It really disturbs me that people only remember the good examples of review bombing. Do any of you recall what happened to Total War Rome II? It got review bombed by some neo-nazis who couldn't stop complaining about "women in ma videogames!" because of a change that in a certain period allowed more women general to show up in the game. Where were you, then? Any of you? Those who are in favor of review bombing and those who don't? Hell, where was Valve?
Like, fuck Randy Pitchford (a con man and pedophile) and Gearbox (a company who defrauded Sega to diverge millions into the development of Borderlands 2), but don't come in here telling me that review bombing is helpful because it helped in a couple of cases. The people who worked on Rome II did not deserve that shit.
Alright, so is your position that because this tool CAN be used for a negative cause, that it should NEVER be used?
Because we don't follow this logic in literally any other scenario, in any other way of life. Bad people will use legitimate means to do bad things, what we can do is help people better understand how to identify the difference between a fight for justice/tolerance/consumer's rights versus a fight for inequality/intolerance/erosion of consumer rights, which Valve has with it taking less than 5 seconds to see a graph of when the majority of reviews came in and why. What it hurt at the time was the 30 day "recent" score on Steam, but ultimately didn't move the needle too far on the lifetime score.
Rome II sits at a lifetime 68% and a recent 69%, and I checked every recent (english) review, and it's back to people complaining about the game itself (mostly how the new "emperor edition" description may have described itself in a way that implied it contained all the DLC but doesn't). If you just outright deleted every single review during the review bomb period (about September 1, 2018 to October 31, 2018 going by the graph), lifetime score would rise to about 77%. Yeah, 77% would be a much nicer number to have than 68%, I won't sit here and argue it did "no" damage, but long term that campaign didn't do much, CA has continued to make more Total War games that are well reviewed, ultimately the world didn't care.
Hell, even the Borderlands review bombs aren't really "achieving" much. The lifetime score for both BL1 and BL2 are still 90+% even with the reviewbombs factored in, because the sheer number of reviews these games have had over the years makes any real coordinated effort meaningless. The recent score will taper off and return to normal after people lose the motivation to keep this up. It did do enough to grab Gearbox/Randy's attention, which ultimately was the sole purpose of the exercise, and now they (hopefully) have an understanding of a portion of the consumers' position on this.
If the EGS gambit fails and they don't see the sales numbers they expected, the hope is that they'll keep this event in mind and understand exactly why it failed.
I'm sorry but you're still not making sense.
In most cases 'review bombing' implies the person did not buy the game. If I leave I review about something I don't like on a game I bought that's just a regular review. That's not a 'review bomb'
Review bombing on steam directly implies you bought the game, because Steam only includes reviews from purchasers in the overall score. (it also excludes owners who received the game for free, or reviews made during "Free Weekends" by non-owners)
