Metacritic Changes User Score Submissions To Fight Review Bombing

In an attempt to counteract review bombing by people who haven’t played a game, Metacritic has changed its policies regarding user scoring and submissions.

In light of the controversy surrounding low scores given to “The Last of Us Part 2,” where players used user scores to wage a proxy war on the game and sink its score to the low 3/10s right at release, it would seem that the site is now encouraging players to actually play a game first before posting scores or reviews.

As cited by Forbes senior contributor Paul Tassi, when he logged on to Metacritic to check out the average score for the newly released “Ghost of Tsushima,” he said, “where normally we’d see user scores on the right, there’s a new message there I’ve never seen before. ‘Please spend some time playing the game. Come back to review it starting at 12:00 p.m. PST on July 18.’"

The game was released on July 17, hence that date and time would mean that Metacritic is making users wait more than 36 hours after release to start posting reviews, deeming that “adequate” time to believably play the game.

Currently, “The Last of Us Part 2” has more user scores than any other in history by an enormous margin as a result of this ongoing back and forth between both its detractors and its fans.

At that time, it was physically impossible for players to have played for a few hours at the most, then to drop reviews and scores on Metacritic almost instantaneously. This is the case because the length of the story of “The Last of Us Part 2” runs between 20-30 hours.

Those people were clearly submitting reviews based on story leaks, streamer playthroughs, or just getting to a single story beat near the beginning and rushing off to write an angry review. The new 36-hour policy seems aimed at combating that kind of action.

This early though, some are clamoring for even greater action from Metacritic, actually asking people to verify that they’ve played a game before they can submit a review for it. This might be possible via some sort of purchase confirmation via linking your Metacritic account to your PSN or Xbox or Steam profile.

While that might seem ideal, it’s doubtful that Metacritic would go that far, at least for now. That is a much more complicated thing to tackle and is not how most user score systems work across most major sites.

Although review bombing won’t be stopped completely by this policy, it’s a step in the right direction. After the 36 hours is up, anyone can still write any kind of review they want and there’s no way to track how much of a game they’ve played if any. But at the very least, Forbes notes, we won’t have people reviewing 30-hour story games two hours after they came out, so that’s something.