BioWare Employee Busted in Dragon Age 2 Review Scandal - UPDATED

[The Deadpool]

Sure, it's been done before, sure it's been done worse. Sure it's not the end of the world.

But none of that makes it RIGHT. A guy whose livelihood is tied to the sales of a game s, by nature, a biased party when reviewing that game. For him to pretend otherwise was unethical.

Had that been a press release, or an interview, it would have been fine.

Him DENOUNCING "personal preference" in the review is just embarassing...

 

[Smorlock]

what a coincidence. i swear, not 20 minutes ago, my buddy was linking me the metacritic site, talking about how it seemed like EA employees were throwing 10 reviews out there... man, what a crap game. so glad i didn't pay for it.

Except this sort of behaviour (while crap), doesn't mean the game is crap. The game is fine. This kind of stuff isn't. Make sure you are distributing your hate correctly.

i'm distributing it just fine. the behavior is right on par with the game itself IMO. i'm clearly not the only one that feels this way. but hey, if you enjoyed it, more power to you. i certainly didn't.

To be fair, I haven't actually played it. I just don't like it when people don't like a work because of ancillary events that shouldn't impact their opinion of the product. But if you genuinely don't like the game on its own merits, I apologize.

 

[uppitycracker]

what a coincidence. i swear, not 20 minutes ago, my buddy was linking me the metacritic site, talking about how it seemed like EA employees were throwing 10 reviews out there... man, what a crap game. so glad i didn't pay for it.

Except this sort of behaviour (while crap), doesn't mean the game is crap. The game is fine. This kind of stuff isn't. Make sure you are distributing your hate correctly.

i'm distributing it just fine. the behavior is right on par with the game itself IMO. i'm clearly not the only one that feels this way. but hey, if you enjoyed it, more power to you. i certainly didn't.

To be fair, I haven't actually played it. I just don't like it when people don't like a work because of ancillary events that shouldn't impact their opinion of the product. But if you genuinely don't like the game on its own merits, I apologize.

no worries, i realized that my original post was a little misleading in that sense. i ended up editing it, because you aren't the only one that thought it meant i had never played it.

 

[CommanderKirov]

Sooo... I'm the guy who enjoyed the first game quite a bit.

And I enjoyed the second game as well, although I only found it too short.


What does that make me?

 

[Labcoat Samurai]

You're not a Bioware employee, so your opinion is much less suspect when you say you love it because of the lack of conflict of interests,

Ah, so it's not impossible that he could genuinely like it, and that he is therefore being honest. So you can't have logically deduced that. You are actually speculating... and calling for a man to lose his job based on that speculation.

furthermore, I don't see you saying it's flawless, endlessly entertaining or calling everybody criticising it wrong.

I am, however, saying it's excellent, that it provides a large amount of content that should keep a player entertained for a long time, and that the people on metacritic giving it scores of 0 and 1 and saying that it's the worst game they've ever played are wildly exaggerating and being incredibly unfair to the game.

So sure, I'm not employing as much hyperbole as he is, but I essentially agree with him.

As for your defence of this obvious hack,

Like the guy in your image, this is a response you should have probably thought better of and kept to yourself. It adds nothing to the conversation but condescension.

On the other hand, given your response to an earlier poster helpfully suggesting he should think before posting or that anyone who disagrees with you about this bioware employee is either a child or a moron, I suppose I should not be surprised with the quality of our discourse.

 

[NickCooley]

If there's anything to be gained from this tale it's that a lot of my fellow gamers are whiny bitches and must be from a VERY pampered background for an issue so petty to cause such an outburst of rage. Most user reviews ARE biased, misleading pieces of crap (pick any game on metacritic and check, you'll see) What does one more drop in the ocean matter?

 

[Labcoat Samurai]

As far as I know, none have attempted to subvert or deceive me.

Well, you can't be sure the guy was intending to deceive you. He may have genuinely thought it wasn't relevant. It's biased, sure, but it could also be his honest opinion. If he believed there was an expectation that metacritic user reviews will be unbiased or will disclose bias, then it would be dishonest of him to avoid doing so. But metacritic reviews are very commonly biased. Not only is it reasonable that he could think there was no such expectation, but, in fact, *I* think there is no such expectation. I might disclose personal bias just to get extra attention on my review, but if I was trying to just fit into the community, I might leave it off. After all, if I worked at Bioware, I wouldn't want to always have my Bioware hat on everywhere I went on the internet, inviting people to harass me personally with questions and complaints.

Inspiring, but what's your point? Are you saying it is OK to knowingly mislead people in a review of a commercial product for personal gain?

Do you really think there's personal gain here? I rather think the opposite. I think the expected personal gain for a drop in the ocean positive review on metacritic when you have little to no personal stake in the company (he receives a paycheck; he's not a major stockholder, as far as I know) is, somewhere between 0 and a negligible fraction of a cent. His time, on the other hand, may be worth a lot.

When you defend the guy without even mentioning what he is being accused of, it makes me think neither of you understand what is going on.

What he's being accused of is silly. He's an engineer posting anonymously on a website, and he's being held to the standard of a professional journalist.

 

[BehattedWanderer]

Good on them. Way to hold up your employees, guys. Reasonably response, too. Cheers.

 

[Freddy Polanco]

I could care less, never pay attention to user reviews or for that matter any other review, because I don't consider what other people have to say about a game as valuable, if I have enough interest in the game then I'll buy it otherwise it could be the most celebrated game in the world I still wouldn't play it, if after I played the demo or read the description it seemed like crap to me, prime case example world of Warcraft, alot of people like it, I can't stand it. A thousand blizzard employees could say it the best thing since sliced bread, I still have no interest in it. So I don't see anything wrong with what the guy at Bioware did, hell its his game his allowed to have an opinion about his own game, and no it doesn't matter if he worked on the game.

Oh there is one person, whose opinion on a game a take very seriously, and thats Yahtzee, all hail Yahtzee.

 

[slackbheep]

Why the hell do people all of a sudden care about Metacritic? Before this, all anyone did is dismiss it as stupid. Why now is everyone pointing to it as proof for DA2's shortcomings?

Vocal minority has the illusion of influence on Metacritic? I don't give a lot of credit to the complaints I've heard as aside from those angry at the several major plot points which are out of your control so far as an overwhelming majority of them seem to come from the same group of people who were angry DA:O wasn't Baldurs Gate 3. Flash forward a couple years and with time for the DA:O system to grow upon them they are once again disappointed to be met with change I will however point out that the final act seems to have a couple rough patches at the least and that the game could probably have benefited from additional testing.

If by chance you remember the pissing and moaning around the release of Mass Effect 2 you'll be well equipped to understand what's going on now.

As for the OP and thread: Sock Puppet accounts, Astroturfing and shill reviews are inexcusable. I sincerely hope that Ea/Bioware are deeply shamed and make it very clear to their employees that it will not be tolerated. That said, lets be realistic: Sock Puppets and Astroturfing aren't going anywhere.
My solution is to view all game reviews with the same disdainful eye, accepting advice and recommendations only with an appropriate pinch of salt, heh.

 

[lacktheknack]

I'd be upset, except it was one positive USER review in a tidal wave of negativity and fail.

 

[Andy Chalk]

I am honestly surprised and appalled at the number of people here who see this as no big deal.

The point isn't whether or not he honestly believes the game is worth a perfect score, or that it's just one score among many. It's that he, an employee of BioWare, is giving the game a glowing, "best game ever" review and doing his part, small though it may be, to bump the score without disclosing his obvious conflict of interest. It's greasy as hell.

I have no problem with BioWare employees offering their opinions in a public forum, but there must be disclosure - especially when that opinion involves assigning a score that impacts the overall rating that people use as a quick-and-dirty scale by which to judge the game.

 

[nipsen]

"Of course the people who make the game vote for their own game," a senior PR manager said. "That's how it works in the Oscars, that's how it works in the Grammy's and why I'm betting that Barack Obama voted for himself in the last election."

In other words, EA encouraged it.

By the way, it's funny that a lot of the people in marketing here always mention politics. The practice with gathering up make-belief journalists and bloggers in a press-event, and then feeding them a pretty much finished draft of what they should say about a very specific list of subjects, etc.. conscious use of that kind of thing to promote something was pretty much invented by the Republican party around 2000. It's always been something that hasn't quite been possible to pull off before, because there's always the danger that someone is going to turn honest and cause problems.

But if you can impress enough people by gracing them with attention, etc. While making it violently disagreeable to "out" the large companies - then starstruck bloggers is a resource to be used.

I mean, I've joked about it before, about how the Bush-administration folks had been looking for jobs lately -- but we've seen several examples of the exact same method used to promote games in games-"journalism". A combination of artificial trolling (heartfelt letters to the publisher and developer, etc), along with just press-releases masked in casual sounding language fed to random bloggers to promote particular games on everything else but the actual game. It's exactly the kind of thing that's been driving some of us to mild insanity over the last decade or so..

 

[Trogdor1138]

I am honestly surprised and appalled at the number of people here who see this as no big deal.

The point isn't whether or not he honestly believes the game is worth a perfect score, or that it's just one score among many. It's that he, an employee of BioWare, is giving the game a glowing, "best game ever" review and doing his part, small though it may be, to bump the score without disclosing his obvious conflict of interest. It's greasy as hell.

I have no problem with BioWare employees offering their opinions in a public forum, but there must be disclosure - especially when that opinion involves assigning a score that impacts the overall rating that people use as a quick-and-dirty scale by which to judge the game.

I'm with you on this, I can't believe how many people don't see this as a thing to be concerned about. There was NO reason this review should've been posted, it's clearly misleading in every way. For EA to dismiss it as "no big deal" shows how out of touch they are with their own industry, this was pathetic.

I don't care how many biased negative reviews there are, be the bigger man and don't give into their games, don't place so much damn reliance on numbers, this is part of the problem the industry has fallen into now.

 

[Rooster Cogburn]

Well, you can't be sure the guy was intending to deceive you. He may have genuinely thought it wasn't relevant. It's biased, sure, but it could also be his honest opinion. If he believed there was an expectation that metacritic user reviews will be unbiased or will disclose bias, then it would be dishonest of him to avoid doing so. But metacritic reviews are very commonly biased. Not only is it reasonable that he could think there was no such expectation, but, in fact, *I* think there is no such expectation. I might disclose personal bias just to get extra attention on my review, but if I was trying to just fit into the community, I might leave it off. After all, if I worked at Bioware, I wouldn't want to always have my Bioware hat on everywhere I went on the internet, inviting people to harass me personally with questions and complaints.

I don't know what to say. I'm not going to continue to argue that lying to people is bad. If you want to tell me 8+8=-1 and it's reasonable to expect people to believe it because *you* believe it, OK. We'll just leave it there.

Do you really think there's personal gain here? I rather think the opposite. I think the expected personal gain for a drop in the ocean positive review on metacritic when you have little to no personal stake in the company (he receives a paycheck; he's not a major stockholder, as far as I know) is, somewhere between 0 and a negligible fraction of a cent. His time, on the other hand, may be worth a lot.

He's not being rewarded in dollars, he's being rewarded in careers. Anyone who wants to line up a job at any point in the future has a huge incentive to say they worked on a highly successful vidja-game. Realistically, making a product that actually moves units is good for everyone involved.

What he's being accused of is silly. He's an engineer posting anonymously on a website, and he's being held to the standard of a professional journalist.

He is not being held to the standard of a "professional journalist." He lied, possibly for personal gain. Everyone, journalists and engineers included, is expected not to break that meager standard.

I don't understand why gamers are in such a hurry to get ass-blasted all the time. If this happened at the car tune up company people would be rightfully pissed off. Gamers are the only consumer group I'm aware of who always seem to shit on their own interests as consumers.

I am honestly surprised and appalled at the number of people here who see this as no big deal.

The point isn't whether or not he honestly believes the game is worth a perfect score, or that it's just one score among many. It's that he, an employee of BioWare, is giving the game a glowing, "best game ever" review and doing his part, small though it may be, to bump the score without disclosing his obvious conflict of interest. It's greasy as hell.

I have no problem with BioWare employees offering their opinions in a public forum, but there must be disclosure - especially when that opinion involves assigning a score that impacts the overall rating that people use as a quick-and-dirty scale by which to judge the game.

Man, I'm with you. Not only are gamers apparently OK with being treated like brainless wallet-control-devices, but I'm supposed to suck it up and take my medicine, too? No way man.

 

[L8NEYET]

The funny thing is that he was dumb enough to get caught, but is he the only person writing reviews for their games or even payed/bribed to write a great review? My favorite review has to be about Two Worlds One, when a reviewer called it the "Oblivion Killer." I laughed for days being that Two Worlds One is one of the worst games ever made, Behind ET for the Atari, but I still had enough common sense to know that someone had to have been paid off or an employee to give that game a perfect 10. I hope this guy learned his lesson.

 

[blindthrall]

This kind of shit is rampant on Amazon, especially with the new Dune books. Kevin J. Anderson was actually giving prizes to people in his fanclub based off how many positive reviews they left. Glad to hear astroturfing is illegal in the EU. I've got nothing against people giving glowing reviews if they're associated with the product, but they need to disclose those associations.

It's things like this that make me like Obsidian. Yeah, their games are buggy as shit, but I don't think they'd ever pull shit like this.