MetaCritic To Tighten Commenting Requirements After Gears, LBP Handbagging

A couple weeks ago, fanboy dorks exposed their stupidity to the wider community by hijacking the user reviews of two games on review aggregate site MetaCritic. The games in question were LittleBigPlanet and Gears of War 2, the people in question, morons. And while the whole mess was a little overplayed by some – who cares about user reviews on a website built solely to aggregate the reviews of critics? – MetaCritic were sufficiently moved by the episode to do something about it.

In a note at the foot of the Gears of War 2 page, games editor Marc Doyle writes:

My advice for our faithful users is to focus your attention on the Metascore for this game and not the thousands of user votes, most of which have been submitted before said users have played the game. This is a gaming community, and if people want to stuff the ballot box, there’s not much I can do at this point. When we upgrade the registration requirements for participation on the site in the near future, this type of thing won’t happen. We’ll post the full legitimate user reviews upon the game’s release. As always, thanks for using the site.

In terms of just what they’ll be doing in terms of upgrading, Doyle tells 1UP that, as it stands, all a user needs to provide is an email address and they’re able to comment. In the near future, commenting will “require users to enter more information than just an e-mail address in order to get an account and vote on MetaCritic”, and users won’t be able to submit reviews until after a game hits store shelves.

Gears of War 2 [MetaCritic, via 1UP]