So I got my first bad rating over Xbox Live the other day. Not bad going considering I’ve been getting slaughtered kicking ass on Modern Warfare 2 for the past 8 months. I suppose it had to happen eventually.
The day I had my perfect rep tarnished, I hadn’t been playing very well at all. In fact, I was kind of embarassed to be me at one point. I could blame noobtubers, glitchers, boosters and campers. I could point the finger at everybody who was in the lobby with me. But at the end of the day, I just sucked. Just one of those days where I should have turned it off and given it a rest.
I idly checked my rep at one point when I was waiting for my game to load (yes I was still playing, hoping I would just become awesome again). I do this partially because I like to have a big fat brag about how great I must be to play with, that nobody rates me badly.
I saw it. 94% preferred, 6% avoided. Six per cent?! Does that mean one person equals six per cent of all of the Xbox community? Or have I just had a massive influx of people just decide that actually they don’t want to play with me, ever? Stunned by this baffling logic, I looked over at what it was that had caused this bad rating. I fully expected it to be something like ‘Exceedingly bad at Modern Warfare 2’, or at least something to do with game skill.
The reason was that I was ‘Overly Agressive’. Apparently I took the game too seriously or got angry at other players. Now, I must admit that yes, I have a competetive streak, which means I do like to win, so in turn I suppose it might seem that I may come across as a rather, um, serious gamer. But doesn’t everybody want to win? And anyway, on that day I wasn’t actually getting any winning done. But I must have come across as a serious loser or something. Either that or I accidentally left my headset on while I was cussing the other gamers.
Now, the point of my blog isn’t about how upset I am because I was rated badly. It happens. After the initial ‘Aww I can’t brag anymore’ sulkiness I got over it. It just bought to my attention a fact that a lot of people already know. The Player Review system is… well, crap.
I have heard that most if not all people disregard the Player Review system, mainly because bad ratings are pretty much thrown about left, right and centre for stupid reasons by some people. You can never really tell whether a guy has 4 stars by his name because he is a horrible person to play with, or if he’s just unlucky enough to be rated bad because some people took a dislike to him having ‘rainbow’ in his name or something. I can see why it is in place. I mean, if you see someone cheating, you want other people to be aware of it. But the abuse of the system pretty much renders it all useless.
In my opinion the best solution is to simplify it, and in part, go with the Playstation 3’s way of doing things. Block a person so that you won’t be put in anymore games with them. That is all you really need. Yeah, it isn’t warning others of whatever made you block them but they can do it too, if they encounter the same problems. I think it would be a lot more effective than what we do now.
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