Why do you think review bombing Darktide is bad?

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
1

Immediately saying this here: This is not a call to action in any way shape or form.

I make this post merely to give my take on the topic and try to have a discussion with people who are against review bombing Darktide.

My silver bullet, I always think, of when it comes to review bombing is that it worked for the Chinese playerbase when it was leaked that FS planned to substantially nerf the Dueling Sword and the Plasma Gun. Mind you, on paper, these nerfs appeared to would have actually fixed these weapons (as in make them not OP but also not make them useless), but allegedly the Chinese playerbase didn’t want that and, on the day of the leaks, the game received a spike of negative reviews. Nothing else happened that day, so the leaks are the most logical reason for that spike. We could also argue if the Chinese playerbase was the one responsible for this, but that’s beside my point.

My point is that because of this spike, FatShark did not go forward with these changes in the next update and in the Bound by Duty update, where they did nerf something, it was just the DS and the nerfs were really miniscule. So miniscule, in fact, that after the update, the DS became even better because of the talent tree rework.

Now, to me, that shows that FatShark can be persuaded to do/not do something based on how the numbers change on Steam for Darktide. And this means that it could work in pushing FS to actually fix the things they’ve neglected in this game for so long. So to hear people be against it, just baffles me.

My logic for people’s most popular arguments against review bombing, goes something like this:

What kind of arguments can you have to justify not wanting to review bomb FatShark?

-That it won’t achieve anything?

I say it clearly works, and not just for Darktide. Playerbase Helldivers 2 did the same thing, and it worked for them all the same.

-That we shouldn’t do it because we have the FatShark Forums and that will suffice?

Do you really think that by making these posts, you will make FatShark go any faster? They clearly don’t care about what you say unless it has consequences that they directly feel. Things like the book of Grudges or Anniversary of no Solo Mode doesn’t scare or worry FatShark in the slightest. Most of the posts here are like letters sent to the neglectful government, begging them to fix their country. It all is either taken and immediately thrown into the shredder (like posts about Solo Mode) or put into the archives where almost no one bothers to look so it will take just as long as if no letter was ever sent. When will you ask yourself that enough is enough and that maybe it’s time to take a different approach? The one they could actually struggle to ignore. You don’t even know if review bombing will do/not do anything, so why not even try doing it?

-That we shouldn’t do it because FatShark will fix everything eventually?

Why even bother making posts on FatShark Forums, then? If FatShark will fix everything in their own due time, and you’re content with that, why bother making posts where you express your frustrations with how slow they are at pushing these changes? That’s just contradictory.

In the end, I am just left baffled that a lot of people who have been with FatShark for a substantially long amount of time are not only okay with their slow pace, but actively defend this studio let alone be against things like review bombing, to push them to acknowledge the neglected aspects of Darktide. Is it just a situation comparable to a horse tied to a blue chair, that it could easily move but because it was tied to it from birth, it believes that the chair can’t be moved no matter how strong it will pull? This mentality of not even wanting to try this out confuses the hell out of me, so I just wish to ask the people who believe that:

What is the incentive, and why do you believe it?

Again, I want to try and understand your reasoning behind your beliefs, and to have a level-headed discussion about it. I do not plan starting any arguments here.

So anyone interested enough to give their take on the topic?

2

I think the issue with review bombing primarily is that nobody has a clear, mutual definition of what review bombing actually is.

In my understanding, review bombing is:

  • Organized and following a call to action
  • illegitimate because way more people follow negative calls to action than would normally review a game
  • throws off the actual real ratio of negative/positive reviews due to this bias

You seem to define review bombing way more loosely, and many others do too. I don’t know if there’s a solid set in stone definition, but I’ll say that according to my definition it’s obviously bad and the review score ends up being illegitimate and actual review bombs should be removed.

To be clear, this is NOT a review bomb in my understanding:

  • A controversial update happened and many people decide to drop a negative review because they’re upset about it
  • The devs made a statement about the games future which displeases many people who then drop a negative review

This is authentic negative reviews and do not constitute a review bomb. However, many people would consider this a review bomb anyway and insist it should be removed, just because it’s a mass reaction. I disagree with this and think this is fully legitimate. If people have a solid reason to, without outside organization or call to action, react to something en masse, then the reviews are legitimate.

That’s all I can say on this topic too. The former is bad and ruins a games review score, the latter is legitimate and people dismissing it as “review bombs” aren’t thinking straight. Encouraging people to leave a review is not organizing a review bomb nor a call to action. That’s just a reminder that anyone can leave a review and have their vote count. You can leave a positive review.
What is a review bomb and call to action is “let’s all leave a negative review now to achieve something in particular”, maybe in the hopes the devs will change course.

3

Personally, I believe it’s bad because I don’t like it when developers bend to the community.

For me, it is important that the developer studio of the game I am playing has a clear vision of what their game should be.

When they start bowing to review bombing or threats from the community, I lose faith in the developers since it makes me believe that the studio behind the game I’m playing doesn’t have faith in their own product.

Darktide is my favorite game in my entire game library, and Fatshark does so much good with it, like the Hive Scum and the most recent map, but everything from specialist conga lines, Crusher/Bulwark clown cars, and the OPness of the player characters screams to me that the developers are constantly caving to whatever side of the playerbase is screaming the loudest.

Darktide would benefit from a full reset, that Fatshark stopped and took a couple of months to a year to just go back to the drawing board and clean up how the game works, how weapons should function, pull back player power, and change how the AI Director spawns enemies.

Why do we need Ogryn’s clown cars when it would have been far more exciting if a single Crusher acted as a small boss that you couldn’t simply blow up?

What if, instead of having four Trappers stand on top of each other (clip inside each other models), there was only one single Trapper in the spawn that posed a real threat to you?

I enjoy how chaotic and fast-paced Darktide is, but there is a point where it becomes silly and stupid, and I believe this is due to Fatshark bowing to loadmouths rather than dictating themselves how their game should play.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk!

4

The way I see review bombing, in relation to Darktide, is that people would drop negative reviews on the game’s Steam page pointing out the aspects that FatShark keeps neglecting (stuff like the constantly growing power creep and enemy spam going with it; unaddressed solo mode that sort of thing).

If those things were to ever be addressed and fixed by FatShark, in a perfect world, I imagine everyone removing the negative reviews they left while review bombing because their complaints are no longer relevant and so, their negative reviews no longer apply.

It is a kind of “hostage” situation where a studio doesn’t want to have a negative opinion of their game on Steam so they cave in to the playerbase’s demands and when they do, the reviews are removed bringing the game’s opinion back to it’s original state.

5

It’s only a matter of who offering it, not why or is it good or bad.

6

See I don’t think that’s review bombing at all. That’s just leaving an honest to god authentic negative review. I think the defining trait of review bombing is coordination. If Fatshark messes up and 100000 negative reviews happen, it’s still not review bombing so long as it wasn’t coordinated by someone.

7

Well, being honest here, in my head I already saw it as a coordinated action, so my definition does have it. I just forgot to say it in my reply.

8

they should have never went to bed with tencent and instead flip the :fu: to the whole “review bombing” area by switching off servers completely :smile:

refund their 4sses and be done.

then again if I’d make the game I wouldn’t have profit in mind as a priority, not feasible without a couple millions in the bank I know, but I’d rather keep the games vision intact

9

To elaborate on why I think coordinated review bombs are bad, it’s mostly because they operate outside of the actual intent of reviews. The intent of a review is to let a potential customer see what the people who bought thought about it. Bad update? That’s relevant. Just general displeasure? That’s relevant. You can see just exactly how many people decided to warn a potential future buyer for completely authentic reasons, “I was displeased and left a negative review”

But review bombs are different. They’re intended to force a dev to do something or punish him, and they’re disproportionate because by definition the people participating in a coordinated review bomb wouldn’t have left a review otherwise. So it kills the authenticity and falsifies a review score, and also furthermore can be totally unrelated to the game. I’ve seen review bombs related to a devs politics. That’s not actually related to the product, and it needs to be removed, no matter if he’s a nazi or woke or whatever, it’s not related to the game.

10

Nah its always been super dumb and childish to the idea of growing and engaging the community you claim to be caring about and vociferously representing with your demands. Sometimes it even gets immortalized in cringe like the Helldivers 2 cape. But for me personally I think Hive Scum was a genuine addition to the game, moreso than attack dog cop. Really just feels at home and their kit is fun (only crowbar feels too mid atm). I don’t want to associate with some fake YouTube outrage story to hate on the game for no genuine reason. They should definitely find their minds with actual combat direction and less spam, but the base gameplay is still fun and extremely visceral/satisfying which few games match with their boring combat loop of lame feedback.

11

I agree that a coordinated action of review bombing Darktide would be just another version of being the crowd that scream the loudest. But at the same time what I would wish for is for that crowd to scream for that full reset you wish the game to go through.

So I know that it would be just the same thing that was always done, just this time used for a good cause (then again, every group that ever did something like this also believed that their cause was pure and just so it feels kinda silly for me to type that out in real time).

12

I think the topic of the usage of review bombing is a bit more nuanced than you say here. To me, review bombing, while it can be used for the things unrelated to the game, in the context of Darktide, it very much is relevant to the game. The playerbase has been voicing their frustrations with the increasingly shaky balance and broken promises for years now. So I think that taking that to Steam wouldn’t really be out of place.

So what I’m saying is, while yes, review bombing can be related to things irrelevant to the game that’s being review bombed, the review bombing of Darktide would actually be relevant to the game itself.

13

I don’t disagree with your message but again

This isn’t review bombing. It’s only review bombing if it’s a coordinated effort.
Anyone who simply decides to drop a review for any personal reason is fully legitimate. That’s how EVERYONE drops a review. The moment you start organizing people to drop a review, it becomes review bombing, and it becomes illegitimate because that number of people is being introduced to a sample where nobody else did it in an organized way.

So I’m just saying, what you’re really describing here isn’t review bombing, but people will tell you what you’re describing is horrid because review bombing is horrid and you call it review bombing.

14

I’m happy for the most part. The game is getting an amount of fixes VT2 never did, not to mention that nothing as bad as winds of magic happened.

The only thing that’s eroding my patience is the loadout bug. So many times I return to a build and see my work there is gone :frowning:

15

Generally speaking, I do not agree with review bombing as a practice. I’m sure there is a scenario where it’s warranted but nothing even close to meeting that threshold has happened in Darktide (or 99% of games for that matter).

There’s a variety of reasons for this. It severely hampers nuance. For people who do not yet own the game, seeing that the game recently has a bunch of negative reviews is dissuasive (obviously: that is main point of the review bomb). But unless that person is going into each review to see what’s going on, they’re not going to understand the intent behind the review bomb. Is it to change one or more related systems or does the game just suck? Is the thing generating outrage an actual widespread issue or isolated to the highly online, dedicated playerbase? Would a new player even care about this issue before dumping hundreds of hours into the game? And so on.

Review bombing, depending on the issue, can make discourse and disagreement among the playerbase significantly more toxic. If you’re unaffected or indifferent to the thing being review bombed or even just plain disagree, then voicing that opinion can suck. By entering into the collective action of review bombing, one joins an internet mob and that dynamic can be pretty awful. I don’t think that the issues of a video game really justify that sort of weaponized behavior. It’s just not that serious.

It’s also counterproductive. When community engagement is a hostile experience, its less likely for FS to engage. So we lose transparency and/or open communication and just get a lot of one way communication like patch note drops and dev blogs. Within the community, the review bombers generally get a poor reputation. Consider how the chinese players are regarded on this forum for their reaction to the DS and PG nerfs. Their concerns are just not taken as seriously for the most part to the point of people suggesting giving them their own client with separate balance. Or to go back even further when the Power Sword was nerfed, what is the consensus of those players? It doesn’t make the devs work any harder (if anything it’s probably discouraging to morale), like they just needed to be yelled at by the internet to unlock their true potential. And most of all it impacts the bottom line of the company, which again I understand is the point, but it’s more likely to me that a game that gets new players, doesn’t have a reputation for having a toxic community, etc. will generate more revenue which justifies more development resources being spent on the product and therefore increasing the chances of getting your problem resolved. It’s shooting the game in the foot to complain that it limps.

16

I see that a lot of people may be frustrated, but I believe that many haven’t really made it known in a negative review. The only organization said here would be to point out that they have that option and to do it on a specific date. People who are frustrated but haven’t actually left any reviews on the Steam page of the game and people who did left a review but can make it again, could work together to collectively voice their frustration of Darktide’s neglected aspects in a coordinated effort to try and force FatShark to do something.

17

They were able to sidestep a reset with the latest Hive Scum tree changes, so I am very hopeful they’ve handled this on the backend!

18

Then that’s authentic. They clearly don’t actually care enough to warn other consumers. It’s fair, and that’s the assumption that makes reviews work: The people who don’t care don’t leave one.

It’s at this point where it becomes organized, coordinated and inauthentic. You now have a set of reviews that operate under a different criteria for actually leaving a review than the rest. It falsifies the total and steam removes them for good reason.

I get where you’re coming from with organizing for people to do something to influence development, it is a service after all, but reviews are the wrong medium to do that. If you really want to force Fatshark to do something with a coordinated effort, convince people not to spend money on the store or a new class. You aren’t ruining a sample by doing this, and boycots are legitimate. Not as easy as reviewbombing though.

19

They haven’t.

20

No? Maybe I’m confused and not talking about the same issue as you.