Vocal obsessives ruining reviews

There’s always outliers, and I wasn’t saying buggy games don’t exist, one merely has to point to the speedrunning community for that, but most games if they wanted to sell decent had to pass word-of-mouth sales and for that they had to be at the very least passable as “playable” most of the time.

And one has to admit those were days of everyone experimenting on scarce information as well, so many guidelines and strategies/philosophies are available now to prevent a lot of major oversights that still occur in a number of games these days. Some of which bring shame to even the worst offenders of back in the day. And those old games generally fell into obscurity for a reason if they weren’t known.

As for dlc we had the occasional trick or expansion pack companies used but in buying a decently known game you were somewhat aware of what to expect, nowadays you had companies like EA that felt known for buggy releases and bad QA however…

Mind you I’m not trying to place vermintide in that list but fact of the matter is a lot of straight-off-the-bat bugs were game breaking in multiple ways. A number of them prevented player progression, meant certain doom or sudden death, and then there’s the issue where internally an entirely different balancing was used than players were using. Resulting in a lot squishier game than was intended.

I agree with the OP. Full team at level 30 and wonrun in legends with everyone. There still stuff I’d like to be adressed, but I feels its dishonest to bash a game after several hundred hours. Are you writing a steam review for someone who may play as much? Maybe, but you know this won’t be the way it will be perceived overall. If you think you have been robbed of your 30 bucks after such a long playtime, maybe your standards are a bit difficult to reach.

And don’t think the devs have no idea of what are the enduring players opinion. Online communities just expect a level of reactivity and dialogue pretty unknown in other media creation.

Wouldn’t you say its inherently more dishonest to write a poor review with only a few hours, if hours at all, played?

People with hundreds of hours played are simply going to know the ins and outs of the game more easily and while it may seem dubious to complain after “getting so many hours out of it” one also has to wonder how many moments/hours were ruined by frustrations. Hours played doesn’t always equal hours enjoyed.

Now, I have to say that I’m not one to give the game a critical review yet myself but I can sympathize with both parties. The game is a lot of fun, so was the first game. I’ve defended this game since it came out. But boy would I be lying if I said I didn’t expect Fatshark to learn from past mistakes. By now its hard to sell that they’re not veterans of sort, they could’ve extended the closed beta a little longer and pushed the release date to fix a lot of the issues that would require rollbacks to fix now so that’s no longer an option and they have to push through it instead, now.

Luckily they’re patching semi frequently… But communication continues to be a chokepoint. I’d love to see more streams from them too but they really need to get better gear set up and tested for that. Primarily decent microphones and more control over the media guy switching between all the stuff. The streams where we suddenly get all sorts of LOUD trailers in the middle of a Q&A were quite amateuristic, though I can entirely excuse them for that if they continue to improve there as well! You have to start somewhere after all.

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I’m into total war too, and believe me, we’d just dream to have a patch schedule as tight as Fatshark’s right now…

The core issue is thatto persevere several hundreds hours into something while being frustrated ought to mean there is something quite solid in the core foundations of the game and this seems to be downplayed a lot in hindsight.

Worse, the steamr review system can lead to unwanted side effects. Someone who’s just cursively interested in the game a while after release can’t really be knowledgeable about the latest community feelings. Sometimes bad review can mean a studio just did a very bad move, indeed. We are far from this situation.

You are forgetting that all of the serious problems are mostly related to champ/legend difficutly and endgame in general.
And due to the grindy leveling system, its not uncommon to pile up on 100+ hours of gameplay before people acutally start it. It took me around 50-70h to reach the Heropower cap on chests with Kruber and a good chunk to level the characters.
Hunting for lvl 300 items that sometimes drop between the 295 crap not included.
Rolling for a decent setup on even a few careers not included.
I essentially got endgame ready and after that noticed how many things are actually wrong with this game since in endgame every taken hit, every special you are unaware of, every gltiching boss step and every bit of dmg that gets taken away by nerfs weights heavy.

Veteran isnt that frustrating because bullshit like three disablers silently spawning ontop of you while kiting a spawn simply wont happen or isnt that bad. Its also not a problem to get hit right trough the block or by rollerskating rubberarm enemies now and then, careers getting nerfed into the ground is no hassle and I seriously dont care if I cant hear that joke of a stormvermin patrol popping out of thin air round the corner.

I dont feel obliged to give developers a good review because they managed to keep me grinding until endgame which wasnt there. And I surely dont know where this logic is coming from. Problems suddenly dissapear and shouldn’t be adressed because they are hidden behind 100 hours of grind? Seriously? You know what? Fanboy mental gymnastics on an olympical scale like this are a certain sign that a game has serious problems. Same with “but I had fun with it”.

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If someone uses steam-reviews to decide on whether or not to buy a game, they will probably find their experience to be somewhat diminished by bad decisions.
Steam Reviews are a cesspool of unsubstantiated opinions and unreasonable expectations that drown out all the solid reviews (what constitutes solid is for each of us to decide), and the rating going up or down can be influenced by facts, but doesn’t have to be.
I’ve seen games downvoted because they have “too many dlcs”, when the game was apparently perfectly fine for the two years before, and it seems some people were just angry that there was content that they didn’t have access to because they decided not to spend more money on it - that’s like complaining there’s a new achievement that’s hard to get, endangering ones 100% clear score.
There’s been plenty of downvotes on games because they were “not worth the money” - Well, why don’t let me decide that myself? I want to see if a game is good, then decide if that much good is worth that much money. Then a game may be 75% off, but it still has those bad ratings, so some people may not buy it because they didn’t actually read the reviews (possibly to preserve their sanity).

Personally, when I sink over 100 hours into a game, I’d recommend the hell out of it. It’s been fun for longer than average, can’t have been that bad. Though then again, I don’t actually play a game that long in the hopes of maybe unlocking a cosmetic far down the line.

I can understand people changing their review when there’s significant changes - if FS suddenly offered paid lootboxes, I’m sure there’s grounds for a downvote - but I agree that giving a negative review for a game after a time played that at least 3/4 of the players will never invest makes the game look bad. Well, for those that care for steam scores, but those are still potentially players that could fund further development, so I can’t discount the effect.

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