Thursday, November 2nd 2017
Metacritic Spammed With Fake Positive Reviews of Assassin's Creed Origins
Metacritic has been invaded by a veritable flood of what appear to be semi-sentient robots, spamming the website with favorable Assassin's Creed Origins reviews. This isn't a common occurrence, but isn't unheard of either - there have been a number of scandals regarding fake reviews on Metacritic and other review score aggregators, with some publishers having even been brought to the center of the discussion.
The semi-sentient part derives from the fact that usernames are obviously a mashing-up of keyboard keys, and no amount of effort has been put towards hiding the fact that these are fake scores. The wording is practically the same, as sometimes even the English in these is of dubious quality. This type of actions usually hurt more a games' reception than help it, if done badly, as these reviews are. So if the idea is to improves Assassin's Creed Origins in the eyes of potential buyers, certainly the fact that these are clearly fake reviews will affect perception negatively. This reminds this editor of those Chinese review farms that were reported some time ago, where entire companies were created that devoted employees towards simply posting positive reviews for apps and programs, while being paid to do so.
"It's not a frequent occurrence - maybe 2 - 3 games a year," Metacritic co-founder Marc Doyle told Kotaku. "We've been moderating those reviews (and suspending those accounts - most off of which [sic] had one single review in their history). The people doing it appear to be changing it up with the chunk of text they keep replicating, but our moderators are working overtime to combat it."
Some user reviews on Metacritic said it best, though: "Ways better than assassins creed unity and assassins creed syndicate, it is more mature and bayek is interseting character, and de historical characters are handeld well."
Sources:
Kotaku, via TechSpot
The semi-sentient part derives from the fact that usernames are obviously a mashing-up of keyboard keys, and no amount of effort has been put towards hiding the fact that these are fake scores. The wording is practically the same, as sometimes even the English in these is of dubious quality. This type of actions usually hurt more a games' reception than help it, if done badly, as these reviews are. So if the idea is to improves Assassin's Creed Origins in the eyes of potential buyers, certainly the fact that these are clearly fake reviews will affect perception negatively. This reminds this editor of those Chinese review farms that were reported some time ago, where entire companies were created that devoted employees towards simply posting positive reviews for apps and programs, while being paid to do so.
33 Comments on Metacritic Spammed With Fake Positive Reviews of Assassin's Creed Origins
Now they also make fake reveiws.
How low are ubisoft willing to go, for selling there crap.
Ubisoft sucks.
They also killed it, so it's a neutral point at best.
PUBG Review-bombed Due to In-game Ads on Steam
Anti temper protecting anti temper and causing 30%-40% additional CPU usage.
Metacritic Spammed With Fake Positive Reviews of Assassin's Creed Origins
Rayman , (the 3 was insane) beyond good and evil... rayman and the raving rabbids wasn't made by him, he was only a character designer, that was just Ubisoft trying to milk the franchise, but then Rayman went back to greatness with Rayman origin (made by him) who also happened to be DRM free.
Or am I giving them too much credit? lol
covfefe
In it's earlier years, Ubisoft had some moments.
They don't want you to be able to make maps and complex missions as that don't make them money.Black Flag after the updates was awesome, well then they spoiled the experience with that add on content which had no were the attention and love.
Did I miss something or is everyone piling on the lemming train of unsubstantiated hate?
They could pay PewDiePie a few hundred thousand and that would probably net them more guaranteed sales than using some backwater Chinese/Russian fake review botnet.
EDIT: I'd go as far to say as this is purposefully being done to bring the game/publisher into a negative light. Astroturfing a bunch of blatantly fake positive reviews is a great way to bring Ubi's and AssCreed's image down.
My thoughts exactly.
Next lets assume there was a cost associated with this, and that cost had to be lower than the perceived benefit. So who would benefit from a lot of positive reviews, with a low cost to a minor amount of players who will actually know, and more importantly care about them being fake? Ahh, Ubisoft would. Do they have "enemy developers" who would do this to undermine them for a few thousand gamers VS the millions they will probably sell to console users, and average PC gamers? None stand out.
So for your idea to be true, there would have to be someone out there who is stupid enough to think that spamming some game title as positive in hopes that a few thousands angry gamers would not purchase it, and instead purchase something else...... well. It fails the razor test.