MMO Weekly: What Is A “Fair” MMO Review

18 May 2010 at 00:00:00 by Jeff Hollis

Welcome, my fellow MMO fanbois and fangurls, to the latest edition of MMO Weekly. In this week's edition, we're going to cover what has now become a hot topic in the MMO genre: the ever more common “unfair” review of an MMO.

A bit of background: when the hardcore, PvP centric MMO, Darkfall, went live last year, a Eurogamer writer duly reviewed it. He didn't like the game, and promptly gave it a 2 out of 10.

The developers of Darkfall flipped their tops. Some hardcore Darkfall players did, too. They protested, very loudly, that the 2 was unfair. The devs even provided logs of the amount of time the writer had played the game. Their claim was that the writer was hostile from the get-go, played the game for under three hours, and actually spend most of his time in character creation.

The writer retorted that he played the game for a lot more than just three hours, and that Darkfall's logs were incomplete and badly flawed.

Then Eurogamer did something that really surprised me: they completely folded, and then had a second review of Darkfall completed. This reviewer gave the game a whopping 4 out of 10. So, even after a second review, the game sucks; it just sucks less.

Skip to this past week. Rise of the Godslayer, the expansion to Age of Conan, is released. Eurogamer reviews it, and the writer gives the expansion a 6 out of 10. Funcom, the developer, along with some hardcore fans, have a collective cow over the score, and nitpick the writer's comments like they were starving vultures.

What did Eurogamer do? You guessed it. They completely folded, pulled the review down, and commissioned a second review.

What. The. F*ck.

I'm going to be very, very honest with you, faithful readers. There are a few straight-out facts about writing MMO reviews (and game reviews in general) that, apparently, need to be understood. This is especially true on the part of Eurogamer who, one might think, should already understand them better than nearly anyone. Apparently, they do not.

• Generally, a reviewer is attempting to ascertain one thing: if a game is fun to play, and therefore worth the money gamers spend on it. He'll usually play all parts of a game – the crafting, the interacting with NPCs, the puzzle solving, the quest completion, whatever else the designers put into the game – so as to give the game a fair review.

• There is no widely accepted rule as to how much time this should take. Some games I've been able to review after completing, taking only a few hours (a racing game, for example). Equally I've been stumped as to how to review a game I've been playing for four days (some MMOs and RPGs). There is simply no set rule, other than your own internal assessment if you've given a game a fair shake, and that you complete it. Sometimes, this is hard to do with an MMO, but that's why there should always be at least two reviews; one on the game's release, and one a few months later.  Ultimately, it's subjective.

• You can almost immediately tell if a reviewer is being fair to a game in his review. I can't put my finger on exactly what it is, but I can spot a shoddy, unfair game review a mile off.

• However, I can't remember the last time I read a review in which it was obvious the reviewer didn't play the game he was reviewing. In fact, whenever you hear the claim “He didn't play the game”, *look closer*. In fact, look a lot closer. The real problem, in my experience, is that a few people just don't like what he's saying.

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