By now you all have heard that Sledgehammer Games’ general manager Glen Schofield was riled that the user score for Modern Warfare 3 was running suspiciously low on Metacritic yesterday. Though the critic score was hovering around 81, gamers with a Metacritic login were pummeling the title. Personally, I saw the PC-user score as low as 1.5/10 but was around 1.7 when Schofield tried to right what he saw as a troll-orchestrated wrong and he Tweeted the following:
“I don’t usually do this but, if u like MW3 go 2 Metacritic.com & help our user score. It’s suspiciously low. Be honest but help if u agree.”
Currently as I write this, the gamer score is 1.9 for MW3 on PC, 3.2 for XBox and 2.8 for PS3 users.
A CoD-community Noob
Schofield, a CoD-community noob, who’s currently learning the hard way what it’s like to deal in the big leagues of FPS gaming, must be quickly Googling the name of Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter service after making such a rudimentary mistake. Someone in the CoD franchise must have told him that begging for votes would look really bad and he quickly deleted the offending characters…but the internet never forgets.
Now, I can understand how upset he would be at all this criticism, given that his Sledgehammer employees must have poured their soul into this game. He was undoubtedly fighting for them and for the franchise when he made his remark. Nevertheless, there’s a long list of reasons why he should have just sucked it up. I can think of a few of those reasons myself:
- By calling attention to the Metacritic score, it subjugated MW3 to that site’s authority. For heaven’s sake, MW3 will be the biggest shooter of all time, it should not have to bow to anyone. By sending out his Tweet, Schofield suddenly made the CoD franchise vulnerable by showing everyone that he cared about the Metacritic score.
- Begging for votes is borderline intellectually dishonest. Asking folks to right the wrong was ethically wrong.
- Given that many of the low scores were coming from BF3 fans, Schofield poured fuel on the raging BF3 vs MW3 fire. Rather than defusing the inferno by telling FPS gamers to buy both and revel in the diversity that the two games deliver, he came close to asking them to pick sides.
- He legitimized the use of Metacritic user scores as a means to show discontent. Rather than ignoring the results, gamers will now use Metacritic to punish developers and publishers from now on (though they’ve been using this for exactly this reason for some time now). While Metacritic users scores may have reasonably been useful in the past, they have now officially lost all credibility.
Saw it coming
I first noticed there was a backlash coming against MW3 when its trailer received a huge number of thumbs-down from YouTubers.
While the trailer received about 28000 positive reviews, 16000 viewers voted it down. I Tweeted this three weeks ago and frankly, I assumed the Metacritic user scores on release day would be phenomenally bad; however, I must admit, they were worse than even I imagined.
‘How Low Do You Go?’ for $10, Alex
Given that I didn’t buy the game, I really have no right to even suggest what the right score should be for MW3; however, given what I’ve heard from fellow gamers I find it hard to believe that it was any worse that MW2 and thus probably does not deserve a 1.9, surely. Frankly, never mind its quality, it’s a miracle MW3 was released at all, given all the devs that left Infinity Ward and all the new studios brought on board to work on it. It’s amazing that Activision and IW could orchestrate these folks, all new to the franchise, into making a cohesive game. Kudos…really. You would think gamers would be sympathetic to devs like Sledgehammer and all the new blood at IW, but gamers didn’t care about Sledgehammer’s learning curve, they just passed judgement. Gamers can be very unsympathetic sometimes.
Why?
Schofield’s reply on Twitter seems weak; however, the issue that really begs the question here is not Schofield’s regrettable Tweet. The real question is ‘Why is MW3′s Metacritic user score so damned low!?’
I think it breaks down as follows:
- Gamers these days vote using only two adjectives: the game either sucks or is epic. It is a zero or a ten, with virtually nothing in-between. It wasn’t always like this. Back in the 80′s, gamer scores were a spectrum of results. It was not surprising to see someone rank a game by throwing in an odd number here and there, maybe even a decimal point. Not any more. Nowadays, there are just so many reviews, so many scores…anything other than a zero or ten will just get lost. To be heard amidst all the noise out there, gamers use the binary scoring system as it skews the results as much as possible. MW3 got caught being on the slightly-less than epic side of things and gamers gave it a goose-egg.
- Many gamers believe that mainstream reviews are bought and payed for. Heck, I know devs who think that. By giving all or nothing reviews, gamers make a farce of the whole review system that they believe is corrupt in the first place.
- The low score is a backlash against Activision’s apparent greed. Whether it is the$60 game, the $15 a pop DLC, a $50/year CoD Elite subscription, the cost of playing CoD continues to increase amidst a continuing decrease in personal income here in North America.
- Admittedly, some of the bad scores come from BF3 devotees, trying to push their archival MW3 into the mud. This would sound right, except for the fact that many of the BF3 fanboys were probably at one time, CoD fanboys too…but simply grew to dislike CoD.
- Gamers want AAA-titles like MW3 to be at the cutting edge of technology and innovation. Anything less is not acceptable. Gamers are simply voicing their discontent that MW3 is no longer, technologically-speaking, on the top of the FPS food-chain. Before the game’s release, Glen Schofield tried to put lipstick on a pig by saying that CoD’s engine was a “Porsche”. Gamers saw through that and realized that compared to BF3′s Frostbite II engine, that “Porsche” was more like a VW Beetle to BF3′s Ferrari.
While many gamers bought MW3, by knocking down the Metacritic score, they are sending Activision a warning that this might be the last time they will be purchasing a CoD release. Frankly, I am ahead of the curve on this. My warning was sent back in MW2 and when it went unheeded, I simply didn’t pick up MW3. Rather than getting CoD fanboys to simply pump up the Metacritic score, Schofield should instead have taken the low score as a warning signal and tried to decipher it. Instead, he tried to game the system and was caught.
Gamers: 1, MW3: 0
Part of it is the fault of people who pre-order for too much money and are disappointed when it wasn’t worth their investment. You pre-order and it sucks, that’s your own fault. You should’ve waited for reviews, or played a demo, or played your friend’s copy, or played it at a store, or pirated it for a day (using it like a demo).
I would like to add that the developers not only are “encouraging” people to vote positively, but I guest they have some influence not only on critics, but upon sites like metacritic as well. All of my reviews and score there are deleted, even without using any bad words or something – just sharing my experience. So you make your own conclusions.
Hello again, Jock and all!
Last time I comment was in the “Epic day” article. I didn’t hold myself, and I will give my 2 cents in here as well.
First of all this “suspiciously” adjective was what got me really mad! There is nothing suspicious with the low scores at metacritic, IMO they are even little high for what this game brings on. It’s about time for them to understand, that we are not some trolls and nearly 70% of the people are just angry enough to register there and put their comments and evaluation, because it’s the only thing they can do against this impudence.
I only want to add one paragraph here and I will stop. MW3, besides the major flaws in, is oriented towards the CASUAL gamers and the only high evaluation is to be expected from THEM, the CASUAL gamers. For the rest of us, there is nothing suspicious – low score for a bad game-play, mediocre maps and major flaws that killed competitive and HC gaming. Man, it’s even impossible to make a HC server without 10 secs re-spawn time. Now what is this ?! Is it a quick and dirty solution for a bricked spawn system ?
Anyways, I really hope that people will finally realize that they are just victims of these corporations and yell as they should /nobody makes them to go out on Wall street with their tents, they just need to score things properly/.
Best Regards!
its ok, im not sure where they will go next if there is a next one with the campain, good maps online, and ops is addictive lol dont think the graphics are as good as black ops think they might have rushed it abit, but over all good. 7/10
I understand about new people coming in and trying to make it work but maybe they should have taken some more time over it.