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
To say Ubisoft makes only bad games is just plain wrong. They've made mistakes but there are Publishers who are MUCH much worse. Activision, EA comes to mind.
This was probably done by a bored kid. I mean, who on earth goes to Metacritic to make a purchase decision on a game?
For a laugh and a giggle is the only reason i ever visit that horrible site.
Lets see if I can make a list of failed releases
The Division
AC: Unity
AC: Origins
For Honor
HOMM VI + Xpac
Watch Dogs
....
I've never been much of a fan of games from Ubisoft - I'm sure there are some I own or have owned in the past that I had no issues with or really liked, but they don't stand out at the moment.
Far Cry (original - pre Ubi) was amazing. I just recently re-installed it from my CDs (yeah, that's right, still got the original discs....man, I feel old) and I had to dig out my burned DVDs to find the game patches for all my older games and then locate the one that held Far Cry patches. I got about an hour into it and it's still pretty cool to see the AI being halfway decent at flanking your position and searching you out. There are games still being released to this day that suck with AI.
When Ubi picked up the Far Cry IP and released FarCry 2 - I pretty much lost all interest in FarCry series. I played FarCry 3, it was a decent shooter, but that's about all it was.
Overall, I'm just really not that impressed with their Uplay service and the AC games have become repetitive and dull, regardless of how well the ship battles play out. The first handful of AC games were entertaining due to the uniqueness of them and how they were able to add to them, but once Revelations came out, that was about the last I could stand playing the same thing over and over again. I did stumble through ACIII and I do have AC: Rogue, but only because it was dirt cheap and I've already grown bored of the game and I'm only about 30% of the way through the main story.
I'm hoping Ubi isn't stupid enough to have places putting out fake reviews for their AC:O game.....but you never know. Sometimes these companies keep surprising you with the stupid crap they continue to do.
that somehow doesnt seem very likely, unless said kid has 14 hands to make said accounts with.
This is the same company that puts 3 layers of DRM on games now. It wouldnt surprise me if the did this thinking it would make their game look good, them being completely removed from reality and all.
Seriously though, if not them, who else gains from this?