QUOTE (rgtaa @ May 3 2004, 11:55 PM) |
The same standard they use in school most sites and people use in rating games! : 100 A+ excellent 90 A GREAT 80 B Good 70 C Fair 65 D Just passing 60 and below fail!
In school if I got a 40-50 (average according to ChrisF) I would be embarassed to tell my parents or show my friends ... I could live with a 76! Same with this game 7.6 is maybe B minus or C+!
I would give it a Solid B to B+ ... because I like the concept , atmosphere and gameplay! |
Stats 101:
The school letter rating is tremendously squeued - hell, over 60% of the distribution is a single letter grade. Why? They are assigning a letter grade based on a distribution of numerical grades and consider anything below 60% bad enough to fail you. They center their letter grading distribution at the 80% mark accoring to your scale which is important to consider since this is their distribution range for letter grades (100 high, 80 mean, 60 low). However the underlying numerics still use the full % scale - meaning that 10-20% is very possible but anything under 60 earns you the same letter grade - basically a floor value for the letters - they run two sets of distributions and this is where your confusion comes from. In the case of games you could give a game a 3.5 with anything under 6.0 as a 'Failure' rating.
For numerics you need to consider a uniform distribution or a bell curved distribution, you can center it at any mark you like and assign any arbitrary endpoints. My point is that if you truly grade on a 10 point scale then 5 is the center. Yeah, it might be bell curved and harder to get extreme values (i.e. standard normal dist.) or a uniform dist. but it still centers around a mean value. Now you can do what you want - if you want to run a scale from 5-10 and have 7.5 be your mean feel free (makes more sense to go 1-5 and use 2.5 but that's neither here nor there). This is what most gaming sites do although they say they rank on a 10 point scale - meaning they don't do what they say at all because they never use the bottom end and claim to rate numerically. What good is the bottom end of the scale if it is never ever used (i.e. I'd bet the total number of games 9.0 and above exceeds the total number of games below 5.0 by a wide margin). Ironically they are not alone in this by any means - sell side investment analysts almost never give a stock a 'Sell' rating so smart people adjust and interpret a 'Hold' as a sell, an 'Accumulate' as a hold, etc... (interestingly they have 3+ terms for 'Buy' but only one for sell and hold - lesson: don't take things at face value).
All that being said, the author claims to rate on a 10 point scale and he does. It is not his fault that people don't understand statistics enough to realize that.