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Originally Posted by DarthHelmet86

If you saw the movies as kids then others might have too and voted on it. But the point is why do we seem to care so much about the scores....why does it affect us when something we like gets a low score? Herd instinct at play, a fear of being different from the rest, or a sense that we know better then others?

That's a bit of a misleading argument, Darth.

Say, I enjoy Myst games. I enjoy the convoluted puzzles and the lack of deaths. No need have trigger fast fingers either so if I was a 60 year old guy who just retired and bought a PC, it might just be my thing.

So a new Myst-style game gets released: great graphics, good puzzles, nice story. And it gets tons of negative votes by young gamers who give it comments like "boring", "no action!", "what a lame game", etc. How would that help me as a gamer who enjoys this type of games when the game gets bad votes exactly because it's that type of game. This has ZERO to do with knowing better, and everything to do with knowing what you enjoy yet scores being totally useless because the wrong kind of people vote.

In short, the public is too big a mass, and just like in democracy, the biggest group within that public will win. If they dislike a genre, they'll just give it 1/5 while people who do like the genre, and even if the game was mediocre, it would still get 2 or 3/5.

And yes, thumbs up/down have been proven to work better. It gives a more accurate picture of whether people in general like it or not - and it's not a score either. While it's still open to abuse, you won't see the problem of all the scores slowly creeping towards a 3.3/5.