Herbert West Reanimator
kiwifarms.net
You are correct, but the point is deeper than that. Most people don't care about the frequency. When Joe Schmoe from down the street sees "7 out of 10" on a game review, his impression will be that that game is being scored notably above what would normally be considered average. Alanah is addressing complaints about "that's not an average score" from the perspective of "yes it is, that's going to be the average score we give out", which is technically correct but fails utterly to address the actual complaints. This is what I referred to as "at best poor communication". She's talking past the people who want to say "your scoring system seems deliberately skewed toward the high end, which gives people false impressions of what games' quality levels are".
This system works, after a fashion, because the games market is absolutely swamped with products. It's one of the biggest buyer's markets humans have ever witnessed. Since we're so spoiled for choice, we can afford to be picky, and merely being middle-of-the-road isn't good enough - unless you're AAA and can afford to spend your way to the top of the heap. That is the core quibble here. The big-name titles IGN (and other sites) hand out largely good scores to - the scores that say "this game is at least not terrible, it's probably worth a shot in this crowded market, spend your time and money here" - are many times the ones that could afford to pay for exposure, rather than the ones that are genuinely worthy of time and money. Yet the scores are defended as if the games genuinely deserved what they got.
Whether you'd rather see a mathematical approach or a school approach to the scoring system doesn't really matter, because IGN isn't using either. If there's one thing I will openly praise Alanah for, it's her admission that scoring systems are only there because of audience engagement and her expressed personal desire never to issue a score ever again. Scores are rubbish in general. But if you're a games rag and you're going to use a scoring system, don't do it the way IGN does it and arbitrarily define each individual number along the scale. Just say "we're doing this the mathematical way" or "treat these scores like school grades, 60% is a failure" and then stick to that as closely as possible.
