‘No plans’ to bring back developer score on Metacritic

Metacritic’s Mark Doyle says the site has “no plans” to reintroduce individual developer scores, after dropping them earlier this week.
As part of a interview at GamesIndustry, Doyle states: “We have no plans to bring it back.”
Throughout, Doyle insists that the intent behind the feature was always just to provide more information to the Metacritic user. “… if you click on this person, ‘Oh, this person also worked on these other 10 games.’ It’s just a way to find other products that they might like to play.”
It’s a spirited defence, but it rings slightly hollow when he claims that “… even with that old career score – which we’ve now gotten rid of – we were never going to say: ‘Here’s the top 10 level designers of all time on Metacritic.’ It was merely a way to collect this data and just take an average of the individual credits.”
If the intent was always just the collection and presentation of information, making it easier for users to find similar games a person has worked on, why was it necessary to assign a numerical value? By definition, this ‘score’ suggested a ranking structure; something which Doyle still doesn’t seem to understand or accept.
Aside from the numerical debate, however, Doyle does reveal something rather interesting about the difficulty Metacritic has encountered when trying to get accurate employee information from publishers. “We’ve found it very tough in some cases to say who has been responsible for a game,” he says “I think that is an issue, of the industry not needing or not wanting to put that information out there.” Though he also admits “I don’t know exactly what’s behind that.”
Metacritics stated aim to give the proper people the correct credit is a noble one. Hopefully they can refrain from giving those same people a rating out of 100.