BTW I just looked up the list of reviewers having an impact on the OpenCritic score, at https://opencritic.com/faq under the section "Where can I find a list of all publications on OpenCritic?". The list of Top Critics is separate from the others, and include The Jimquisition, The Angry Joe Show and Skill Up in example And their opinion is weighted as much as the one from IGN. And I think this is a good thing.

Edit: Forgot why I was looking this up. I could not find The Critical Drinker in the list of Top Critics there. So you are good to go. ^^

But what do they filter on?

Details how Metacritic is operating is uknown. Another reason to avoid it.

There’s certain critics (think right wing nut jobs like Critical Drinker) that I wouldn’t want impacting a score as they’d just rate it low because there’s a minority included in a game.

That's your personal taste and this is good. But imagine someone else decides for you who can impact the score and how much. If you like Metacritic, that's okay. But OpenCritic takes a more general approach and does not discriminate (at least not as much as Metacritic) and provides a "real" average value. In example I don't want IGN to impact the score too much too, but Metacritic values scores from places like IGN higher than most other platforms. And with excluding Critical Drinker, IGN's opinion has even higher impact on the score.

If you really like that, by all means keep using and looking up IGN. I don't think its the worst in the world or anything like that. I just think OpenCritic operates a little better and that's it. My initial point was to provide and alternative to Metacritic, because I do not like how it operates overall.

The point is not that OpenCritic matches your taste or expectations of a game better than Metacritic. The point is that OpenCritic is more fair by giving everyone the same voice (average instead weighting) and allow more people to speak / vote. This does not guarantee a better result for you, it just makes it more fair and even. This way OpenCritic has less control of the result than Metacritic, because Metacritic has a hidden algorithm that weights voices differently.

Is it possible, even a little bit, that people just have a different opinion than you about a video game? Surely if there was flagrant bribery happening, someone would have receipts and a conscience that compelled them to share it.