I reckon a larger scale would let reviewers (and voting visitors) give a bit more variation between reviews - how good is a game which scores 5/5 anyway? How bad is one which scores 1?

The quality of the game depends so much on taste and things that something very accurate would not work and also as the games vary so much in age and some people value things like graphics and sound more than others so 5/5 seems the right system to account for these matters. As for the point about what the ratings mean, we would have the same problem if we moved to a different system.

How can ALone in the dark/settlers 2/blood/ultima be between the most popular if they have only 3 as a user rating.I know there is a mathematical formula for most popular but still most popular is not 3.
Some games after reading the review u say a definite 5 (legendary game historic great fun....)u look up and the editor's rating is 3 .Wolfenstein3D is a good example to this.Ratings and reviews oftenly dont coincide.I only rely on the review.

I don't see how most popular and rating should be related.

The rating is the editor view of the game as a whole. Even if it has the most wonderfull thing, if the game is really bad you can't change that.

Best example would be Ascendency, but it got a 5 anyways. As you can see it's extremely biased and that's why we also have a public voting which usually get the game to the rank it deserve.

I dont know i c that most popular should be linked to the opinion of the downloaders.Coz in this case they are the people! the game people rate 5 are popular becoz the people like them as in popular as in popul -->people argh--->like LOL

isn't popular just "downloaded a lot" whereas highly rated is different?

Hmmm good point it is a debatable issue.

I think it's a bit late to change the scale now anyways.

This has been discussed before, so it is useless.But that was long ago, and i will leave it be because new members weren't around then

i thought that might have been the case but couldn't find anything in here, so i thought i'd try again :D