Reviews Removed

[Mad Jack]

To those of you who may have left a review of the expansion on Metacritic; you might wanna to make sure it's still there. They did a review purge, and it looks like quite a few legitimate reviews got caught up in it. Weird thing is how many obvious spam reviews somehow stayed.

[Giganx]

Metacritic always cleans up the review bomb, bot spamming and troll reviews; happens for every game.

[Mad Jack]

Originally posted by Giganx:

Metacritic always cleans up the review bomb spamming and troll reviews; happens for every game.

Except this wasn't a review bomb cleanup, or if it was, they did an awful job. They removed a huge number of seemingly legitimate reviews while leaving the nonsensical, spam-like ones alone. A fair amount of the remaining reviews were obviously intended just to manipulate the overall user score.

[Giganx]

Originally posted by Mad Jack:

Originally posted by Giganx:

Metacritic always cleans up the review bomb spamming and troll reviews; happens for every game.

Except this wasn't a review bomb. They removed a huge number of legitimate negative reviews while leaving the nonsensical, spam-like ones alone. On the other hand, a portion of the FFXIV community has been carrying out semi-organized "positivity bombing" through various means.

Like I said, it's the same process they use for every game.

Saying they were all legitimate reviews is something you can't possibly verify. Metacritic has it's own process for sussing out bots and spam; probably just reviews that pop up impossibly early, within the exact same time frame, or are from known problematic IPs.

The number of user reviews is so low it hardly matters anyways.

[Mad Jack]

I certainly can't verify all of them, but I do know mine was among those taken down despite A.) being posted after I had completed the expansion fully, and B.) being one of the aforementioned well-written, detailed posts. The same thing happened to several other people I know, all of which posted their reviews at different times and without the input or knowledge of other people.

[Giganx]

It's not impossible that you got accidentally caught in a wave of them cleaning up bot/spam reviews; but again it's something you can't verify, You're not gonna establish some kind of conspiracy when all you have is "trust me bro, it totally happened to me!"

Regardless of how clean the process may be, Metacritic does this for every game. Metacritic is a VERY easy site to review bomb because they don't make you verify your purchase or limit the number of accounts you can have. They have to do something to clean up the mess that creates. A LOT of Metacritics reviews end up being the same person with 100 accounts.

[Mad Jack]

The point wasn't to establish a conspiracy in the first place. It was to alert others that their well-meaning reviews may have been removed.

[Giganx]

Originally posted by Mad Jack:

The point wasn't to establish a conspiracy in the first place. It was to alert others that their well-meaning reviews may have been removed. Dawntrail is incredibly divisive, and those reviews might actually end up mattering one way or the other. SE pays attention to numbers.

Metacritic user reviews is only like 600 people right now. Trust me when I say SE doesn't care about that.

[Lord Adorable]

Cancel culture got cancelled.
Based Metacritic.

[Adam__86]

When people are writing memes as a negative review what do you expect

[Shakja]

Did you post your review on or prior to the July 2nd? Because that could be the reason why. Everything from July 3rd onwards is still there and metacritic might've not considered early access, thus judging everything that's not from at least a day after release can't be a legit review

[causality]

Originally posted by Mad Jack:

I certainly can't verify all of them, but I do know mine was among those taken down despite A.) being posted after I had completed the expansion fully, and B.) being one of the aforementioned well-written, detailed posts. The same thing happened to several other people I know, all of which posted their reviews at different times and without the input or knowledge of other people.

By any chance do you have a copy of what you wrote? I'd like to read over it just to confirm a few things.

[Mad Jack]

Originally posted by Shakja:

Did you post your review on or prior to the July 2nd? Because that could be the reason why. Everything from July 3rd onwards is still there and metacritic might've not considered early access, thus judging everything that's not from at least a day after release can't be a legit review

July 5th.

[Shakja]

Originally posted by Mad Jack:

Originally posted by Shakja:

Did you post your review on or prior to the July 2nd? Because that could be the reason why. Everything from July 3rd onwards is still there and metacritic might've not considered early access, thus judging everything that's not from at least a day after release can't be a legit review

July 5th.

Weird...

[Mad Jack]

Originally posted by causality:

By any chance do you have a copy of what you wrote? I'd like to read over it just to confirm a few things.

I do not. Honestly didn't think I needed to keep it.

It touched on pacing issues, bland characters, and the combat system being... yeah. I do recall mentioning Wuk Lamat being a Blackhole Sue, but I didn't really go into much detail on that because of all the controversy surrounding the character at the moment. I did not want the intent of my review to be misconstrued, as people are often wont to do under such circumstances.

[Caz]

Originally posted by Giganx:

Metacritic always cleans up the review bomb, bot spamming and troll reviews; happens for every game.

We've been over this. There is no such thing as "review bombing". Not liking the review does not make it not a review. Not having enough reviews (one of your criteria) does not mean it is not a review. What you falsely label as "review bombing" is nothing more than dismissing feedback, criticism, and reviews that you don't like or agree with.

There is no such thing as "review bombing". Period.