Why does your staff add DLC reviews to lower aggregate scores?

[DragonOne23]

I've seen countless example of reviews being added to a base games page, and they usually tend to be much lower then the actual games reviews. It isn't a consistent policy. You add DLC review scores to certain games, and you make separate pages for certain DLC.

The two reviews dragging it all down for TWW2 are for DLC that shouldn't be there.

Total War: Warhammer 2

Total War: Warhammer 2 reviews, pros and cons. Liked: Campaign has tight pacing and forces creative Disliked: Few playable factions in competitive multiplayer modes

www.techspot.com

There's EIGHT reviews for Ashes of Ardienel for Dark Souls 3, that drag it's score down hugely, yet it's other DLC, Ringed City, gets a page of its own.

Dark Souls 3

Dark Souls 3 reviews, pros and cons. Liked: Expert level design Rewarding challenge Disliked: Redundant late-game bosses and areas

www.techspot.com

Dark Souls 3: The Ringed City

Dark Souls 3: The Ringed City reviews, pros and cons. Liked: Surreal setting breathes a bit of life into the staple castles and knights Weightier than previous DLC Disliked: Doesn't explore its ideas as fully as it could

www.techspot.com

Resident Evil 2 has a big fat 6, but it's for it's free addon, the Ghost Survivors.

Resident Evil 2

Resident Evil 2 reviews, pros and cons. Liked: Best-in-class visuals and sound design Updates the original Resident Evil 2 for a modern audience Disliked: Movement speed is too slow

www.techspot.com

Considering the fact this site shows up as a result in the first few pages when you search reviews for a game, I think you need to have a more moral (or at least consistent) policy. How is it fair for these developers there products aren't being represented properly?

 

[DragonOne23]

I'm not trying to attack the staff, I'm just stating this method is unfair to the developers of picking and choosing which DLC reviews go up (which almost always lower the scores of games unfairly) and which ones get there own page.

 

[Julio Franco]

Full disclosure: we curate the Product Finder for quality control: pros/cons are usually edited by hand, pricing, photos, and reviews, especially at launch. We choose what to promote based on relevancy and we also add some weighing based on our Best Ofs/in-house reviews.

But then to gain better coverage we combine this information with the review feeds from Testseek.com who crawls for this information and then passes it to us. On the game's front, it's not something we have realized could be an issue. We'll have to look deep into this because we are not differentiating DLC from the original games.

 

[DragonOne23]

Full transparency: we curate the Product Finder for quality control: pros/cons are usually edited by hand, pricing, photos, and reviews, especially at launch. We choose what to promote based on relevancy and we also add some weighing based on our Best Ofs/in-house reviews.

But then to gain better coverage we combine this information with the review feeds from Testseek.com who crawls for this information and then passes it to us. On the game's front, it's not something we have realized could be an issue. We'll have to look deep into this because we are not differentiating DLC from the original games.

Ah that explains it. So it's an automated system? My apologies if I sounded rude. I just did a quick look through and it shocked me so many games had DLC reviews attributed them.

I guess you can't manually remove them? There's so many games affected by it, it would take some effort.

 

[Julio Franco]

Yes, the review aggregation is automated (70-80% of it) and even if we edited hundreds of games seeing what scores are DLC and which are not, the data will keep coming in that form I'm afraid. I will inquire about it with Testseek though.

The Product Finder section got started as a review aggregator (think Metacritic for PC hardware, that was the idea), but we have since added to it in many ways. Soon we will be adding Amazon price history as a feature, too.

 

[DragonOne23]

Thanks for the clarification. It's a shame though it cant be easily remedied.

 

[DragonOne23]

If it helps, the system seems to pick at random what reviews to pick up after a certain point. There's alot of other DLC reviews they could have chosen but it only chooses certain ones, which is quite strange.

And in some cases the system chooses it a month after the review up. TWW2 score was 87, then 86. And now it's dropped to 85, because it decided to add a review that was posted a month ago for Shadow and the Blade. I suppose even if you removed that, the system might just add it again.

Again don't want to seem rude. I think the site puts alot of time and effort into making this place great for tech and gaming enthusiasts, but to take the aggregate seriously it should accurately effect the products it's displaying. Especially since it's often on the first page of search results (which is great for the site, but doesn't accurately display correct information).