Remove/Report troll reviews, or limit it to people that own it? Thread

Hey Desura peeps

My game here: Indiedb.com has been getting a lot of troll reviews, people giving it 1/10 because they disagree with the subject matter (for whatever reason) and they don't even own the game: Indiedb.com

I'm fine with people expressing their opinions, and I think it's perfectly valid to use all points on the review scale in the case of something being offensive or really bad/lazy/whatever, but this is just trolling. When Desura 2.0 launches, would it be possible to limit reviews to people who actually own the game? For some reason Desura gives huge weight to the people who give really low scores, it brings our average way down whereas the people who actually bought and played the game are giving us 7/8/9 out of 10.

It's not a huge issue, but I'm not a big fan of the ability to troll like this.

Cheers
Lachlan

just like some ppl gave you some 8-9-10 without reviews...

ANyhow I really don't know your game all I know is the description that said:

group of characters who suddenly have to adjust to putting on a bra every morning.

wait what??

It's a gender swap rom com. And I'm fine with 8-9-10's without reviews being removed too, you want a review section to be of people's opinions of the game that they've played, and I think having fanboy reviews giving you 10's out of 10 can be harmful too, it makes it look like the developers made spam accounts just to bump up their game.

If those were removed alongside the 1's I'd be very happy, I'm all for a fair system

Perhaps people can see past the numerous 1 trolling? When I look up a game I always dive in the written reviews to find out the specifics and don't care so much about the numerical rating.

shadowflar3 wrote: Perhaps people can see past the numerous 1 trolling? When I look up a game I always dive in the written reviews to find out the specifics and don't care so much about the numerical rating.

Yeah, that's what I do too.

If it's a gender swap, why not mention it instead of the bra line?

Zireael07 wrote: If it's a gender swap, why not mention it instead of the bra line?

The title is 'Gender Bender DNA Twister Extreme', the fact it's Gender Swap is pretty clear :p

I am actually interested in this game although still thinking about downloading it....

Zetsub wrote:

Zireael07 wrote: If it's a gender swap, why not mention it instead of the bra line?

The title is 'Gender Bender DNA Twister Extreme', the fact it's Gender Swap is pretty clear :p

The point he was making is that if you aren't serious about the marketing then people aren't going to take you seriously.

Imagine if a game like LIMBO had it's tagline:

"Find your lost sister who you had gratuitous sex with in a wonderful world."

Basically, when you crack jokes at this sort of subject matter it makes it seem like you have little to no respect for transgender/transexuals.

I think the tagline is pretty straightforward and descriptive. And for I all I can imagine it does sell the game. It makes the reader think the game is not too serious and boobs are involved. If that doesn't sound good to someone I suspect it's simply because they aren't the target demographic.

Basically, when you crack jokes at this sort of subject matter it makes it seem like you have little to no respect for transgender/transexuals.

Oh please. By that logic Super Mario is offensive because being a plumber is no fun or joke. Try to resist the urge to play the racist card it doesn't belong here.

There is nothing wrong with making lighter themed games and not trying to make everything bold, epic and serious.

We've actually spoken to lots of transexuals both prior and during development, and the response has been really positive.

Back to your point, the only way to do this, would be have your game only on desura, and then let only the people who have finished the game be able to rate it, thats a very closed view on ratings.

I do however agree with your main point of people down rating due to their opinion on the subject matter, but for the most part thats a risk you take when making a game with a theme that can be taken the wrong way, I'll pass this feedback to the site developers.

Edited by: TKAzA

"No, our game doesn't go in that direction at all, and we wouldn't make a game like that. We tried our best not to offend anyone with the game, it's a humorous game but it does tackle a lot of serious issues in it, and the characters are complicated and have depth. "

"A Romantic Comedy Visual Novel that follows a group of characters who suddenly have to adjust to putting on a bra every morning. "

You don't have to be ultra super serious in games.

The reason people have an issue is due to these statements from the developer. There is literally nothing on the store page that leads us to believe the developer takes the subject matter in any serious fashion in any capacity.

Looking at the screenshots I'm looking at the typical huge breasted girls talking to huge breasted anthropomorphic cats.

I simply see nothing serious in this product despite the developer saying otherwise.

A feature to filter out the votes of non-owners would be encouraging more realistic feedback to both the developers and browsers.

To be honest, all those 10s/9s/8s/7s seem as unrealistic as the ones, I'm not a fan of VAs and doubt it was written by some maverick wordsmith to warrant such a high rating. I'd honestly take the three as the real score considering it lacks gameplay.

It's part of having public ratings. Modern Warfare 3 got a lot of 1 ratings because it didn't support dedicated servers. Nothing to do with the gameplay but it caused a backlash of bad ratings.

So, either deal with it or don't read ratings.

EDIT: Having ratings only for finished games would be the best idea. Any game could change drastically between a preview release and it's final one.

Mods, meh. They can get ratings at every stage.

Edited by: TheHappyFriar

I'm dealing with it fine (our reviews are really good), but I find it surprising that Desura gives such huge weight to 1's and 2's. It pulls the average way further down than it should, I'm not exactly sure how the math works.

Currently dealing with this on Festival.

"77 MB for 10 minutes of play" Rating: 1

I find it quite ironic given that the description of the game said 30 minutes tops.

Either way, a "1" rating should be given if a game is broken. Festival is not.

There should be some means of damage control for developers when it comes to reviews without just outright being a dictator about what reviews get through.

Zetsub is still right they need to make more strict powers spam is very easy for those who desire it.

SirChurro wrote: Zetsub is still right they need to make more strict powers spam is very easy for those who desire it.

It'd be nice if developers and only developers could at least report absurd reviews and this eventually gets looked at by an admin of Desura who then determines whether the review is valid.

I don't even care if the review is still visible. I just find it annoying that people are arriving at my game page to see a 4.9 even though at least two "1" reviews are purely bogus.

Hell, just make the reviews not affect the rating if an admin finds them bogus. As I said, don't care that they're visible, I only take issue with it swinging the rating of the game page which I can't even prevent from being seen in the case of bogus reviews.

Edited by: Cleril

Cleril wrote:

SirChurro wrote: Zetsub is still right they need to make more strict powers spam is very easy for those who desire it.

It'd be nice if developers and only developers could at least report absurd reviews and this eventually gets looked at by an admin of Desura who then determines whether the review is valid.

I don't even care if the review is still visible. I just find it annoying that people are arriving at my game page to see a 4.9 even though at least two "1" reviews are purely bogus.

Hell, just make the reviews not affect the rating if an admin finds them bogus. As I said, don't care that they're visible, I only take issue with it swinging the rating of the game page which I can't even prevent from being seen in the case of bogus reviews.

Agreed.

Uggh, we just got our game trolled by a bunch of homophobes... Again... Gotta love people giving us more 1/10's...

Really wish you could downvote the reviews thata don't provide text at least. The "Good Review/Bad Review" system that allocates more weight to reviews depending on how upvoted/downvoted they are is good, but you can't do that when they don't assign text to their review, so the troll reviews remain.

Even though 80% of our reviews are 8 and above, our average rating is 7.7 because we've had 10 people give us a 1/10, none of whom have played the game.

I'm thinking of buying it next month.I like the looks and sounds of it.

Id really love the ability to limit reviews to just ones that provide a text and/or those who have bought the game. (Or downloaded it if free on desura). Maybe with an option to note next to the review what version they bought if there is more then one.

If someone has paid money for your game and gives you a bad review.. Well, That is life. Clearly they where interested enough by your PR pitch to buy it but then somewhere between your PR pitch and the game itself things went wrong.

But people giving you a bad review because they don't like your PR pitch? That is just stupid. They should just move on, this game was clearly not made for them and they don't have any interest in it.

Reviews should be for the game, Not for the PR pitch.

Gaming is great because we get to embrace things freely that we could or would not in real life. Be that shooting people, swinging from trees and jumping from building to building, Or as the Zetsub said 'adjusting to wearing a bra in the morning'. if you don't like some gener there is over 10,000 other games on indieDB to try.

I guess because the rating system for games / desura is based off the same rating system used for mods, which by no means is a perfect system, this problem is inherent cross site.
We will discuss ways to improve the review system but unless desura locks the ability to review games, unless they are on the members desura client i can't see how this will be fixed unless the hole review system is split, theres no way for us to track to members what games have been downloaded on indiedb, so you would still get people abusing this system via there, or moddb.
Its a tricky one.

Well, at the end of the day isn't Desura more visited and recognized than indiedb or moddb?