Jim Sterling reviewed Zelda BOTW today, then angry comments exploded, site down multiple times...

[Neurotic Void Melody]

So in total, an in-depth review with a mostly positive slant and a score of 7/10 - Good.

Even as a bit of a Zelda fanboy at heart myself, it seemed fair enough a review to me and am still looking forward to eventually playing it.

However, people online have not been so forgiving or understanding or...whatever. Have never seen such hostile behaviour so out of nowhere, not even from the more SJW type content. Have not really followed a previous main Zelda review process before and am a little surprised at the extent of the anger others retain for an entertainment medium.

Is it always this bad in games media? Is it a Zelda thing? Are these just kids?

 

[Avnger]

Is it always this bad in games media? Is it a Zelda thing? Are these just kids?

It's a Nintendo thing. There's a subset of gamers who have made "Nintendo fan" as a part of their identity; therefore, any slights against Ninty (even the smallest) are seen as attacks against them. There's examples of this even on the Escapist if you look in the threads about the Switch and such.

edit: It's simply a more extreme version of the threats over giving a game a 9/10 instead of 10/10 where gamers have taken an entire company into the "protected zone" rather than just a game.

 

[Zhukov]

Hm. Site is still inaccessible for me.

Fucking gamers man. How empty does one's life need to be to make sabotaging someone's website because they didn't give a video game a big enough number out of ten seem like a good use of your time.

And people have the gall to try and tell me that reviewers and game journalists are the problem in this equation. Ha.

EDIT: Here's an archive link to the review for anyone who wants it:

http://web.archive.org/web/20170312161600/http://www.thejimquisition.com/the-legend-of-zelda-breath-of-the-wild-review/

(Don't worry, the Jimquisition site doesn't run ads, so you're not short-changing Mr Sterling by using an archive. He's encouraged people to use them in the past to get around this sort of thing.)

 

[Neverhoodian]

Reviewer doesn't give a game 100/10 Game of the Century, unstable fanboys go apeshit. In other news, water is wet.

Sadly, this is nothing new. It's the culmination of decades of blind brand loyalty by insecure fans and unscrupulous review outlets giving fellatios to publishers.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Wow, what a bunch of idiots. Why would they even care? Does a review that they don't agree with somehow diminish their enjoyment of the game, or their opinion of it?

You know what, now that I said it I think it actually does. This kind of behavior is not that different from how people refuse to accept that an idea, opinion or a situation is bad just because it's from the political party that they agree with, or that it's good just because it's proposed by the opposing political party. Most people are stupid and therefore they are prone to being dogmatic about something.

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

Is it always this bad in games media? Is it a Zelda thing? Are these just kids?

It's a Nintendo thing. There's a subset of gamers who have made "Nintendo fan" as a part of their identity; therefore, any slights against Ninty (even the smallest) are seen as attacks against them. There's examples of this even on the Escapist if you look in the threads about the Switch and such.

edit: It's simply a more extreme version of the threats over giving a game a 9/10 instead of 10/10 where gamers have taken an entire company into the "protected zone" rather than just a game.

Hm, I thought it to be more only a couple of outliers previously. Maybe I wasn't looking much. Even past Nintendo criticism from Jim only garnered a few "passionate" type responses, aside that No Man's Sky debacle that occurred, that wasn't Nintendo of course, just a similar strength in push back I guess. This seems like a whole bigger hornet's nest of aggressive buzzlings compared to before.
Perhaps there needs to be more awareness in attaching identities to chosen entertainment so people can learn to disconnect the two? With a prybar made from logical thinking?

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

LMAO, it seems Jim is a decent part of the reason the Metacritic dropped from 98 to 97. To think any work of art in any medium deserves a 98 average score is beyond ridiculous. Sure, someone or several people may find a game to be a 10/10 masterpiece. However, what's the chances that upwards of 100 people are all going to basically rate anything that high to allow for the average to be a 98?

And people have the gall to try and tell me that reviewers and game journalists are the problem in this equation. Ha.

It's clearly both sides IMO. Reviewers try to "objectively" rate games, which is why say IGN and Gamespot are so close to each other in score for just about every game. Whereas Siskel and Ebert would have quite the differing opinions on many films. Then, it's quite common to find a gamer post in a thread saying "[Newly-Released-Game-That-I-Haven't-Played] is clearly at worst an 8.5/10, that 7/10 review is obviously wrong". I remember back during even the PS2 era when EGM magazine used the 3-person review format and you got more varying opinions and scores from just 3 reviews being a couple paragraphs long than you do with 100 Metacritic reviews.

 

[tippy2k2]

People are stupid and DDoSing is so easy that any dipshit with a keyboard can do it. For whatever reason, gamers seem especially stupid when it comes to this kind of crap.

Although in this case, I think the stupid people are being extra stupid. Jim Fucking Sterling Son doesn't get revenue or anything from his website so taking it down doesn't hurt him. If anything, this is a win for JFSS as this is just going to give him a lot more attention than a 7/10 ever would have.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Same thing happened with No Man's sky if I remember correctly

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Wow, what a bunch of idiots. Why would they even care? Does a review that they don't agree with somehow diminish their enjoyment of the game, or their opinion of it?

You know what, now that I said it I think it actually does. This kind of behavior is not that different from how people refuse to accept that an idea, opinion or a situation is bad just because it's from the political party that they agree with, or that it's good just because it's proposed by the opposing political party. Most people are stupid and therefore they are prone to being dogmatic about something.

It's more like "this thing that I support can't be bad, otherwise I would be stupid for supporting it, and I can't let this reviewer basically call me stupid." These are people who don't understand that it's healthy to criticize things you like.

 

[Saltyk]

Jim could have given it a 9.999 and there are people who would have bitched about it.

Slightly unrelated, but I remember Adam Sessler once commenting on how stupid he found those types of scores, partly because he would see people argue that a game that got a 9.8 was better than one that got a 9.6 like those fractions of points mean anything.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Jim could have given it a 9.999 and there are people who would have bitched about it.

Slightly unrelated, but I remember Adam Sessler once commenting on how stupid he found those types of scores, partly because he would see people argue that a game that got a 9.8 was better than one that got a 9.6 like those fractions of points mean anything.

Most people can't afford to buy and play every game, either because of time, money, or both, so they have to make choices about what they play, and they want to feel like they made the right choice. So it's not enough for the game that they picked to be good, it also has to be THE BEST. If they didn't pick the best choice then they made the wrong choice, and if they're wrong then they're stupid, and they can't be stupid, they're not going to let some reviewer tell them they're stupid!

And that's why these review scores matter to people, even though that kind of thinking is utterly ridiculous.

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

Keyboard warriors in an age of absentee parenting. Whaddya do.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Apparently the site is back up... but the comment section is gone, replaced with this:

God bless you, Nintendo fans.

 

[InsanityRequiem]

ITT: People immediately blaming ?fans' when a rather big game critic releases a critique of a game that is heavily marketed. Instead of, you know, the most logical issue being server overload due to too much traffic. Or as most call it, the website servers can't handle the influx of people wanting to read his critique. Nah, must be the fault of the ?fans'.

And yet, the hatedom is brushed under the rug. So tell me folks, what makes you believe it was ?fans' that were magically DDosing the site instead of members of the hatedom doing this?

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

So tell me folks, what makes you believe it was ?fans' that were magically DDosing the site instead of members of the hatedom doing this?

Logic. Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions is probably the correct one.

 

[tippy2k2]

ITT: People immediately blaming ?fans' when a rather big game critic releases a critique of a game that is heavily marketed. Instead of, you know, the most logical issue being server overload due to too much traffic. Or as most call it, the website servers can't handle the influx of people wanting to read his critique. Nah, must be the fault of the ?fans'.

And yet, the hatedom is brushed under the rug. So tell me folks, what makes you believe it was ?fans' that were magically DDosing the site instead of members of the hatedom doing this?

I don't know exactly how The Twitters work so I apologize in advance if there is an easier way to share this but I think most people believe it's a DDoS because Jim Fucking Sterling Son is the one who said it was a DDoS.

https://twitter.com/JimSterling/status/841054860921491456

 

[mad825]

Instead of, you know, the most logical issue being server overload due to too much traffic. Or as most call it, the website servers can't handle the influx of people wanting to read his critique. Nah, must be the fault of the ?fans'.

The logical issue that Jim sterling holding a Steam sale.

If there was too much traffic then it would be a regular occurrence and somebody would have to roll out the monkeys to make sure it doesn't happen. Ddos attacked are unexpected and unaccountable.

 

[FalloutJack]

Yeah, everyone cheers when it's taking the piss out of a very obviously bad game/developer or a big business like Konami and Ubisoft, but heaven forbid we take a few lumps that maybe a game we love isn't perfect.

 

[Neverhoodian]

ITT: People immediately blaming ?fans' when a rather big game critic releases a critique of a game that is heavily marketed. Instead of, you know, the most logical issue being server overload due to too much traffic. Or as most call it, the website servers can't handle the influx of people wanting to read his critique. Nah, must be the fault of the ?fans'.

And yet, the hatedom is brushed under the rug. So tell me folks, what makes you believe it was ?fans' that were magically DDosing the site instead of members of the hatedom doing this?

I don't know exactly how The Twitters work so I apologize in advance if there is an easier way to share this but I think most people believe it's a DDoS because Jim Fucking Sterling Son is the one who said it was a DDoS.

https://twitter.com/JimSterling/status/841054860921491456

To add to that, the Zelda subreddit is pretty salty about his review;

https://www.reddit.com/r/zelda/comments/5yzmvt/jim_sterlings_zelda_breath_of_the_wild_review_710/?st=j07g2777&sh=cd0c01fc

https://www.reddit.com/r/zelda/comments/5z0xr0/botw_breath_of_the_wild_dropped_from_a_98_to_a_97/

...So yeah, it's probably a safe assumption that the "lunatic fringe" of the Zelda fanbase is to blame.