For a couple of weeks, extreme fans of Gears of War 2 and LittleBigPlanet have been waging a user review war on MetaCritic. Many of these extremely low user reviews were posted before the games were released. Gears of War 2 is scheduled to drop this Friday as a 360 exclusive, but out of (currently) 3,694 votes, it has a user review score of 3.5 out of 10. It is highly unlikely that several thousand people got their hands on the game this early.

This ridiculous attempt to unfairly tarnish the image of Gears of War 2 prompted this editorial response by MetaCritic games editor Marc Doyle:

“My advice for our faithful users is to focus your attention on the Metascore for this game and not the thousands of user votes, most of which have been submitted before said users have played the game. This is a gaming community, and if people want to stuff the ballot box, there’s not much I can do at this point. When we upgrade the registration requirements for participation on the site in the near future, this type of thing won’t happen. We’ll post the full legitimate user reviews upon the game’s release. As always, thanks for using the site.”

When asked for clarification by 1UP, Doyle noted that unbalanced user reviews aren’t normally a problem on MetaCritic, but it had recently become an issue with several console-exclusive titles. As a result, MetaCritic will soon be changing the registration requirements for users, asking for a little more information than simply an email address and a pulse. In the meantime, there’s not much the site can do, except remove users’ ability to vote on games prior to their release.

Yes, these types of guerrilla attacks on games are a shame for the industry. With the high cost of gaming these days, many people are committed to one console, and are defending their consumer choices. But at the same time, it’s pretty easy to tell when user reviews are uninformed and intended as an attack. Despite MetaCritic’s imperfections with user participation, the site’s primary focus is still on critical reviews made by professional outlets.