Ridiculous player review numbers - bother anyone but me??

... but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop talking about it.

"Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell 3D" has 18,949 player reviews.

It turns out that that's an aggregation of all of the various versions of "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Chaos Theory." Don't ask me why the Chaos Theory part is left out of the homepage name for this game, or why all the versions are lumped as "3D." That's not even the fun part.

Here's the breakdown of the number of player reviews for each version:

• • PC - 1,649
  • XBOX - 3,682
  • PS2 - 931
  • GC - 254
  • DS - 396
  • 3DS - 34
  • N-Gage - 12,003

No, seriously. I've been told that the Gamespot player review numbers for multi-platform games are more accurate than before the site redesign. Yet I'm supposed to believe that the freaking N-Gage version of this game got almost twice as many people rating it as did all of the other versions of the game combined. Were there even 12,000 Chaos Theory games made for the N-Gage?!?!?!?

Can someone from Gamespot please tell me what utility it is to have obviously inaccurate information about player reviews for multi-platform games? I mean, you might as well be just making up the numbers if you're going to take player ratings that were obviously entered for one version of the game and randomly assign them to another version.

It's so frustrating. I once really relied on these scores, but now they're laughable.

so what version were that many ratings intended for? just curious.

@leon2365:

Shrugging. I don't know, and neither does Gamespot. What I've been told is that even before the site redesign, when a user gave a ratings-only review (i.e. didn't write anything), the rating didn't necessarily get assigned to the version of the game intended by the user. So when GS was tinkering with user review numbers, they developed a new algorithm that supposedly more accurately assigned ratings to versions.

My problem with this version of events is that I still have access to a lot of the numbers from before the redesign, and they look accurate. "Chaos Theory," for example, had about 8.740 ratings for Xbox, about 5,190 ratings for PC, and about 2,640 ratings for PS2. Obviously, the new algorithm reassigned most of these ratings to the N-Gage version, which can't possibly be right. I still maintain that what really happened is that the ratings were accurate pre-redesign, but the version-specific tags on a rating got somehow lost in the redesign. So now Gamespot applies some sort of guesswork in assigning a huge percentage of the ratings to one version or another. Look up any multi-platform game, and you'll see one version that has the majority of the ratings allocated to it, and often, as is the case here, it makes no sense at all.

hmm. well the first statement you made makes it seem to me that in the older layout, even if the rating went version B, the rating still contributed to version A. now with the new design, the rating that went to version B stays there, and the previous contribution it had made to version A is nullified as if it never existed to begin with.

or, in the case of your second paragraph, I don't think gamespot manually assigns the ratings. it is most likely automatically done by the system. they just didn't code it properly I guess.

I don't follow you. My point is that I don't think the old player averages were wrong. The numbers seemed to bear out that if someone gave the PS2 version of "Chaos Theory" an 8.4 and gave the XBOX version an 8.6, those two ratings would be aggregated accurately into the averages for PS2 and XBOX respectively.

Now, in whatever manner that 8.4 and 8.6 had originally been assigned to PS2 and XBOX respectively, the site redesign erased it. I never said that Gamespot was now manually assigning the ratings - I believe when they say they're using some kind of algorithm to assign the ratings among the versions. But that algorithm, by necessity, involves guesswork if the original version assignments have been lost. And if that guesswork assigns 90% of the ratings to one version, there's something wrong. When that 90% goes to a fringe version like N-Gage, there's DEFINITELY something wrong.