I was reading the other day how the scores were worked out and I think that having the publications that review music weighted is terrible, what’s even worse is that they don’t tell anyone who is weighted what. I’m guessing that rolling stones magazine is weighted far too heavily and that other “better” or at least less “bias” (my opinion, of course) publications are not as weighted as heavily because they aren’t popular or influential in the industry, but this has nothing to do with quality of reviewing and changes the idea of metacritic being an unbiased website that just calculates average to a website that is just takes sides with popularity and I think ruins what metacritic was set out to do.

The second thing I don’t like is the way they standardise the scores. I, to some degree, understand the reasoning behind it but since there is not a need to do it, it just makes the data less raw and therefore less representative of the actual reviews that were given and I think this is a bad thing.

There are some other issues in the way that they work out scores which are less important like when converting grades (A, B etc) into numbers A =100, which seems unfitting and I think it should be closer to 90 or something else (I still have no idea why people even bother having A, B etc scores anymore since it is just to hard to figure out what they mean numerically) this point is also up for a lot of debate and I think the solution is just getting rid of the letter scaling system. Also, if the scale used is only 5 stars without half stars in it someone at metacritic can put it up or down half a star, why not just get rid of that reviewing agency if they use a crap scales. This might not seem like much but it can change scores a quite a lot.

The last issue I have (which is even less of an issue than the other two) is that if you see a score of 50 everyone could have said it was average or scores could have been polarised to each end of the scale and the number 50 wouldn’t represent the reviews properly at all

I also feel like metacritic is a good idea in principal and that it has just been ruined by these practices

How do you guys feel?