[General Discussion] Best review scale?

My site staff has been wondering lately, what's the better review score scale? x/10 or x/5?

Right now, we use /10, but not in the same way other site use it. We've seen it as a waste to throw away half of the scale (most places, anything below a 6 is pure garbage, and there's no difference between a 5 and a 1), so used the mathematical average of 5 for our "average" game.

It seems like it works well enough for us and the readers who actually try to understand it, but sadly, this is the internet, and not everyone reads the "Verdict" underneath where it says the final word like "Great" or "Average" or "Classic" or what have you. And I'd assume even less people actually click "See our review criteria" before bitching about what seems like a low score.

Would an 0-5 score scale, sticking to (presumably sticking to 2.5 as the average) lessen the misunderstandings and decrease the complaints, do you think?

What do you see as the pros and cons of each scale?

Feel free to also express other ideas and why you think they'd possibly be good.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Thanks for the 2 posts so far.

Domino: we break ours down in a way you suggested, I think. Here's one of our reviews. Tell me if it's what you had in mind:
http://www.rpgland.com/games/marvelalliance/review.html

Side: our 1-10 scale goes in .5 incriments. When we just barely started doing reviews, we'd do all decimals, but it got tedius trying to figure what separated a 7.3 from a 7.4, so just simplified it a tid bit.

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by electric_eye

II've never liked percentage systems. Rating a 98% seems odd that it be 2% away from supposed perfection, but take a game call it A which scores 90%, I tend to find I in comparison to others, it's hard to put a finger on why it should score 40% more than that or 7% less than that one. Personally I can't use it. Five suits me fine.

Right, but, like I said:

Quote:

our 1-10 scale goes in .5 incriments. When we just barely started doing reviews, we'd do all decimals, but it got tedius trying to figure what separated a 7.3 from a 7.4, so just simplified it a tid bit.

We covered that for the most part.

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Originally Posted by NES Oldskooler

Since everyone values aspects of games differently, I figure the simplest review score would be out of three:

Buy it
Try it
Avoid it

Well, the danger a media outlet gets into there is that somewhere, someone's going to take that recommendation and regret it. Even a big fan of, say, the RPG genre is going to have at least a handful of games that get near-universal praise, but just aren't Example Gamer's cup of tea. The "buy it/try it/avoid it" is generally what one tries to describe in the text of the review.

Giving it an 8.5/10 is one thing, but telling someone to straight up spend their money on it is a somewhat different territory.

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