No mate it's just a lot of effort when every post you see as a chance to patronise, sling mud or show your superior knowledge.
Get some new material, it's boring when you get all super defensive like this. Show me where I patronised or threw any mud at you, or shut up about it every time you get rebutted with questions you can't answer. Besides I thought the Shammy/Bojan comments were enough of a wink to you, but I forget about your sense of humour (or indeed lack thereof at times).
You raised a valid point about games that are free elsewhere, but a fair rebuttal or at least, consideration would be to look at how many people that actually applies to. If for a significant chunk of people it doesn't impact then the value proposition still holds strong for those people. You don't want to engage in nuance if it might water down your point but otherwise want us to listen to you harp on about games from 7 generations ago and the mistakes made back in the 1980s.
Obviously metacritic isn't everything. It's subjective but because it can bring some 'wisdom of the crowd' that is less prone to the bias and agendas of the masses (thousands of people giving TLOU2 a 0 for example). It's not flawless, and yes critics can have their own bias and unfortunately vested interests too - 'will this publisher continue sending me games pre-release and give us advertising budget if we don't give a good score?'
The Sea of Thieves point was irony because only days before people had been posting a list of the metacritic scores of PS5 exclusives and asking how many high scoring games Xbox has.
I've never dismissed it and always retained that it's clearly worth considering and of value, but isn't the be all and end all on whether or not a specific game is good or that you'll enjoy it. As a good indicator over a library of games though, it can be a pretty good indicator but should never be the only thing to look at.
So you agree with me then. So tell me how I offended you enough to write the first line of this post? Chill yourself dude.
As for the sea of thieves point, our discussion was a separate part as I never once mentioned PS5 or metacritic in that regard, YOU brought it up in a dig (oh no! Please don't patronise me!) because I earlier was fecking around calling it the de facto best game on the gamepass. I responded to that by making a very valid point about actually reading those bottom scores with regards to the nature of the game and how long ago those reviews were, and you just dismissed it. Basically, don't act like you aren't any different at times mate.
Anyway to continue the conversation further, lighten the mood and hopefully to an interesting area, I think the issue with metacritic and all scores is that gaming has simply moved on. Long gone are the days a game is simply released and what you get is what you get, the landscape has changed. The way we consume games, the way they are updated all the time, the very nature of some genres and early access and all that. The issue is what we replace it with, I'd have to think about that one but I fear it'd take someone way more versed in that particular subject than me (shocker I know!), but I will agree that at least with the group think metacritic is much better than the old magazine scores.
Any ideas on a better system? (though it would also have to take into account the age old thing of publisher influence and all that, but then we are going waaaay too deep into it). It's very tough because we are so ingrained with the ways things are, but there has got to be a way. For example, though obviously the thumbs up/down system on steam is ridiculous in that simplistic nature, it does at least mean you really do want to read the reviews for yourself more and see what is being said...which leads you to then easily see the bombing and all that. I overall find it a better way to gauge a game I want than a review or meta critic.