Slitherine

There is a very strange situation developing on Metacritic and Gamespot.

Someone has been creating many dummy accounts and posting false reviews. They have created accounts for Slitherine, Matrix and the Lordz and are pretending to be us and posting false positive reviews. These reviews have been copied and pasted from other CTGW reviews. At least they are reviews of the the right game...

These are the false developer accounts that were created:
http://www.metacritic.com/user/MatrixGames2012
http://www.metacritic.com/user/SlitherineGames
http://www.metacritic.com/user/LordzGames

These accounts were not set up by us.

Then they have created many more accounts giving very bad reviews. These reviews are copied and pasted from completely different games. You can tell because they talk about features not in the game. For example there are no doors & dungeons in Commander the Great War!

All these accounts have only 1 review created just to post post a bad review about CTGW. These accounts are listed below - E.g.
http://www.metacritic.com/user/JMiles - this one talks about "Rugged defence" which is not in the game.
http://www.metacritic.com/user/Gazelle67
http://www.metacritic.com/user/Levada
http://www.metacritic.com/user/jopmores - this one complains the developers are rating their own games...
http://www.metacritic.com/user/Gret - this one talks about the doors and dungeons not working!
http://www.metacritic.com/user/JohnSteed67
http://www.metacritic.com/user/HTTbull - this one talked about inventory management. Inventory - seriously!
http://www.metacritic.com/user/GreatnessWar - this one says its from paradox.

All of the negative and bizarre comments have been marked as helpful by 13 users so not only did the person set up these fake reviews they took the time to go through and like all their fake reviews with other accounts. They also took the time to mark all the real reviews from actual players as unhelpful so all of their fantasy reviews go to the top of the list.

Someone has gone to a lot of effort to do all this across multiple sites.

It is very sad when a small indie developer spends years making a game to be faced with such malicious behavior, than runs the risk of ruining their games chances of success and potentially putting them out of business.

We have contacted Metacritic and Gamespot to try and resolve the issues but its quite difficult for us to explain to someone who doesn't know the game that these reviews are complete fantasy and made up.

If anyone has any information about the culprits we'd really appreciate it.

The other thing that would help is for anyone who can spare the time to report the abuse by clicking the link on the false reviews to add weight to our argument that these are completely spurious.

Please share this news as the more people who know what is going on for real, the less damage that can be done to the game.

Disappointing to say the least...

If you've bought the game and have a bit of time, it would be very much appreciated if you could review the game on these sites. It goes without saying that the more honest reviews that are posted, the less influence this ... individual ... will have over the average scores.

My knee jerk reaction, based on absolutely no actual information at all, is "I bet this is somehow related to that super-weird meltdown at wargamer.com." http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/878 ... g-farewell

Bet it was someone you banned !!!

We haven't banned anyone I'm aware of! Even if we had you think they would target us rather than a small indie developer. I guess you can't expect someone who would undertake such actions to have much in the way of brains....

Its the way they cut and paste good reviews of CTGW for the fake developer reviews and bad reviews of other games for the bad reviews that makes it totally transparent that its a malicious attack. I guess that means they couldn't find any actual bad reviews of the game to use!

IainMcNeil wrote:All these accounts have only 1 review created just to post post a bad review about CTGW. These accounts are listed below - E.g.
http://www.metacritic.com/user/JMiles - this one talks about "Rugged defence" which is not in the game.
http://www.metacritic.com/user/jopmores - this one complains the developers are rating their own games...
http://www.metacritic.com/user/Gret - this one talks about the doors and dungeons not working!

Iain the comments you make about these posts aren't accurate. JMiles and jopmores haven't posted any reviews and Gret doesn't make any comments about doors and dungeons.

I don't doubt you are correct in your assertion of being under attack, but if you are going to critise posts then you need to be accurate otherwise it looks like you are trying to falsely discredit people who don't like your games.

If all these posts are genuinely believed to be posts from 1 person then they are probably have the same IP address (I'd be surprised if the person has gone to the trouble to change PCs!). Can't you get those details, demonstrate it is all one person and then get the posts removed?

As a small business owner, it sickens me to hear that!

I love the game! I was disheartened at first after reading a few of the false reviews, but then saw your posts on Facebook and spent several hours playing the game. Great game!

Morbio wrote:
Iain the comments you make about these posts aren't accurate. JMiles and jopmores haven't posted any reviews and Gret doesn't make any comments about doors and dungeons.

I don't doubt you are correct in your assertion of being under attack, but if you are going to critise posts then you need to be accurate otherwise it looks like you are trying to falsely discredit people who don't like your games.

Maybe the reviews were removed already..?

Adlerson wrote:

Morbio wrote:
Iain the comments you make about these posts aren't accurate. JMiles and jopmores haven't posted any reviews and Gret doesn't make any comments about doors and dungeons.

I don't doubt you are correct in your assertion of being under attack, but if you are going to critise posts then you need to be accurate otherwise it looks like you are trying to falsely discredit people who don't like your games.

Maybe the reviews were removed already..?

Maybe, but normally there is a comment to say a post has been removed.

Some of the links Iain posted are the wrong ones. If you want to read the dungeons one, here it is:
http://www.metacritic.com/user/Josh4577

Makes you wonder what game the review was copied from... German game, conversation menus, doors, dungeons, skill trees and characters... sounds like an rpg.

The execution of combat is spotty, and the localization of this German game is a real issue. You receive the "Translation is missing" option in some conversation menus. This message also appears on some doors and gates in the dungeons; while the information isn't essential, it's nice for things in your game to have names. Sometimes, these names are still in German. The game also has some crash bugs, including one annoying crash that happens whenever you try to put more than three points into one of a character's skills, limiting his progression on that portion of the skill tree. These flaws point to one thing: The game isn't finished.

It was a copy and paste from a review of Grotesque Tactics 2 in Gamespot:

http://www.gamespot.com/grotesque-tacti ... w-6348143/

Morbio wrote: If all these posts are genuinely believed to be posts from 1 person then they are probably have the same IP address (I'd be surprised if the person has gone to the trouble to change PCs!). Can't you get those details, demonstrate it is all one person and then get the posts removed?

It's possible, but it's trivial to hide behind, and switch between, proxies.

peterrjohnston wrote:

Morbio wrote: If all these posts are genuinely believed to be posts from 1 person then they are probably have the same IP address (I'd be surprised if the person has gone to the trouble to change PCs!). Can't you get those details, demonstrate it is all one person and then get the posts removed?

It's possible, but it's trivial to hide behind, and switch between, proxies.

Fully agree. It's so easy to do it. It's just a matter of a few mouse clicks and not of changing computer.

It looks like some have been removed already. They were all there earlier today.

All this is puzzling and unfair of whoever's doing it.

If there are any budding detectives out there with information, or can ID the ISP of this person please contact me PM.
We are talking about, the well being of some of the most talented and hard working development teams that I know and this is simply unfair. So I will offer £1000 REWARD for evidence of this individual

Best Regards to all you sleuths
JDM

I'm truly stunned. But it does give substance to something I have felt for years ... our community, wargamers that is, we are not made entirely of paragons of virtue regardless of claims to the contrary. Some wargamers DO indeed do all the crappy things normally associated with mainstream gaming.

There is just no way this could happen out of the blue. Sad truth is our hobby barely exists in the minds of joe schmuck gamer. The average individual entering the average game store simply will never have heard of Slitherine or Matrix Games. Depressing, but its the reality of our horrendously limited marketplace exposure. I have never gotten anything but blank stares from ordinary gamers or store staff when discussing my games

Whoever is doing this has to have an axe to grind. I doubt the tech required to find the perp is very complicated though. But marketplace slander is no small issue. I wish you all speed in dealing with this nuisance.

Know this though guys, your target market is not so dumb We are used to superb games and service from you all, and it will take more than a nutjob to hurt your reputation.

Very bad...

Is Metacritic important? I go there only to find links to official reviews and don't read players reviews...

Metacritic is sadly hugely important for retail and the wider market and this is game that cross over to the wider market and would have had a retail launch next year if this has not destroyed that chance.

I just read this and I would like to suggest a strategy to deal with this, but other than being precise in showing that something fishy is going on and hoping for Metacritic and Gamespot to react is not possible. You must work together with them to figure out who/which account at least is doing this, then action can be taken.

It must be someone with a lot of time and a lot of hate/envy behind all this! A grumpy nerd is most likely.

I can only second DSWargamer and want to point out that Panzer Corps especially reached also non-Wargamers, as such behaviour is unfortunately quite common in usual computer gaming communities. Someone voted 1 or 10 and people feel like having to balance this out by counter-voting and things like that, this is quite common. Going crazy and doing such things, too.

It might also be an overzealous anti-wargame-activist, I am German and having to explain other Germans that I am not a Nazi just because I like to play Panzer General / Panzer Corps and other wargames is getting tedious. People still look at wargamers and think something must be wrong with people playing such games.

(edit: Actually, I rather believe it must be someone active in the wargaming community, if not here at least at wargamer.com)


Anyways - it's for sure bad for sales, but I think Panzer Corps got most customers by positive word of mouth from gamers. Such crappy fake downvotes often only cause people to do proper research on a game and then Panzer Corps really wins.