Constructive thread is massively abuzz with anti-review-thread sentiments. Too many to list here, but it starts here:
https://www.resetera.com/threads/constructive-community-discussion.270630/page-95#post-63918024Didn't want to push too much on the point before today, because I know I'm in the minority here, but I really think review prediction/review threads should be severely moderated or removed altogether for big releases. The posters engaging with the topic responsibly does not imo outweigh the toxic console wars/hype that permeates the discussion. The few AAA release review threads I have stepped into over the past year have been awful and thinly veiled excuses to attack reviewers.
I know there are good posters in those threads and great info that comes out of reviews that people like to have aggregated, but it just isn't worth it for big, highly anticipated games that have way too much defensiveness behind them.
Review threads are the exact kind of toxicity Era isn't supposed to stand for:
I agree with this. If you're not going to ban these threads, at the very least they should be heavily moderated with a zero tolerance policy towards harassment or dunking on a review solely because of a negative score.
The Returnal OT is embarrassing, quite frankly. It's full of people dunking on negative reviews for a game they haven't played and posting quotes from those reviews out of context to present them in the most unflattering light. The game has an 86 on Metacritic and 85 reviews and yet all anyone is talking about is the 3/5 and 6/10 from Jeff Grubb and Dia Lacina, respectively. It's clear the thread was locked because mods were aware it was spiraling out of control but the damage has been done after 30 pages. The fact that a mod jumped on the Dia dunking is tremendously disappointing.
It's just a classic example of the toxicity this forum is supposed to be campaigning against.
Well, I say further in that post that people were "posting quotes from those reviews out of context to present them in the most unflattering light," so I clearly agree with you there.
My point isn't that "people aren't allowed to dislike reviews," it's that the culture of review threads are such that people excited for a game always go towards reviews that are critical of it and look for excuses to mock it. Again, the Returnal thread literally got to the point where a mod chimed in on calling the quote from Dia's review "cringe." People matter-of-factly said that Jeff Grubb never finished the game when all anyone needed to do was go on twitter and see that he posted that he stayed up late to finish it. And the fact that it took a poster calling out the other members of the thread for the mods to finally lock it and review it is too little too late. The thread should have been locked far earlier.
This happens over and over and over again. Kallie Plagge similarly got a lot of crap of her Cyberpunk 2077 review, and then the game came out and suddenly people agreed with most of her criticisms.
If review threads aren't going to be removed, then they need to be moderated to a degree that they clearly are not now.
Kyuuji takes the opposing view:
Seems kind of odd to me to lay it at the feet of the thread, when numerous other threads on a wide range of things from opinions to sensitive issues are moderated with the intent to get rid of users that are misbehaving.
I still find review threads both interesting and useful, part of why I was keen to make the Returnal one and provide as comprehensive a post as possible on it. If people are assholes in the thread, moderate the assholes. I still think it's possible to have decent discussions within them past that, like we do in most other threads on the board. It's also nice to have a celebration of the success of a game release, when there is one that does particularly well. Especially around a new IP and studio venture into the AAA space finding that success.
I would lean towards heavier moderation rather than outright banning the threads myself, as there can be good takeaways/celebrations there with genuine posters, but that would require a harder stance on hype/console toxicity all around. There is an uncomfortably large amount of users that get way too negative/positive about a product and manage to skirt the current line in the sand just enough.
I guess it's just I can see mods not wanting to deal with that headache for something that's not as needed as news, an OT, the discussion of sensitive topics, etc. Review threads aren't the source of the issue though, for sure, and the underlying toxicity behind it I would prefer addressed.
For sure, I'm just hesitant to let the people that can't handle things like middling reviews or platform differences start to dictate which threads the rest of us are allowed to have. Seems to me if they weren't in a review thread they would be in the OT because, as you note, the thread isn't the issue but specifically those people. If there wasn't a review thread people would post the reviews in the OT and you'd have the same discussions and arguments in there.
As I illustrated in my last post, my issue is that the culture around review threads is a huge problem. People excited for a game finding the most critical reviews on metacritic and then quoting them out of context to make them look bad followed by a big dunkfest is not a one-off to the Returnal thread, it's a pattern. And it's clear that the mod team is just not moderating these threads as heavily or as severely as they should, because it keeps happening constantly. Either get rid of the threads or make a real concentrated effort to moderate them better.
At the same time there's a lot of people discussing the game and appreciating the reviews normally, often discussing them with people that have written them themselves. So I'm not chomping at the bit to gut the threads from the forum, when it'll do little to prevent the actual issue of some members being unable to handle a middling review. We don't prevent other threads from being made because console warriors decide to pipe up, we just ban those members because they're being assholes.
Era would definitely never, ever prevent a thread from being made or close a thread due to it being too much work to handle the assholes.
I can't decide if it's funnier if they ban review threads entirely, or if they just turn review threads into joyless slogs where you're not allowed to point and laugh at dumb shit in reviews.
