The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few Even If The Box Hasn’t Been Delivered Yet

Never mind Metacritic, Game Rankings or other review aggregation sites, there’s only one source I ever use for judging the quality of games: the customer reviews at Amazon.co.uk. Where else can you find real truth and hyperbole-free revelations like Mass Effect 2 suffering from “…the kind of incompetence you expect from 3 people in a basement making an iPod game”?

I’m therefore in some sort of a quandary over Cataclysm. It seems there’s been a bit of a problem with the despatch or delivery (or both), leading to many Amazon customers still not having received their pre-ordered boxes, so I don’t know whether to believe the (to date) 46 one star reviews like “Very Poor Service”, “Pathetic amazon”, “Amazon can’t deliver squat” (mostly saying it would probably be a good game if it ever gets delivered), or the 36 five star reviews like “Shame on you Amazon”, “Never again Amazon”, “Amazon fail” (who are absolutely adamant that it is an excellent game, despite not actually having access to it thanks to the lack of delivery).

Fortunately m’colleague also ordered from Amazon, and is therefore in a position to deliver the definitive review: “7/10 Best game I haven’t played this year!”

5 thoughts on “The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few Even If The Box Hasn’t Been Delivered Yet

  1. Fnord

    I wonder how much of this is Amazon’s fault, and how much is UPS (which handled release day delivery).

    If I were on worse terms with my neighbor, I might not have gotten my copy. It was delivered to the wrong house, despite being correctly addressed.

  2. Melmoth

    I received an email from Amazon saying that they were still having trouble delivering the game because of the snow, which I assume is down to the carrier, but is also a pretty lousy excuse outside of the Northern Hebrides.

  3. Melmoth

    Under normal circumstances I would have gone for the digital download first, but I have boxes for all the other WoW expansions, so I felt I ought to get the box for this one too.

    It’s almost like I have some sort of obsessive compulsive disorder or something; jeez, I hope they never come up with a game genre which takes advantage of that.

  4. FraidOfTheLight

    @Melmoth: if there were an in-game achievement for buying all the expansions the non-digital way, no doubt everyone would do that.

    Incidentally, the Cataclysm box is on sale for £25 in the shops, which is only slightly more than Amazon.

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