Earlier this week, members a three-person sports studio TurtleBlaze has discovered their new game, Kunai, they had been purged by what they called bad bad schools. Metacritic user scores have been increased from 8.1 to 1.7 to 1.7, with a light red box for all to see.
"We had a bomb review," TurtleBlaze devs wrote in a post during the week in the development area Gamasutra. It was the latest in a line of similar campaigns against AAA developers and indie developers.
While the problem is still being resolved—Kunai it is roll back to a more sophisticated 7,7-step setting forced the overall user experience of the game to a lower level and also showed how easy it was to use user reviews to confuse the game creators.
Kunai a small cleanup platform about a ninja computer tablet that arrived on the switch with a PC on February 6. The second game of TurtleBlaze, and as a result, were paying close attention to reviews in the weeks following the launch. On the 17th, they saw that the user's points had been set.
"Update bombing," or the act of relentlessly sending poor reviews of reviews to aggregates like Metacritic to reduce total user traffic, occurs for a variety of reasons. It can happen naturally, as in the beginning Warcraft 3 fans have expressed their displeasure lately Renewal remaster en masse, or cruelly, as Borderlands 3 to find is limited of poor scores on Steam due to its lack of time to keep up with the Epic Games Store. In the case of Kunai, such a short-term decline told developers that there is something unusual.
After harassing the Internet, demons have stumbled upon now deleted Reddit post suggesting that Kunai The bombing review was a scam and was done by one person who seemed to do this in another game as well.
TurtleBlaze says see how easy it is to fake the scores on Metacritic when they are investigating the issue. Unlike Steam, which requires users to buy the game before reviewing it, Metacritic users' reviews are open to everyone as soon as they open an account. It's as simple as signing up with a temporary email address, sharing bad points, signing out and repeating a cycle. I was able to create three new Metacritic accounts immediately in a row without my IP address to turn off any alarm, as one might expect. And while I stand short of beating any games, it's easy to see how this can be exploited.
Kotaku asked Metacritic what the site is doing right now to prevent bomb attacks and whether they are looking for any additional gaps in situations such as KunaiNext time.
"Metacritic takes the issues of fraud seriously and has some policy in place to maintain integrity," a Metacritic spokesperson told Kotaku by email. “The moderators regularly check the site and remove any entries that are not in our guidelines above the checklist where Metacritic users may be abnormal. Moderators review and delete any entries that violate our terms of service. "
While it is true that negative reviews are something that all creative people have to deal with, it should not be so easy to manage the game's reputation independently. Moderation can only do so much in the face of hundreds of bad faith attempts to reduce the value of the game.
