Once human‘S Rollercoaster ride after the start continues after a new update broke certain items and bases in the game. While this is frustrating for players and a headache for developers, the funniest part is that the new problems came right at the time when developers were asking fans to improve the survival MMO’s rating on Steam by leaving positive reviews.
The post-apocalyptic crafting game has been battling various dramas and controversies since its release, plunging its Steam rating into the “mixed” range, despite massive peak concurrent player numbers and a place among the top five best-selling games on the Valve-owned platform. As a result, yesterday representatives from publisher NetEase and its subsidiary Starry Studio posted on the hugely popular 500,000-person website Once human Discord, and asks fans to visit the game’s Steam review section to raise the rating to “positive” or higher.
But the patch from July 18which was packed with bug fixes, caused some unexpected issues. It essentially ate some players’ items as they tried to drop them and destroyed some bases that people had spent a lot of time building. All of this happened after extensive server maintenance to even get the update finished. Players have since shared Pictures of destroyed houses on the Once human Subreddit and Steam pageand asked each other for help in restoring it. “I was walking around tonight wondering why people build half-bases without walls,” joked one player. “Now I know why.”
“We apologize for the inconvenience,” representatives of the game wrote today on Discord under the title: “Fixes for the ‘Deposit feature causes item loss’ and ‘Area module loss’ issues.” The developers added: “Both issues have been identified and are currently being fixed as quickly as possible.” Once humanThe developers said that players who lost items will have them replaced via in-game mail and that any players negatively affected by the patch will receive “additional compensation.”
Amid this recent chaos, the original post asking players for positive reviews has been deleted (I only saw it initially because of the automatic ping notification from the Discord server). It’s unclear if there will be a new call to action once the mini-crisis is fully over, or if NetEase has changed its mind and is asking players to improve the Steam rating – a not entirely unreasonable request considering how many players like the game and that it is still plagued by unfounded criticism of Once humanData collection guidelines.
“Bad reviews like this can be very damaging to the game and could be the reason it dies. I hope from the bottom of my heart that this doesn’t happen,” wrote a fan posted on the subreddit last week. And the tide seems to be turning. Despite numerous complaints about the latest patch issues, most of the negative Steam reviews have started to subside. We will see how this holds up after Once human reaches its first map and character reset at the end of August.
