Review-bombing Imperator Rome is not the solution...

[J Farrell]

Can you provide evidence to this mass review bombing of I:R? Where are they organizing etc?

Review Bombing is generally referring to a mass demographic of people, usually with a nationalistic, social agenda or in response to massive greed/incompetence. I:R hovering around 50% on Steam seems comparable to people's reception of the game, even on this forum.

What a worthless comment. If you actually wanted evidence, you'd simply go to Steam and read.

But hey, if you're that lazy and/or obtuse, sure. Here are some recent quotes:

"Then on the 2 year anniversary of the game, you say "LOL WE'RE NOT UPDATING ANYMORE THANKS FOR THE MONEEEEEEEEEEEEEY"

"Paradox has announced they are no longer supporting this game. I know that isn't what they said, but I do not believe for two seconds they will come back 1 or 2 years from now and resurrect it. They have no track record of doing so."

"Now that our game is playable, we decided not to update it anymore"
Paradox - 2021.

"Paradox is abandoning the game despite it needing a lot more work."

 

[toegut]

What a worthless comment. If you actually wanted evidence, you'd simply go to Steam and read.

But hey, if you're that lazy and/or obtuse, sure. Here are some recent quotes:

"Then on the 2 year anniversary of the game, you say "LOL WE'RE NOT UPDATING ANYMORE THANKS FOR THE MONEEEEEEEEEEEEEY"

"Paradox has announced they are no longer supporting this game. I know that isn't what they said, but I do not believe for two seconds they will come back 1 or 2 years from now and resurrect it. They have no track record of doing so."

"Now that our game is playable, we decided not to update it anymore"
Paradox - 2021.

"Paradox is abandoning the game despite it needing a lot more work."

dude, I'm agreeing with you that recent review-bombing will damage the game and drive away new buyers.

 

[Daft]

[...]

I would rather say that companies are not entitled of their fanbase, but have to keep the quality up to keep them happy. Downplaying the voices of fans complaining about the quality is a disservice to both the company and the fans.

[...]

Technically, that is how companies sort of work. If they do shady stuff, release shoddy products or services, they either go out of business or, in the case of an established company with a consumer base, swap out the consumer base.

That process might be painful for the existing consumer base, and they can rightly complain and be angry during this process, that is natural. Look at EA. I essentially went from buying lots of their games to just about none. I just fell out of love with their practices.

But they are still around, because there is an audience. They have a consumer base. And I'm not saying that PDX is EA, I still trust the PDX and hold them in high regard. But then again, I NEVER pre-order games or buy stuff on promises alone.

My point is, I think the system works and that the companies work essentially as they should. Only thing is the process isn't really fast. Companies lose or swap user base over time.

 

[J Farrell]

dude, I'm agreeing with you that recent review-bombing will damage the game and drive away new buyers.

The post of mine you quoted here wasn't a reply to you. I know that we're on the same page here.

 

[Gatkramp]

Can you provide evidence to this mass review bombing of I:R? Where are they organizing etc?

Review Bombing is generally referring to a mass demographic of people, usually with a nationalistic, social agenda or in response to massive greed/incompetence. I:R hovering around 50% on Steam seems comparable to people's reception of the game, even on this forum.

Well, there was the steam reviews that went from overwhelmingly positive to overwhelmingly negative immediately after the announcement, despite absolutely no change in the quality of the game for multiple months beforehand. Then there was the people on here that were gleefully posting screenshots of the review average and charts of the review trends. Same thing happened on Reddit. This happened to coincide with calls, by these people and others, for a boycott and threatening to warn others off PDS games.

With a community as small as Imperator's a relatively small number of people can gave a disproportionate effect. In this instance, the effect was to essentially destroy the reputation of this game forever (reversing all the gains over 2 years worth of patches). It doesn't affect PDS (sales of this game were likely negligible at this point) or their other games (who have much, much larger communities than Imperator). It just destroys Imperator and damages the health of the Imperator community (fewer potential players, fewer sales, likely fewer mods, lowered chance of future content/minor patches, lower likelihood of a sequel).

Criticising PDS is entirely legitimate. Being upset is fine. Hell, deciding to vote with your feet and not buy any more PDS games is understandable. But mass reviews of a game that don't actually base it on the quality of the game is just stupid and dishonest. Many of those reviews even said it was a good game, but then gave it a negative rating.

 

[MrNewVegas]

What a worthless comment. If you actually wanted evidence, you'd simply go to Steam and read.

But hey, if you're that lazy and/or obtuse, sure. Here are some recent quotes:

"Then on the 2 year anniversary of the game, you say "LOL WE'RE NOT UPDATING ANYMORE THANKS FOR THE MONEEEEEEEEEEEEEY"

"Paradox has announced they are no longer supporting this game. I know that isn't what they said, but I do not believe for two seconds they will come back 1 or 2 years from now and resurrect it. They have no track record of doing so."

"Now that our game is playable, we decided not to update it anymore"
Paradox - 2021.

"Paradox is abandoning the game despite it needing a lot more work."

This is a fine thing to include in your review. As current price with current content, Imperator is a 66% off kind of game. You could push people up higher with the promise of a game that will increase in quality over time. It would be a good investment, you might say, it will age like fine wine and you will not regret it in the fullness of time.
Now, no such time can ever develop, except with a modding community that will abandon the game quickly once the developers do (this is not Victoria II after all, it holds no special place in our heart).

I will not apologise for leaving a review that says "this game is not up to the standards it sets itself, nor the price tag it expects me to pay for the privilege of playing it" and you should not slander anyone who wants to express their steam review in a pithy way because Paradox abandoned the game.

 

[Stianas]

Man how I am downvoted in this thread just because I sympathize a little bit with Paradox. I think that kind of proves their point a little bit. They could have just closed the forums though. "Business decision. Done and dusted." If that is the state of affairs and it cannot be improved I wouldn't even blame them for doing that. But they haven't. Which means that they still hope they can get constructive input from their players.

I will not apologise for leaving a review that says "this game is not up to the standards it sets itself, nor the price tag it expects me to pay for the privilege of playing it" and you should not slander anyone who wants to express their steam review in a pithy way because Paradox abandoned the game.

Paradox can be criticized, but you yourself should be shielded from criticism? Can you not even see how hypocritical that is? Are you not an adult who are responsible for your own actions? Are we really there where we think that the Steam reviews should be a "safe space" for venting? If you do any kind of public statement you need to be prepared to also defend it. A poorly written Steam review is not exempt from that. If you cannot handle that criticism, you don't leave reviews. It's not more difficult than that.

 

[EarlKonrad]

It is a pretty strange argument to say that if there aren't any good ways to react it is okay to react in a negative way. It is not my responsbility to find appropriate ways for people to react to and handle their own feelings. People have a responsibility to handle that on their own. But in general in life it is a good idea not to worry too much about things that are outside of your control.

Well, there was the steam reviews that went from overwhelmingly positive to overwhelmingly negative immediately after the announcement, despite absolutely no change in the quality of the game for multiple months beforehand. Then there was the people on here that were gleefully posting screenshots of the review average and charts of the review trends. Same thing happened on Reddit. This happened to coincide with calls, by these people and others, for a boycott and threatening to warn others off PDS games.

With a community as small as Imperator's a relatively small number of people can gave a disproportionate effect. In this instance, the effect was to essentially destroy the reputation of this game forever (reversing all the gains over 2 years worth of patches). It doesn't affect PDS (sales of this game were likely negligible at this point) or their other games (who have much, much larger communities than Imperator). It just destroys Imperator and damages the health of the Imperator community (fewer potential players, fewer sales, likely fewer mods, lowered chance of future content/minor patches, lower likelihood of a sequel).

Criticising PDS is entirely legitimate. Being upset is fine. Hell, deciding to vote with your feet and not buy any more PDS games is understandable. But mass reviews of a game that don't actually base it on the quality of the game is just stupid and dishonest. Many of those reviews even said it was a good game, but then gave it a negative rating.

There is something you both are missing about steam reviews. Before you can publish a review steam asks you "would you recommend this game?", To which you can answer with either a "yes" (thumbs up) or "no" (thumbs down).

I'd hazard a guess that the vast majority of users care more about this metric (how many would recommend the game Vs how many wouldn't recommend the game) rather than the individual reviews. Partially because their quality can vary wildly (some are jokes, some complain about product not working, some are well thought out critics, etc.) and because the review consensus tends to be, more often than not, correct. A game that naturally sits at 90% tends to be great, a game that sits at 70% tends to have its issues but still be enjoyable, a game that sits at 50% usually has many problems but may also be worth giving a try.

At the end of the day what is called review bombing would be better described as consumer dissatisfaction. When a group of people leave a review saying that they would not recommend the game in mass that serves to warn potential buyers that something is going on with the game. It may be a controversial update, newly discovered of introduced bugs, price changes, anti-consumer practices, etc. In the case of I:R it should be Cristal clear that a portion of the new reviews have to do with the game being put on a hiatus.

Ultimately, a good portion of reviews, be they pksite or negative, won't never have anything to do with the game in question. If you look at DS 2 for example, many of the top rated positive reviews to this day are jokes saying that you can 2H fists, git Gus, etc.

 

[Stianas]

Damn, if I owned the Leviathan DLC right now I would have gone to the Steam reviews and left it a positive review. "For the memes"

After all the ends justify the memes, right?

Peace out. I'm outta this thread now.

 

[J Farrell]

This is a fine thing to include in your review. As current price with current content, Imperator is a 66% off kind of game. You could push people up higher with the promise of a game that will increase in quality over time. It would be a good investment, you might say, it will age like fine wine and you will not regret it in the fullness of time.
Now, no such time can ever develop, except with a modding community that will abandon the game quickly once the developers do (this is not Victoria II after all, it holds no special place in our heart).

I will not apologise for leaving a review that says "this game is not up to the standards it sets itself, nor the price tag it expects me to pay for the privilege of playing it" and you should not slander anyone who wants to express their steam review in a pithy way because Paradox abandoned the game.

That's great. None of my quotes said anything remotely like that.

 

[LSF]

I have changed my review to a negative one because the value proposition has been changed, not because development has been ceased (although that has an indirect effect on it.)

The counterargument that PDX and the die-hard fans use for rushed or broken games/DLC's that are drip fed is usually something along the lines of "you are not buying the game/DLC. You are buying it and the promise of further development, patching and added content for years to come".

All that nonsense from the last paragraph, that no other publisher would get away with for so long, is now no longer applicable.

I gave it a positive review after 2.0 on the basis of "it's fun now, needs a bit more development, but certainly worth your time already".

With the recent announcement 'that promise' has been taken away and it's now heavily overpriced for what it is and has many bugs left unpatched (nothing big, but it's certainly not a flawless game by any stretch).

To re-iterate: the value proposition has significantly changed and this mandates a different opinion when trying to review a game.

EDIT: Spelling errors

I think I disagree with most of you because I have another meaning for a review.

For me a review is about the game per se in its current state, not about its future state (that we cannot judge) or its price.

Again an example from GOG. I really like Heroes of Might and Magic 3. IMHO it is a 5/5 game.

If GOG for some weird reason put its price as high as 300 euros I would still give it a 5/5 even though I would never pay 300 euro for it. Because Im analysing its quality, not its cost-benefit.

When you rate the games looking at their prices you are not helping potential buyers. They have different budgets. Prices change over time, in the long term they tend to get cheaper, in short term the price oscillates with sales.

That is a problem not only on games. Almost everything under consumers' reviews suffer from that, people usually dont differentiate quality analysis from cost-benefit analysis.

It is also a problem from Steam. We should be able to give stars, 0-5 or 0-10, not only recommended or not.

 

[J Farrell]

I think I disagree with most of you because I have another meaning for a review.

For me a review is about the game per se in its current state, not about its future state (that we cannot judge) or its price.

Again an example from GOG. I really like Heroes of Might and Magic 3. IMHO it is a 5/5 game.

If GOG for some weird reason put its price as high as 300 euros I would still give it a 5/5 even though I would never pay 300 euro for it. Because Im analysing its quality, not its cost-benefit.

When you rate the games looking at their prices you are not helping potential buyers. They have different budgets. Prices change over time, in the long term they tend to get cheaper, in short term the price oscillates with sales.

That is a problem not only on games. Almost everything under consumers' reviews suffer from that, people usually dont differentiate quality analysis from cost-benefit analysis.

It is also a problem from Steam. We should be able to give stars, 0-5 or 0-10, not only recommended or not.

If Steam allowed a numerical rating it wouldn't help matters. You'd just see a bunch of 0's come flooding in, with a bunch of 10's to "counteract" them, a la Metacritic.

 

[Godd_Howard]

People actually doing that? Why not bomb in the other direction instead, get it to 90+ so they get the message.

 

[LSF]

If Steam allowed a numerical rating it wouldn't help matters. You'd just see a bunch of 0's come flooding in, with a bunch of 10's to "counteract" them, a la Metacritic.

It is not what happens in GOG.

It is not what happens in IMDB for movies.

Dont lose all your faith in humankind. Do it like me, lose most of your faith, but not all of it!

 

[MrNewVegas]

Man how I am downvoted in this thread just because I sympathize a little bit with Paradox. I think that kind of proves their point a little bit. They could have just closed the forums though. "Business decision. Done and dusted." If that is the state of affairs and it cannot be improved I wouldn't even blame them for doing that. But they haven't. Which means that they still hope they can get constructive input from their players.


Paradox can be criticized, but you yourself should be shielded from criticism? Can you not even see how hypocritical that is? Are you not an adult who are responsible for your own actions? Are we really there where we think that the Steam reviews should be a "safe space" for venting? If you do any kind of public statement you need to be prepared to also defend it. A poorly written Steam review is not exempt from that. If you cannot handle that criticism, you don't leave reviews. It's not more difficult than that.

It's a customer review, people think you shouldn't buy the game, so they say so.

 

[Ixtli613]

(this is not Victoria II after all, it holds no special place in our heart).

Uh, speak for yourself. I've been saying 'Rome 2 when?' since 2008, and now I'll be saying 'Rome 3 when?' until it happens or I give up on PDX altogether. Meanwhile, I'll still be playing Imperator.

 

[n0cturn4l]

I think I disagree with most of you because I have another meaning for a review.

For me a review is about the game per se in its current state, not about its future state (that we cannot judge) or its price.

Again an example from GOG. I really like Heroes of Might and Magic 3. IMHO it is a 5/5 game.

If GOG for some weird reason put its price as high as 300 euros I would still give it a 5/5 even though I would never pay 300 euro for it. Because Im analysing its quality, not its cost-benefit.

When you rate the games looking at their prices you are not helping potential buyers. They have different budgets. Prices change over time, in the long term they tend to get cheaper, in short term the price oscillates with sales.

That is a problem not only on games. Almost everything under consumers' reviews suffer from that, people usually dont differentiate quality analysis from cost-benefit analysis.

It is also a problem from Steam. We should be able to give stars, 0-5 or 0-10, not only recommended or not.

I don't know how you can ignore prices when they are a core factor of every product. People have different budgets but you can concur that some products are going to be expensive for most people and they are also compared to competitor products.

You can ignore prices, but don't make it sound people don't look at them when buying something.

 

[n0cturn4l]

People actually doing that? Why not bomb in the other direction instead, get it to 90+ so they get the message.

So more people spend money on an abandoned product?

 

[Herennius]

So more people spend money on an abandoned product?

Positive reviews are fine, if the reviewer has the honest opinion that the abandoned game is already worth to be played in its current state.

 

[Borgratz]

We should probably stop calling every sudden change in ratings "review bombing". Something happened to the game that lot's of people individually didn't like.
They left negative reviews because of that. That's not review bombing.

I don't think steam intended the reviews to be some sort of high art constructive game criticism purely based on mechanics. I think they are there to let people express how they feel about the game overall as customers. Players do not have to play politics/3d chess with their reviews and think about the metaimplications of how this might or migh not affect their chances of continued development. They can just leave bad reviews if they are disapointed and Paradox can handle them however they think is right.

Now if someone somwhere on a reddit or something made a campaign to force paradox into continuing development by organizing players to leave bad reviews, that would be review bombing and also counterproductive. But I haven't seen that happening.