial Marines got high marks from the professionals the first few days.

Rome Total War 2 right now has a meta score of 7.9 from the professionals but 2199 users currently have it at below 3.0. Why is this? The game is buggy, the AI is horrendous, and if you actually sat down and played it as if you were trying to enjoy it and not as a project to confirm a research bias than you would realize its an incomplete game. I would rather listen to hundreds of fellow consumers tell me "I did not enjoy this product, be careful" than a journalist explaining why the product design is an industry achievement.

The meta score for AMFP btw, is based on 520 user reviews, not 40. The current 5.6 in my opinion is deserved. Even though I gave it a 7.0, I understand that the game has a lot of shortcomings that may not be as easily forgiven by other players.