https://i.imgur.com/mdLBZsJ.png Here is my screenshot.

https://i.imgur.com/pRnMfLQ.png Screenshot from another user.

Yesterday here been mobyrank. What happen?

Recently there's been a brief exchange in the Discord about how the score display is "not very useful", "kinda ugly" and only takes up space. So I'm assuming admins have removed it.

That was the only way you could rate a game though. If true, hopefully this is rectified soon.

I just saw that and I really lament this decision. I hope this is reverted.

I just realised that now. For days I've been seeing at the gap and thinking how something is missing but couldn't figure out what until I wanted to rate the game today, lol!!

I hope that is back as well. At least "Personal Slant".

Sorry, not following discord discussions much, but such things should be added to news or at least changelog, imho.

Hope they return this back. I watch some old games in every year list, and can't understand now, where I can see rank.

Why would it not be useful?

What the... ? Why would those be removed? And how do you even rate games now?

You can still rate games by clicking on the review tab. Nicely hidden of course.

So much more I could write about this, but what's the point. I'm sure this was a well thought out change. smh

Might be a good idea to remove the Top Contributors list from this website as well. Now that would be extremely useful, I'm sure all of us would contribute even more.

I know this was a joke, but actually the score could be removed because we don't need rating for what we've uploaded. Whether something gives you 3 points or 1 point or 10 points.

Instead of points only the quantity of things could be displayed. So instead of 3000 points showing for someone submitting covers, there could simply say how many covers that user submitted instead of how many points s/he got for submitting those covers.

This could ever be taken a notch up and show how many electronic covers and how many physical someone submitted. Same for games, how many written submission in comparison to scraped submissions.

I know, none of this will be done, but quantity of submitted item would be more informative than score for it. On user pages anyone can already see that score mapped in quantity of items submitted so the info is already there.

Plus, personally, it sounds much cooler to see someone uploaded 500 screenshots than someone got 1000 points for uploaded screenshots. And it looks less competitive since we don't earn any points/score, it just says how much we contributed.

Can't see overall contribution in that case though, you'll only have each submission category separately.

On the other hand, there's no longer any way to see the average Critic Score... (Something that provided a bit of additional motivation to contribute new Critic reviews)

Honestly, I'm glad that something getting changed in MobyGames, but this seems like a pretty ill-thought-out, spur-of-the-moment change.

I'm very liked to seen average Critic Score at main page of game. This also show interest from press and players to this game.

It was removed because it's not useful in most cases, and worse, often misleading (not representative). Which I think degrades our image as an authoritative source.

Most of our games don't have a useful score, especially those released in the past couple decades. Frankly it'd be a bit silly to use the critic or user scores here vs myriad other sources.

That said, there are exceptions, particularly with older games, and what we may do is show the scores in cases like those.

Regardless, the reviews are still shown on game's overview and review pages. As well as the ability to rate them.

User score always has its place, and should be very obvious and easy to rate. And there was already a threshold, 5 scores from "trustworthy" sources I think, just like it's 5 ratings for the user score.

And in general, removal of functionality is never all right.

Often critic ratings and user ratings isn't same. A lot very authoritative sites show both, because only reader can compare and decide which score better. Most times this difference shows very controversial game. I prefer mobygames, because this site show a lot of data about game include ratings. I hope ratings back to main game page.

The solution to lacking or missing information should not be to remove the feature from the site, it should be an active effort to contribute said information.

Better review info is available further down the page (on the overview page) as well as on the reviews page.

This was just a snapshot overview that's frequently misleading / empty / of little value. Especially to the typical MobyGames visitor. You have to view it from that perspective, and overall I think it was doing more harm than good, at least in its current incarnation. Also it had been there since the dawn of time, so I think it's safe to say it wasn't doing the job of attracting sufficient contribution.

Though we may show the overview for games with enough info... or rework the display and logic to resolve the aforementioned issues.

We'll have to take a different approach in regards to improving review contributions or questioning what things should have more or less focus. Going to start a larger discussion on this.

This feature make site very useful. I use moby not only because this site have a large games base. Both Average ratings invite users to read and understand why game have this rank.

One problem I see with the missing info in that section is that sometimes we DO have an average, but only for one platform or a few platforms, and sometimes that info isn't shown in the main page because there are several other platforms with no averages. And some platforms will never get one, specially for games re-released in modern platforms through digital distribution.

I'm not sure what you mean by "often misleading". Now, I can't speak for user scores, since they are always highly subjective, but I've taken a look at our Critic Scores.

I picked 25 games (that had at least 5 Critic Scores) more or less at random, and compared their averaged ratings to the corresponding ratings at Metacritic and OpenCritic.

Out of these 25 games, pretty much all have the same averaged critic score on MobyGames as they have on Meta/OpenCritic. The single biggest discrepancy is a difference of 9 points; most averaged MobyGames critic scores differ by no more than 3 points from the Meta/OpenCritic result.

So in conclusion: I don't see a reason to believe that the averaged critic scores on MobyGames (especially for games released "in the past couple decades") are untrustworthy. At least if you go by the averaged scores on other review aggregators (which presumably are no less trustworthy than MobyGames).

Of course, by necessity my survey only included a handful of platforms which do have coverage on Meta/OpenCritic (PC, Xbox 360, Dreamcast; most games were from after 2010). So maybe games from different platforms do have a significant problem with untrustworthy averaged scores. But, of course, one has to ask: untrustworthy compared to what?

When it comes to older platforms, MobyGames is (as far as I know) the only website which can offer averaged review scores. Removing the averaged Critic Score from the main page means a removal of one of the unique things about MobyGames.

That's why I was referring to modern games, where you're much better off with Meta/OpenCritic.

Bear in mind that the core value of reviews is to help with purchasing decisions, and most games being bought are new releases. That's usually why people are looking for reviews in the first place. (of course there is also value for those curious about the historical record, but we still have that)

Now let's look at a couple popular, recent examples. Disco Elysium, 0 user reviews and 11 reviews. There are 69 on OpenCritic. Sekiro, 0 user reviews and 20 critic reviews (including platform dupes). OpenCritic has 169. MetaCritic similar, plus over 2000 user ratings and about 600 user reviews.

So yeah... we're not representative for critical nor user reviews. When people see or feel such a discrepancy, it has an affect on how they view MobyGames as a resource and calls into question the reliability of everything else. We were putting it front and center that many games have no user reviews and few critic reviews, thus misleading.

That's no good. Older games with sufficient reviews are a different story, but would need to rework things for that and consider it holistically (e.g., make sure it doesn't introduce confusion about why it's sometimes there and sometimes not).

MobyGames was never good at recent stuff. And I still say it shouldn't even really care about recent releases. If someone wants to add them, great, if not, not big deal, you can find info about those everywhere anyway, and we'll see a few years down the line.

And either way, user score and a way to rate a game should be immediately available on the game's main page. Now if you want, you may move them lower down the page, to the sections in question, display user score next to user reviews header, and maybe the rate game link next to the review game one, and critic score next to the critic reviews header, possibly next to the number of reviews it's based on.

As for submissions, still say there should be ways to automate the process on many sites for everything bar abstracts. In some cases even those may be grabbed directly, if they're set in a separate container, user intervention only required if what's there goes over the character limit, in others the user will be asked to manually pick and add the abstract, but the rest will be scraped. Just need someone to tell a script where to look for on the page code for date and rating, and once that's done just add URL and script grabs what's needed. And maybe it could also be made to grab review URLs from the article listing, so everything will be added automatically (possibly remaining pending until abstracts are added manually).

To reiterate what's been said above, removing functionality is never the right choice for a database. I find this new change quite discouraging, as I too was actively using both aggregate critic score and user score. Now even to rate a game is a hassle. I really hope that the owners of MG will reconsider and return this basic fuctionality to the site, at least in some form.

No functionality was removed. But even if it was, I don't agree with the reductionist idea that removing things is never the right choice.

That could only be true if adding things was always the right choice, and that's certainly not the case. More is not automatically better, often it's worse.

Rating a game now is a little more of a hassle, true. It takes another click. But actually rating them is the biggest hurdle - which is why there are so few and why most games were just displaying a big 0. I think for user ratings to make sense as a core part of the display, they would have to be much easier to rate. Which is a discussion all its own...

Moving it down to the relevant subsection makes sense I think and not showing the empty averages boxes when there's no average is also fine.

Another idea: Currently when you have one platform selected you see only the score for that platform. When you have all platforms selected you see a random selection of 3 averages (for both critic reviews and user score). Maybe in the latter case show the average across all platforms instead? That makes more sense I think than just showing three randomly selected scores.

Yeah, just adding my voice to say that I think this was a poor decision. The average scores really should be on display, and we could probably reduce the number of scores needed to display an average, from 5, down to 4 or even 3. That way, a lot more games without the full 5 reviews would get an average displayed, rather than just nothing. Also, agree with this idea too:

I'd suggest removing the rating limit altogether, as there are a lot of obscure games and platforms on Moby. While you might be afraid of "garbage ratings", these are much more likely to appear on more popular releases – anyone who goes to rate some obscure BBC Micro title probably knows what they're doing. And people are going to be less likely to actually rate if their vote isn't counted – I know I am. But reducing it to 3 would be a step in the right direction.

And, while I'm not so sure about displaying an all-platform average, which will undoubtedly get dragged down by shoddy Android "ports", some care should be taken as to which scores are shown (on top). I'd suggest either the lead/original platform, or the one with the most "votes".

Hi, I came to support the cause to undo the removal of the ratings. Taking this decision in favor of the new games is an awful one. It seems they have no idea what is central here.

HISTORICAL INFORMATION ABOUT GAMES.

I can't believe they loose track on this.

I agree to upgrade the system, but removal of this functionality is a HUGE mistake.

Saludos.

This doesn't really mean those sites are more reliable or representative overall, since review bombing by kids (of all ages) is a thing. Critics also get together and decide to collectively push or bash games for stupid, in the moment reasons as well.

It was always implied that the scores represent what's been contributed here by the community and nothing else. One of the best site features imo.

I don't agree with this decision. MobyGames might not have the same amount of reviews per game that other sites have, but the amount of international diversity of the review sources was incomparable. So many games have German, French, Russian, Norwegian, Arabic etc. review abstracts and scores, which makes the average score even more relevant because it becomes a worldwide average over time. Which other site has that? I contributed hundreds of reviews from German and other countries' game magazines and websites. And for me every relevant game having a metascore on MobyGames was a core motivation for doing so. So please take that decision back!

It's not about the critic scores Matthias, those are still on the page... it's just the average number that's gone, and the Mobyuser scores.

This statement is completely true. We already had the best review database for games before 1995 and since Gamerankings is dead this is true for everything before 2010 as well. I can't believe we would hide that result of our hard work.

To claim that MobyRanks are useless for games released "within the last decades" is an atrocity. Five years max. Yes, our content for current games is lacking, but this is true for everything.

If the argument was at least that aggregated scores in itself are useless, that would be an interesting discussion.

Now that's another thing I missed, GameRankings going away. Had it among the links on my (custom) homepage, but admittedly that was since back when I was still submitting reviews, hardly ever went there over the past couple of years. Did have quite a number that MetaCritic didn't, so was an useful resource, and also tracked the sources to some extent, another handy thing at times. Sad...

I've been using this wonderful site since 2010 (almost 10 years now) for reference and even I tried to contribute as much ratings I could. I can tell you this is your worst decision until this day (and I can see almost everyone in this post agrees with me). Please bring back the ratings on the main page!

I'm going to offer a minority opinion here, but I can see the reason why they wouldn't want to show the _average user score_. Simply put, it relieves MobyGames from a responsibility they shouldn't be having in the first place: the responsibility of offering an assessment of a game encoded in a single number. That's a critic's job.

Averaging such heterogeneous metrics is inevitably prone to debate: anyone could argue that gameplay and personal slant should matter more. Even with a weighted average, though, the debate on what the actual weights should be could last forever.

Even professionals like GameSpot or IGN have been abandoning the policy of giving scores to each parameter *and* to the game as a whole: they understood they would otherwise always have to deal with someone picking on details to find leverage to defend their favourite title. I teach in University and I used to accompany a student's grading for an assignment with a list of pros and cons of their work: as a result I was occasionally accused of being unfair to a student for giving them a lower score than to another student who had the same number of pros and cons (regardless of which ones they were!). I gave up on that scheme and now just accompany grades with a short review.

I think a sensible trade-off would be to display the user scores for each parameter and let users make up their minds about what it means to them. The score for *that* parameter could be averaged out of all the versions, yes. This way MobyGames would only commit to state that e.g. "users say this game looks and sounds stunning, has a compelling story but plays poorly: it's up to you to decide if that makes for a good game or not".

Average critic scores are another story: I would have kept them, as it would be safe to assume a critic's opinion matters just as much as any other's.

Just wanted to give my 2 cents. While I fully understand that the scores for new releases (if existing at all) are not representative, I'm all for showing them for the older ones. When you compare those to gamefaq for example you see they either have none or just 2 or so sources. The work done here by collecting old magazine reviews and their scores is valuable and often thoroughly enough to be representative I think.

Also, I think the user score at least makes sense in every case, I mean why have it when you're going to not display it prominently.

I never cared about Critic Scores. If I wanted to see an aggregate of them, I'd go somewhere else.

User Scores, on the other hand, have always been a core piece of functionality to me, and I have to strongly disagree with the idea of tucking them away. Mobygames attracts a different sort of user than Metacritic, etc, and I find the user ratings here much more predictive of my own tastes.

It's also really not intuitive that you'd need to click "reviews" to see rating averages, especially when this number is derived from tallying votes, and not necessarily from any reviews.

Count me as another who would rather see the ratings come back as they were before. If the Critic Scores must go for reasons stated, fine, but I can't see how that rationale would apply to User Scores, as those are useful front and center for showing users what Mobygames users think of the game.

I'm quite the opposite. I see the use in Critic Scores, but see absolutely no use in User Scores whatsoever.

People can't rate anyway, nowadays people only know how to select the 1 and 5 stars/points. Not much worth in a rating system where people can just click how they feel at that moment, instead of having to explain why they feel about that and why they gave that number. Seeing fanboys giving 5 out of 5 and haters giving 1 out of 5 for everything isn't useful.

But that aside, on most games the box was empty as there weren't enough (minimum of 5) user scores. I don't see how an empty box at the top right is useful in any way to anyone.

Yeah well, critics are also people and not necessarily better at making a nuanced and well thought out judgement.

Having to explain why you picked a score doesn't stop what you don't like about user ratings, as you can see on metacritic. Not that I'm against having that. You can try to avoid this with additional rules but then the average person just goes to another site instead (which isn't necessarily a bad thing!).

But on that point, a score average conversion of a variety of opinions ultimately isn't that useful anyway, it just gives a vague idea of what people think without the why. So I'm not that upset about this, I just prefer having it to not having it.

My two cents (unpopular opinion it seems). I feel the need to also voice for the other side, as there're quite a few people who think it was fine to be removed, but those people aren't vocal here and thus it seems like 100% of the userbase wants them back.

I say good riddance. I never used it and found it the most useless part of a game entry page. Rating games as a Moby user here seemed useless and I actually never did it (aside from 5 games or so). It was so underused, most times it didn't even show a number since there weren't enough votes. Utterly useless.

Critic scores on the other hand are pretty useful (and we didn't remove those) but maybe we can add back the average number, on the reviews tab for example, that could be useful.

EDIT
Wow, I knew humans naturally don't really like change, but i'm a bit baffled after reading the comments...

I never liked critic scores myself because "professional" critics are not professional at all.

Basically, every score is subjective. Someone may like some game, someone may not. Rating from 1-5 was fine but should've stayed only for Personal Slant, imho.

All other ratings are silly and cannot be subjective. Let's take Spiderman for PS4 for example. Noone should be able to rate graphics for that game less than 5. But someone who doesn't like the game or Spiderman or Marvel may go and rate it 0 or 1 which was obvious nonesense. Also users just rate games they don't like without ever playing them so there should be trivia questions that anyone who finished some game should know the answer to but those who didn't play it won't and that would eliminate bad voters who don't really rate the game bad because they gave it a shot but really didn't like it and it would also eliminate those who rate it high just because they like its title but never played it.

But if people do rate games like that, then leaving rating really makes no sense because it's silly and incorrect. Critical reviews may be subjective and too good or too bad, but you at least know those people played the game and reviewed it so their score, no matter how subjective, was done after they played and/or finished the game.

Yeah, after writing this I see that leaving user score really wasn't that good nor correct so the site is fine without it. Damn, I changed my own opinion at the start of this post after writing this, lol!

Couldn't agree more. But I'm fine with critic scores staying where they are. I mean, at least those people add in the review why they decided to go with those certain points.

User ratings on the other hand were just giving some numbers, with no supporting info at all. Which could end up pretty misleading in ways that you and Reed described, amongst other reasons.

You know what boggles my mind. How people who barely submitted critic scores to this site can so easily toss the work of people who did aside like it doesn't matter. Gee thanks.

I also hate that you guys can't handle change excuse. We can handle change, but it better damn well be for the good of most. And this certainly isn't.

And of course the removal was half-assed because they left the top games link still there. B-b-b-ut the scores are inaccurate. Good job fellas.

I guarantee critic score submissions are going to go down dramatically because of this. If that's the point, well congrats then. smh

Wow, take a chill pill dude. That wasn't one of my arguments so don't say I use that as an argument. It's also not an excuse, it was an observation of me.

Yes the change was made too quickly without hearing anyone's opinion, never said it wasn't.

But I wasn't talking about critic scores, I just said I was a fan of those, in several posts.

I don't see why critic score additions would go down. Critic scores are still there, on the main page of game entries. You just have to scroll down a bit. The only thing that got removed for Critic Scores is the average, which was pretty useful as I suggested to put that back, just not in a big table at the top right.

If you love critic scores so much, why don't you go say that to the people above me who said critic scores were useless, instead of preaching to the choir...

I'm chill man. Trust me. I didn't say your name. Just using your quote as a jump off point. But if anyone feels I'm addressing them, you know the shoe fits, wear it and all that.

Ok, sorry for jumping the gun there then! I thought, since you quoted me, edited the quote and were talking about the "not liking change" you were directing all responses to me.

I'm with you on critic scores, I find them useful and it would be sad to see people's just be deleted in one press of a button. And I also think that the critic score average is pretty useful and should still be displayed on the main page or the review tab.

Oh and I'll remove the snarky things from my post, there was no need for that.

I was one of those people who would go to the Most Wanted page and click on "games missing MobyRank" to find games to submit rankings. I hope at least that link doesn't get removed, even though there's no average to be shown now.

I wish at least the average could still be seen when clicking "see more rankings".

I think people are overestimating how many there are or how much it's used.

But to give you an idea, at the time of removing that display, there had been 0 new user reviews in over 3 weeks.

0 approved user reviews. (Well, yesterday, I approved one last night.) See a couple in queue for about a month now.

...Actually, the slowness of approvals is to blame for that. *whistles innocently* That said, all the pending reviews have been dealt with now.

I suppose this happens because approval is very slow process now. For example, I send screenshots 16/01/2020 and they still pending. Maybe 3 weeks isn't so big time.

Compared to some years ago, approval times now are VERY fast. It wasn't at all uncommon for submissions to be in queue for months, and in case of corrections even years.

I'm just mean 3 weeks isn't long time to statistics.

Wow, what a mindset here. Reed with the typical infuriating dev mindset that ruined software for the past decade or so, Kenny with the change is good let's just change things and if some people misuse something it must be the fault of the thing and not the people and we must get rid of it and if I find no use for it it shouldn't be here anyway ones, even MAT turning around now...

*nauseous*

You know what makes me nauseous? Your argumentum ad hominem. The weakest of the non-arguments.

God forbids someone has a different opinion....

I never said that it should just get removed based upon that I didn't use it. I just said I encountered empty after empty after empty tables (because obviously most people don't use that voting system, see examples of Reed above). And an empty table is of no use.

I also never said that if people 'misuse things it must be the things's fault', now you're just rabble-rousing.

And yes, change is often good. Why wouldn't it be? It all depends on the specific change, we could give examples like Hitler coming to power or whatever (there's always something to mention), but i'm not an old grumpy grandpa who can't stand change. Is that something that counts against me now?

You obviously only hear what you want to hear.

That's the rule, just seeing what you want to see and in arguments just fortifying your own position. Doesn't get anywhere unless it's done for the benefit of undecided people on the sidelines. In this case we don't really have any, and if there are they're not the ones making the decisions, those have already made them and stick to their guns anyway, and those in support just enforce that position.

So, they get rid of average critic scores because too many modern games don't have any. And replace it with credits, of which too many modern games don't have any.

So let's reduce the functionality of the site for older games while doing nothing to improve the site for newer ones. But hey I guess some people just like to read "There are no game credits on file for this release of the game."

In that case why not have "There are no game reviews on file for this release of this game." for the newer titles that don't have the reviews and leave the damn thing as it was?

I think it's been a really stupid decision that goes against what I thought MobyGames was all about; the retro games, not the new ones. MobyGames ain't never going to compete with the 1001 other sites when it comes to new games. But for the old games this place is the best. Please keep it that way and don't hurt your retro stuff chasing after the new stuff.

Now if you'll excuse me I'll go lurk somewhere else.

mobygames is one of the most authoritative and well-developed databases on video games - even with the previous display of ratings it was difficult to find any lists (in top games they were limited by 15 places) now everything has become even more complicated - with the above difficulties the user now needs to calculate on the calculator arithmetic average of critical ratings - it takes a lot of time and effort, you have to use other sites. Please return the display of critics' ratings and make complete lists from 0 to 100 critic ratings and search by criteria (year, platform, genre, etc.)

My two (or three) cents:

The average critic score is one of my most used features. Of course I always get a deeper look into the critic details but the average is (ehm ... WAS) an important starting point when researching games ... mostly old games. Im less interested in newer ones - but that's almost the whole reason for using MobyGames!

Sure the display badly needs an overhaul (and I already read some good suggestions here). Blank boxes shouldn't be displayed at all and I would be fine if the average score will be only displayed in the reviews tab. (EDIT: I had to correct myself - the average critics score belongs somewhere on the main tab!)

One of the admins even said that they should bring it back for older games in some way. So why the hell you COMPLETELY removed it BEFORE you built in a reasonable alternate solution? Jesus ...

Amen to that! It's also a complete puzzle to me.

Now I can't find any site with ranks of NES games. Metacritic doesn't support old platforms, Moby cut functionality. Very sad.

This is especially true since gamerankings has been shut down. At least they had metascores of NES (a few), SNES, Genesis, PS1, Saturn etc. games. Now we don't have anything before the year 2000, when metacritic started. Here on mobygames we had average scores since the atari age, what a shame to waste that. But I'm optimistic the administrators are working on a new system of displaying the moby ranks and moby scores again. Just show the platforms, that have an average and you don't have the problem with the empty score tiles anymore!

Son, I'm disappoint. Mobygames is the major source of rankings info, especially for older games, before there were metacritic, gamerankings and other aggregators. Some games have dozens and dozens of rankings from various sources across the world and that makes average data more accurate than likes of metacritic can even dream of. Go find another site that has offers this. I agree that average block wasn't pretty, but then it's a good incentive to make it into a better looking thing instead of just removing functionality.

Hi folks, as an experienced product owner I totally fail to see the problem here. It seems clear to me that on the one hand the mobyrank at least for older games is a unique selling proposition which adds value to the page. On the other hand it does not work for newer or less popular games. So, why not remove it from the main page and put it in the “review” tab as one score among others? Maybe add some explaining text and you’re done. Shouldn’t be more than a few hours work and everybody will be happy.

Who'll see it there? And still leaves the issue of making it hard to rate, since the user score was removed along with the critic one, and the link to rate went with it.

Ugh. I'll also add that now the only way to add MobyRank (unless there's none on file for the platform) seems to be to manually enter the URL. Shows how well thought-out this change was.

Well, no. You can go on the reviews tab and then see the rate game link there. Who'd think to do that though?

I know you can *rate* games there, hidden as it is, but that's not what I meant.
I meant submitting "critic reviews" – there's no link for that anywhere, not even in the "contribute" menu, unless the game in question has no critic reviews on file.

Not sure what you're talking about... There's an "add review" link on the game's main page, below the "Critic Reviews" header, no matter if any critic reviews actually exist or not.

No. https://i.imgur.com/Wyhhr1f.gif

It's only there if the section is empty.

I mean the game's main summary page. What we call the "Rap Sheet". That's where the link is. If I recall correctly, the Critic Review subpage itself (what's visible in your screenshot) never had a link to add a new review (as little sense as that makes).

Ah, I never saw that link; I always used the one in the aggregate box. Thanks for pointing it out, I stand (partially) corrected.

Please, add it back in.