I'm happy to take the blame on the 3.5. He's using a scale I use and encouraged him to use when we brought him on staff. One of its primary objectives is to avoid the bloat caused by the MBAs of the world conditioning everyone for
Net Promoter Score. This has roughly been telephone game'd and trickled down to internet reviews for everything from videogames to books to movies where everything below an 8 out of 10 or its equivalent is somehow not good. I find that doesn't reflect the reality of the world very well. There's plenty of enjoyable, recommendable stuff that gets beat up when converted into some quick-hit numerical score when viewed through that kind of lens.
Anyhow, this scale roughly breaks down as follows, but keep in mind these are
guidelines and still highly subjective in the end:
Simple Version- 0 - Total disaster, but a purely theoretical score. Hopefully.
- 0.5 - Everything is very bad - writing, art, all of it.
- 1 - Mostly bad
- 1.5 - Bad
- 2 - Not good
- 2.5 - Acceptable / 'Meh'
- 3 - Average
- 3.5 - Good
- 4 - Very good
- 4.5 - Great
- 5 - Perfection or near to it
Longer Version- 0 - Reserved for the worst of the worst. Examples: Continuum were that to be released today, or Regeneration One #100's final page - ok so we don't review single pages, but if we did, I give that one a 0.
- 0.5 - A technical disaster, with poor writing, storytelling, art, and mistakes abound, but we can at least find one and probably only one nice thing to say and say it honestly.
- 1 - Not good at all, but has at least a redeeming quality or two.
- 1.5 - A poor effort overall, but serves its purpose and has at least some obvious production effort and only some truly egregious flaws.
- 2 - Not quite good enough. Maybe the art is very bad, maybe there are a lot of plot holes, maybe the characters are completely one dimensional. Something isn't right, but a little more work in one area could make it easily better.
- 2.5 - Border of acceptable from an overall quality standpoint. Has at least one large flaw in production (includes art), plot, or characterization that ticks it below average.
- 3 - Average. Not super bad, not super good, but you might sometimes even just say regular old "good", sometimes. Moves the plot along, has no significant flaws, but stirs indifference in the reader as the primary emotion. Just moving things along.
- 3.5 - Somewhat above average. Basically, an average book with 1-2 great moments. If we're really honest about it, most books we'd consider "good" are probably around here and 4.
- 4 - Very good. Serves its purpose, has several great moments, is of good-to-great production quality, but may have a minor quibble or two holding it back from greatness.
- 4.5 - Great. Only 1-2 points of note holding it back from perfection. Could be fantastic in every way but the reviewer has a hard time with InsertArtistYouDon'tLike's art, or something like that.
- 5 - Best of the best. Should be reserved for only the finest works. No notable, objective problems. Exceptions: sometimes a book may excel in an extreme direction while not necessarily being the "one of the finest works", an example being MTMTE's Revolution one-shot issue where as a work of comedy it became something exceptional, but if regarded as a serious dramatic work it'd get something much lower.
Was a 4 right for this one? That's what I'd have given it personally, but it ultimately comes down to what the reviewer wants to do and how they feel. I'd suggest our site's readers take everything with a +/- half a point leeway in either direction at the bare minimum just to account for personal tastes. It bears repeating that it's all very subjective and even then, what I've put down here are
guidelines and not rules. A review from me will have a different feel to it and scoring than one from WilliamJames88 or Mr. Micromaster. That's probably good because all I do is ape Va'al anyhow years after his departure from the site and if everyone else did that, these would get too homogenous to be interesting. Tigertrack doesn't tend to even give scores, and that's fine. Maybe I should follow his wisdom.
Relevant any time I see posts unhappy with reviews (and there are more that most of you can't see because they're waiting mod approval for new user accounts, which is not in my wheelhouse): we're still recruiting new reviewers and comics staff, btw. If anyone's interested please shoot me a DM or use the contact form at the bottom of the site. If you don't like the reviews being posted, this ain't a scary walled garden or bullpen of pro writers or anything like that, it's a fansite, and volunteers are welcome to take a crack at it