Yesterday, Sledgehammer Game's Glen Schofield took to Twitter to get some help in the defense of Modern Warfare 3's unusually low Metacritic score. Despite rave reviews from the professionals, "fans" were pretty displeased resulting in a "suspiciously low" user score. I use the term "fans" loosely because it looks like the majority of user responses were created to troll MW3 by intentionally bombing the score, a problem Metacritic has continued to face.
In defense of Schofield, the user scores are unjustifiably low and completely unwarranted. In all honesty, Schofield should've just ignored the user reviews seeing as everyone else in the gaming community does. I personally don't buy into the biased user reviews – the majority of attackers seeming to be BF3 unfortunately.
But yesterday, Schofield made the fatal mistake of going on Twitter and saying, "I don't usually do this but, if u like MW3 go 2 Metacritic.com & help our user score … It's suspiciously low. Be honest but help if u agree." From there, the Tweet was picked up from several news outlets including the big kahuna, IGN. You'd think a site as reputable as IGN wouldn't have to result to picking apart Tweets and could instead schedule a formal interview with the studio head.
Unfortunately, I couldn't and have had to resort to checking up on his Twitter. It seems he had deleted his original Tweet, and has instead defended and clarified his intent.
"I don't wonder about the scores. Everyone has an opinion. You can't make ever 1 happy No matter how hard u try. That's life." Schofield continued to respond to fans, "I wasn't complaining. Unfortunate people took it that way. My bad."
But when talking about IGN's take on his original Tweet, Schofield had a less forgiving demeanor.
"IGN uses the word "begs". Wrong. Sensationalized journalism," Schofield said in response to IGN's headline, "MW3 Dev Begs for Help With Low Metacritic User Score". Terminology aside, Schofield continued, "They should call me and talk with me."
Whether or not "beg" is the right word, he did ASK fans for help which does make him a target of ridicule (especially by BF3 fans). But this just goes to show you that if you truly believe in your product then you are going to stand by it. Nobody wants to see their hard work bashed, especially when it's unwarranted bashing. Rather than chastise Mr. Schofield about his defending his game, we should respect him for having so much pride in it.
