Hungry Donner said:
EA's defense makes no sense. It is fine for employees to post their own reviews but they need to disclose their involvement in the game. As long as they're up front about their involvement I have no problems whatsoever with them posting reviews in places like Metacritic. (Unless Metacritic specifically forbids this, I don't know.)
Well, they got caught and EA is in a position where it's options are limited. It either has to take the approach it did, or it has to do something to punish the employees involved if it's going to say that what they did was okay (and that means firing them).
The quick reaction like EA makes me think that this was intentional, I've read other articles (some on The Escapist I believe) where there has been discussion about companies using their employees to pump up the ratings of their own products for promotional purposes via things like Amazon, and Metacritic.
It's a dishonest practice because you have the developers promoting the product in concealment, claiming to be satisfied customers, who allegedly started with an impartial opinion. Given that they make money off of this, it's a big deal. It's also sadly possible because there aren't any safeguards to prevent it, and it shouldn't be surprising that something as increasingly corrupt as the gaming industry is angling to do every dishonest thing it can to get ahead.
The thing with Metacritic is that it tries to be more reliable than other ranking systems by intentionally seperating the customer reviews, from professional reviews. I don't think they really considered "promotional spam" by game developers themselves to begin with, however it technically belongs in the "professional" catagory due to their financial stake, as opposed to user reviews which is only affected by what people think of the product. Even someone trolling tends to be a sign tht they find it worth the time to troll about.
At any rate, the specifics of this arguement are kind of pointless, the bottom line is that Bioware has had it's first major failure, and it was a titanic one. Overall this penny ante crap isn't going to have that much of an influance on the ratings overall. If users dislike the game that much, that means something, I mean even trolls have to be motivated. What's more when there is this kind of a discrepency with the professional reviews that's kind of
a sign of why sites like Metacritic seperate them from the user reviews.
Bioware's "promotional spamming" to alter records, especially this quickly and sloppily shows that they are kind of desperate. To be honest I just hope it means that they will learn from their mistakes here, and release better games as a result. They dumbed it down, and cut all kinds of corners as far as the number of areas, the companions, and all kinds of things, and put in this stupid "they fall from the sky" system of zerg rushing thugs. They are quite simply paying the price for releasing a sloppy game. It's probably worse for them because Bioware up until this point had an almost golden reputation. They probably got arrorgant in thinking that people would worship anything they produced with their name on it, and decided to ignore the signs they were seeing when they started changing development strategies with "Mass Effect 2".
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Oh and one final note, I would hope that a professional game designer could come up with a better handle, even a temporary one than to steal from old sneaker commercials. "Lupotheebutcher" being from a series of Converse (I think) commercials where they would have some cartoon wierdo try and destroy a pair of the shoes and fail. I think they did two commercials in the series because they didn't seem to go over very well.
I mean come on, you'd expect someone in the creative industry to do better. Let me guess, he's one of the relatively new hires, right? Maybe that has something to do with how Dragon Age 2 turned out of if was involved rather than the guys making the original game. A fanboy of an obscure, failed shoe commercial series, involved in the development of a failed video game. Hmmmm.... coincidence?
Okay, okay, no need to pick on anyone. I'm actually just surprised I remember the source.
