Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Reelya]

I think the "nothing is ever a 10" is just as bad as only giving high scores all the time. Reducing your rating scale on either ends reduces the dynamic range of what you can express - how good thing are relative to each other.

Perhaps if it's a percentage score then never giving 100/100 makes sense. But you can imagine a show that's worth 95/100. If you're rounding that down to a 10-point scale each 10% becomes 1 point. So you'd say 1-10% = 1/10, 11-20% = 2/10, etc. But then at the top of the scale, you have 81-90% = 9/10. If you also lump 91-99% into 9/10, then you're saying an 81/100 is worth the same as 99/100, which is way to coarsely grained. You might as well use that 10/10 point to differentiate shows in the 9/10 range from just great to uniquely awesome.

[Flying Dice]

Problem is, is that a ten-point scale measuring enjoyment or quality? You seem to be treating it as the latter, but most user-generated reviews seem to be the former, which would also explain why it tends to range from 5/10-10/10. Depending on your worldview, people are either: humble and accepting enough to admit that them not enjoying something doesn't make it utter garbage, tasteless and shallow enough to derive some degree of enjoyment from anything regardless of how poorly made it is, or generally unwilling to publicly bash something because they don't want to start an argument.

[Frumple]

... to be fair to monster musume, at least basing it off the manga, I could actually see a scenario where rating it a 7.5/10 would be appropriate. Namely, relative to other works in its niche.

Yes, it's fanservice pandering harem drivel, and objectively pretty sub-par, but as fanservice pandering harem drivel goes, it's arguably one of the higher quality examples of it. Characters may be relatively derivative, but they're not entirely flat (even including the male!), there's some degree of character development, and character interactions aren't entirely static, the world-building isn't completely ignored (even if it by and large is drawing from porn scenarios, as befits its roots) and impacts the plot meaningfully (to the extent there is a plot in this genre of media, anyway), and the actual point of the work, the titillation, is pretty clean in terms of quality (if not content, ha) and handled comparatively tastefully and organically compared to a lot of the material in the field. It's not actually something you can charitably call "a bog standard by-the-books harem anime that just happens to have monster girls in it". Unless you haven't actually been exposed to many by-the-books harem animes, I guess.

As its particular sort of very soft softcore porn goes, I could see rating it a 6 or 7 on a ten point scale. It's not even remotely innovative or impressive, but it does what it's intending to do pretty competently, particularly relative to its compatriots. Damning with faint praise it may be, but the thing actually has a fair degree of merit. Not enough to save it from being drivel, but enough to elevate it close to the greatest heights drivel achieves. It would just deserve a three or four point knockoff if you were going to compare it to most anything outside its particular niche, heh.

[Reelya]

"1" is reserved for Mars of Destruction. That OVA is a good way to calibrate the bottom of your scale.

[Hawkfrost]

... to be fair to monster musume, at least basing it off the manga, I could actually see a scenario where rating it a 7.5/10 would be appropriate. Namely, relative to other works in its niche.

Yes, it's fanservice pandering harem drivel, and objectively pretty sub-par, but as fanservice pandering harem drivel goes, it's arguably one of the higher quality examples of it. Characters may be relatively derivative, but they're not entirely flat (even including the male!), there's some degree of character development, and character interactions aren't entirely static, the world-building isn't completely ignored (even if it by and large is drawing from porn scenarios, as befits its roots) and impacts the plot meaningfully (to the extent there is a plot in this genre of media, anyway), and the actual point of the work, the titillation, is pretty clean in terms of quality (if not content, ha) and handled comparatively tastefully and organically compared to a lot of the material in the field. It's not actually something you can charitably call "a bog standard by-the-books harem anime that just happens to have monster girls in it". Unless you haven't actually been exposed to many by-the-books harem animes, I guess.

As its particular sort of very soft softcore porn goes, I could see rating it a 6 or 7 on a ten point scale. It's not even remotely innovative or impressive, but it does what it's intending to do pretty competently, particularly relative to its compatriots. Damning with faint praise it may be, but the thing actually has a fair degree of merit. Not enough to save it from being drivel, but enough to elevate it close to the greatest heights drivel achieves. It would just deserve a three or four point knockoff if you were going to compare it to most anything outside its particular niche, heh.

I would be fine with it being called a 6 or maybe a 6.5, a 7 stands a bit strong for my liking.

[JoshuaFH]

Well, numerical scores are very flawed IMO, as it's attempting to sum up a complex opinion with a single number, but if that level of brevity is necessary then I'd say numerical scores best measures the 'necessity' to watch something in a given genre. Things that stand at the forefront as the classics of a genre would be given a ten, then just naturally scaling down until you hit the ones and zeros, which would be the 'never watch' or 'unnecessary to watch' scoring. It's important to note that while the scoring strongly implies the quality of a piece of content, the system cares more about the cultural or artistic relevance of a piece. It's possible for things that are very good to score low because better, similar choices are available, while something that's very bad can score high because there's alot to be learned from the show's badness.

The quirk of the necessity system is that while the totality of all pieces grows, which is just natural as more and more original content is created in time, the total number of things rated in the lower half grows and grows, as it's natural as alot of tripe is derivative and not honestly warranting of attention, while the number of things listed in the upper half of the system remains largely the same, experiencing much slower growth.

I just feel that if any scoring system is to be pragmatic to the discerning viewer with only so many hours in his day, then the scoring system should factor in the fact that anime is produced at a rate faster than the ordinary fan can watch it, and that the existing library of all available anime is already enormous, providing an overwhelming glut of choices, so the idea is to vastly cut out the fluff and only care about the most archetypical pieces.

But it all boils down to opinion, and any system based on opinion will be inherently flawed, and there's nothing wrong with that.

[Hawkfrost]

Well, numerical scores are very flawed IMO, as it's attempting to sum up a complex opinion with a single number, but if that level of brevity is necessary then I'd say numerical scores best measures the 'necessity' to watch something in a given genre. Things that stand at the forefront as the classics of a genre would be given a ten, then just naturally scaling down until you hit the ones and zeros, which would be the 'never watch' or 'unnecessary to watch' scoring. It's important to note that while the scoring strongly implies the quality of a piece of content, the system cares more about the cultural or artistic relevance of a piece. It's possible for things that are very good to score low because better, similar choices are available, while something that's very bad can score high because there's alot to be learned from the show's badness.

You know what, I would be down for this.

Or at the least, if ratings were labeled on what factor it is being judged by, instead of leaving it some nebulous thing that you have to guess at.

[Reelya]

The best you can generally do is to normalize the scores, then it doesn't matter what specific score people give things, it's only about relative rankings.

But I think that any specific system would be hampered because not everyone has the same opinion, even of the specifics like "art". A lot of anime with unique artstyles get slammed for being ugly, because they don't look all colorful and moe like the popular shows. But if you watch a lot of anime, then you appreciate when some studio tries to do something experimental with the art style. So, if you had people rate on "art" then the moe stuff would end up on top of that rating.

The same thing with e.g. having a rating like "originality" or "necessity". You'd get a lot of people claiming NGNL and Mahouka are 10/10 necessities to watch, and I'm not sure that the rating would be useful. 50 different harems that all look the same? Well the girls are all equally cute in all the shows, so they're all necessities right?

[Tellemurius]

I am following Musume for the manga and its a bearable harem for me. At least Darling isn't a bumbling idiot.

[Mattk50]

One thing to consider is that any shows that would be "1" people probably dont get past the first 5 minutes and most people dont rate a show they watched 5 minutes of. There have been a few that i stopped watching before the opening song even finished, but i dont even remember them, thats part of the issue.

By the way, do people like chaika? Does it get better? i watched the first episode and dropped it but keep seeing stuff about it posted, not here necessarily but in places.

[Reelya]

I think it was pretty decent, but not spectacular. One thing going for it is that it does have a conclusive ending (no wiggle-room for sequels or dangling plot threads). It mostly fits the shonen fantasy/comedy adventure genre, but there is actually a meta-plot that is revealed as it goes along. Basically anything you're told at the start is probably wrong information, so it's not so straightforward in that sense, and discovering what is going on is the main part of the plot. Personal ratings would also depend how annoying you find Chaika, too, since she has a rather distinctive personality.

[Flying Dice]

Didn't the anime pull a Gecko ending?

[JoshuaFH]

The same thing with e.g. having a rating like "originality" or "necessity". You'd get a lot of people claiming NGNL and Mahouka are 10/10 necessities to watch, and I'm not sure that the rating would be useful. 50 different harems that all look the same? Well the girls are all equally cute in all the shows, so they're all necessities right?

I let the idea sit in my head for a bit, and I'm thinking the most practical way to implement a rating system is in something I'm calling the "Top 90" system. Basically, every person has a list 90 names long.

Basically, you have a finite number of ratings you can use to describe any show.

You can give ten shows 10/10
and then ten show 9/10
and then ten shows 8/10
...

and so on until you have a list of 90 shows stretching til 2/10, and the 1/10 section is infinitely long, allowing it to hold every other show in existence regardless of quality.

So basically, if you want to rate something 10/10, you're gonna have to bump every other name on the list down one notch. I'd think that if all your favorite shows are competing against eachother for your favor, which in reality they are due to entertainment being a business and time being finite, then a person's opinion becomes more honest as it is impossible to highly rate every half-arsed show in existence.

It'd also give a better idea of how experienced an anime watcher someone is, if they can't fill out the top 20, then you can safely assume they don't have nearly as well-developed an opinion as someone who is struggling to make a cut to place something into their 2/10 (aka the 81-90th slot) section.

Stretched across many people, averaging would give a better idea of who considers what to be actually worth watching.

[Flying Dice]

That's not a half-bad idea, though it would probably only work with dedicated site infrastructure, otherwise you'd never get certain groups of fans to use it.

[Neonivek]

At that point you might as well force people to make a top 100 list

Anyhow a "score" is basically the summation of the overall feeling the reviewer had with the game. What that score means can vary but really nothing replaces "reading the actual review" which is sort of key here.

You can create any system you want... but nothing changes it.

Heck in many ways I like how Rotten Tomatoes does things in that instead of a score you simply state if you enjoyed the movie... or not.