Hey, I've been a fan of this site for a few years now, and I'm really pleased with how you guys have implemented the metascore concept. Your system really seems to give an accurate representation of the general critical sentiment regarding a particular piece of media.

The one suggestion I would have is this: at the moment, there's no way to distinguish from just the metascore whether (say) a movie with a metascore of 70 is pulling reviews that are generally hovering around 70, say within five or ten of that score, or whether the movie is split between a bunch of 100-point reviews and a bunch of 40-point reviews. The former movie might be pretty solidly mediocre, while the latter could be a polarizing, love-it-or-hate-it sort of film (as many cult films are). A secondary score describing this variance could serve to even further refine the collation of reviews and help readers put a finer point on their tastes. I'm thinking something reminiscent of the standard deviation function, though I wouldn't know quite how to manipulate it so it'd be useful - I'm sure you've got some statisticians there putting all this together (I'm just a math major, I dont like working with actual numbers ;->.

Anyway, I think this could be a useful addition if implemented properly, and I'm interested in what you guys think of it.

You can just look at the items webpage to see the spread of reviewer scores, but it would be pretty helpful to be able to see the standard deviation of the score in relation to the Metascore.

What I think could be done to improve the Metascore system (and I THINK it doesnt do this already, but it might, so dont rip me to shreds if it does) is to take into account how many reviews have been used to calculate the scores. For example, alot of the really high Metascores are given to things that have undergone relatively less critical scrutiny than others (Diablo, Quake, Civilization 2, Command and Conquer, How the West Was Won). Its seems to me that it is a greater achievement for an album to get a score of 95 in the face of 20 reviews than getting 97 from a lesser number of reviews.


And yes, I do have too much free time as indicated by the all the links in the post.

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