No WTFast, You Can't Bribe Customers For Positive Steam Reviews

Cid Silverwing

Paladin of The Light
Jul 27, 2008
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Fuck this industry so goddamn much. We need an even bigger consumer revolt against not just corrupt journalism, but corrupt developers period.

I'm sick and tired of watching us gamers being treated with giggling contempt like this.
 

ChaoGuy2006

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Sep 6, 2014
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Cid Silverwing said:
Fuck this industry so goddamn much. We need an even bigger consumer revolt against not just corrupt journalism, but corrupt developers period.

I'm sick and tired of watching us gamers being treated with giggling contempt like this.
Buy good games from good devs.
Support good journalists who write about games.

Can't find a good website/game? Ask around. And talk about games/articles you've player/read. No point in having something good living in a vacuum, let the world know how good it is!

Hit them where it hurts, their wallet. Keep supporting what needs supporting and the "industry crash" will only take down the stuff we don't care about losing.
 

MonsterCrit

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You know you have to give Valve credit for what they've doe. This release basically ensures that no one can take any positive review of WTFFast seriously. They know they can't really stop the bribery in any real way... since as long as it;s done off-steam there's no way of confirming if someone was or wasn't bribed so they did the next best thing. Revealed that bribing was happening so in short any positive review is highly suspect and it adds more weight to negative reviews
 

Drummodino

Can't Stop the Bop
Jan 2, 2011
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Kinda scummy thing for them to pull, I'm quite surprised they thought that would be a good idea.

That said I actually use WTFast and pay for it, since I play FFXIV from Australia and the servers are in Canada. It cuts about 100 ping from my connection and dramatically improves my gameplay experience. I would not be able to raid without it and I consider it well worth the money. Its not perfect but it definitely helps.
 

Glaice

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Mar 18, 2013
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It's only a matter of time before the developer becomes blacklisted by Valve for their ToS breaking practice which they got caught red handed with.
 

faefrost

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Jun 2, 2010
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kyp275 said:
@Strazda



Since the quoting system seems to be broken once again?





It?s not about ?having more hoops to jump through?, nor does ?all VPN speeds suck?. Services like WTFast is about jumping through DIFFERENT hoops than the one you normally would be, which may or may not be beneficial to you depending on the circumstances.



What White Hunter said is spot on. FF14?s NA datacenter is located in Toronto, where a substantial number of users routed through a Level 3 connection that is often unable to handle the demand, which causes severe latency issues for some people. While I don?t usually have much lag issues, there were a few weeks awhile back where I had to resort to VPNs like WTFast because the L3 hop at Toronto were losing so many packets it was nearly impossible to play the game(ping plotter showed 70-90% packet loss).



And yes, while lag is not measured in DPS, its impact can definitely be measured there. Players who parse regularly knows where their DPS number sits, and the drop off from the norms is easily measured. If you normally put out around 500 DPS in T10, a drop to 400 or 450 is definitely a sign of serious issues.



Ninja in FF14 is especially vulnerable to this, as their ninjutsu requires a specific combination of up to 3 skills within a 2 second period that takes 0.5 second each to complete activation, with the wrong sequence either yielding the wrong ninjutsu or cancel the whole thing entirely (which can?t be cast again for another 20 seconds or so), which is a very real dps drop. And since all ninjutsu actions have to be cast sequentially in order without other normal skills weaved in between, if you slow down the input of ninjutsu skills to account for lag to make sure you get it right, it would mean you?re spending a lot of time NOT using normal weapon skills that you otherwise would be using ? again, a real negative impact on DPS.



Bottom line is, services like WTFast isn?t what I?d consider ?snake oil?, they do work ? provided your specific connection issue is one that can be addressed by a VPN service.
And you have just described the one single, and exceedingly rare situation where using some manner of VPN might change or improve a users performance in a game or reduce lag. And it is nothing predictable. It is just in that particular case the VPN in question happens to shift the routing to bypass the bad router. This is entirely by accident, not design. it may just as easily dump you onto a bad route. But at the end of teh day it truly has no real net benefit to most and an overall detriment to the vast majority as it adds more overhead in processing and encryption to no actual benefit. It's classic "magic network code to make games run super fast", and it always is and always will be pure and utter bullshit. There may be some anecdotal evidence that some users do better. But it is simply a crapshoot caused by shifting where the user seems to be sitting with regard to the desired server. The people running this service do not have any actual control over routing on the internet backbones. They cannot selectively find the best paths because they are simply another host on the web. They count on there being enough stupid people with no idea of how things worth willing to buy into the service and pimp it out via word of mouth. it's Homeopathic Networking at its worst.
 

faefrost

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Jun 2, 2010
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Cid Silverwing said:
Fuck this industry so goddamn much. We need an even bigger consumer revolt against not just corrupt journalism, but corrupt developers period.

I'm sick and tired of watching us gamers being treated with giggling contempt like this.
It's a really simple solution. Stop Paying For Shit! Serriously! If you don't like day one DLC stop paying for it and encourage others to do the same. Pre Order bullshit and feeling forced to buy shoddy products sight unseen? STOP PREORDERING. Simply stop giving them money for practices you don't like, and encourage others to do the same. It does not matter how much screaming of complaining anyone does. It really doesn't matter if jim Sterling bitches about it on YouTube. At the end of the day the only thing that will stop industry practices that we do not like is to make them unprofitable. Stop paying for them. It's that simple.
 

Kardsymalone

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Oct 6, 2014
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Cid Silverwing said:
Fuck this industry so goddamn much. We need an even bigger consumer revolt against not just corrupt journalism, but corrupt developers period.

I'm sick and tired of watching us gamers being treated with giggling contempt like this.
There's not much we can do we could try to be as savvy a consumer as possible and tell everyone we know how to be one but there will always be another 100,000 idiots to take your place as a consumer for a crappy product. FPS players still buy CoD and Battlefield regardless of how buggy or crappy the previous one was because of the hype. People still buy crappy EA games regardless of everything they've done. Early access and bullshit kickstater scams are clearly profitable since so many of them exist and work. It almost feels like the industry doesn't want savvy consumers anymore who want more for less and want innovation since they're so hard to deal with.
 

totlmstr

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Oct 12, 2011
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Chiming in, saying that they did admit to their mistake, but they put that response in KotakuInAction.

http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2zzl7e/gamer_vpn_service_wtfast_offers_a_free_premium/cpo5xy4

ThorvaldurWTFast said:
Hi Everyone,

I work for WTFast, and I figured I'd make a post here kind of explaining our side of things. I'd be willing to provide proof to the mods of my identity.

This all started when we get our product Steam and we noticed we had 44 negative reviews most of which we believed were not honest as they claimed:

-That they got a ping of over 900 ms, our ping meter does not go that high. And in game ping meters are broken by WTFast as it obfuscates the user's IP from the game server, and it is a SOCKS proxy. And you cannot send pings through a SOCKS proxy this is well documented.

Depending on how the in game ping meter works it's either not going to change or show the ping between the game and the proxy. So the only conditions in which you could get an in game ping that high would be to deliberately choose the farthest proxy from the game server.

-They were VAC banned, we have to date not received any evidence of any user experiencing a VAC ban due to WTFast.

-Users posted reviews about attempting to use WTFast with games we do not support at the moment such as Battlefield 3 and Civ 5.

That being said the decision to offer a free month of basic time for a positive review, to counteract reviews we believed to troll comments, was one made in haste. We have a large community who love and use our product, and we hope this has not damaged their perception of us. We've issued an apology for this on our Steam page and we hope we can accommodate everyone as we adjust to user feedback.

Best regards,

The WTFast team.
 

kyp275

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Mar 27, 2012
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faefrost said:
And you have just described the one single, and exceedingly rare situation where using some manner of VPN might change or improve a users performance in a game or reduce lag. And it is nothing predictable. It is just in that particular case the VPN in question happens to shift the routing to bypass the bad router. This is entirely by accident, not design. it may just as easily dump you onto a bad route.
FF14 has what, probably at least half a million subscribers? With a good chunk of that being NA players. The lag problems is hardly "exceedingly rare", considering SE had to make specific mechanic changes to try to alleviate its effect in the game. I know people who actually use VPN services regularly because they are unable to be effective in raids otherwise. And accident? Please, you may want to give us a bit more credit than that, people know where the bad routes are, or are you trying to say that we're all idiots who doesn't know how to use basic networking tools?

But at the end of teh day it truly has no real net benefit to most and an overall detriment to the vast majority as it adds more overhead in processing and encryption to no actual benefit. It's classic "magic network code to make games run super fast", and it always is and always will be pure and utter bullshit. There may be some anecdotal evidence that some users do better. But it is simply a crapshoot caused by shifting where the user seems to be sitting with regard to the desired server. The people running this service do not have any actual control over routing on the internet backbones. They cannot selectively find the best paths because they are simply another host on the web. They count on there being enough stupid people with no idea of how things worth willing to buy into the service and pimp it out via word of mouth. it's Homeopathic Networking at its worst.
VPN service is a tool, a tool designed with a specific purpose that may or may not be useful to you depending on what your issue may be. Lambasting it as "utter bullshit" because it's not useful at all times makes you just as bad as those who try to say it works all the time. An emergency carjack is really only useful during roadside emergency where you need to lift the car up a bit, it's certainly not very useful anywhere outside that scenario, but I doubt you'll find many people who'd think that an emergency jack "has no real net benefit to most" just because it's not something you'd ever use normally - hell, now that I think about it, I've used VPN services more times in the last year than I've used an emergency jack in the last twenty.

But since you obviously know better, why don't you tell all those FF14 players who can't dodge ground AOEs w/o VPNs how to actually play the game without relying on "homeopathic networking"?
 

faefrost

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Jun 2, 2010
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kyp275 said:
faefrost said:
And you have just described the one single, and exceedingly rare situation where using some manner of VPN might change or improve a users performance in a game or reduce lag. And it is nothing predictable. It is just in that particular case the VPN in question happens to shift the routing to bypass the bad router. This is entirely by accident, not design. it may just as easily dump you onto a bad route.
FF14 has what, probably at least half a million subscribers? With a good chunk of that being NA players. The lag problems is hardly "exceedingly rare", considering SE had to make specific mechanic changes to try to alleviate its effect in the game. I know people who actually use VPN services regularly because they are unable to be effective in raids otherwise. And accident? Please, you may want to give us a bit more credit than that, people know where the bad routes are, or are you trying to say that we're all idiots who doesn't know how to use basic networking tools?

But at the end of teh day it truly has no real net benefit to most and an overall detriment to the vast majority as it adds more overhead in processing and encryption to no actual benefit. It's classic "magic network code to make games run super fast", and it always is and always will be pure and utter bullshit. There may be some anecdotal evidence that some users do better. But it is simply a crapshoot caused by shifting where the user seems to be sitting with regard to the desired server. The people running this service do not have any actual control over routing on the internet backbones. They cannot selectively find the best paths because they are simply another host on the web. They count on there being enough stupid people with no idea of how things worth willing to buy into the service and pimp it out via word of mouth. it's Homeopathic Networking at its worst.
VPN service is a tool, a tool designed with a specific purpose that may or may not be useful to you depending on what your issue may be. Lambasting it as "utter bullshit" because it's not useful at all times makes you just as bad as those who try to say it works all the time. An emergency carjack is really only useful during roadside emergency where you need to lift the car up a bit, it's certainly not very useful anywhere outside that scenario, but I doubt you'll find many people who'd think that an emergency jack "has no real net benefit to most" just because it's not something you'd ever use normally - hell, now that I think about it, I've used VPN services more times in the last year than I've used an emergency jack in the last twenty.

But since you obviously know better, why don't you tell all those FF14 players who can't dodge ground AOEs w/o VPNs how to actually play the game without relying on "homeopathic networking"?
But they are not offering themselves as a "tool to specifically get around FFXIV's Toronto bottleneck." Which honestly it is just a fluke of the network that they happen to do that and wholly outside their control. Instead they are offering it as this "game speeding super VPN service" which should generally improve everything in all your gaming. It's a sham.

It's utter bullshit because the merchant is selling you something that they do not in fact have any control over, and passing it off as magic network code. It's like selling you rain to water your crops. That it causes a seeming improvement in one game today because of a known flaw in a public router is not an indication that it will do so an hour from now. The vendor taking your money has no control over how or if his product will work, and he counts on your lack of knowledge of how the public networks work to keep you as a customer. It's Snake Oil. Some people did get better taking snake oil. That does not mean it was brought about by the snake oil, nor did it make the snake oil a valid or valuable product.
 

Idocreating

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Apr 16, 2009
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Daemascus said:
Bribery and all aside, I'm still baffled how running a secondary program is suppose to make you connection better/less lag-y.
WTFast and it's ilk are -supposed- to redirect your traffic through their web servers. While this does take slightly longer than it normally would, it means that your bypassing the standard web server infrastructure. Infrastructure that can be horrifically clogged and unusable for gaming because the providers of certain 'hops' refuse to spend money to update their capacity.

Case in point: FF14: ARR. Servers apparently based in Canada and most of the time your routed through Montreal. Whatever was going on in Montreal would utterly kill your latency most of the time. Nothing to do with Square Enix's end, nothing the playerbase could do but force their traffic to route around it.

When it works, it's a fucking godsend for fixing a very specific problem. Evidently the service's Steam launch has been quite half assed from the negative reviews, though i wonder whether they bought the service trying to fix a problems it's not designed to fix.
 

kyp275

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Mar 27, 2012
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faefrost said:
But they are not offering themselves as a "tool to specifically get around FFXIV's Toronto bottleneck." Which honestly it is just a fluke of the network that they happen to do that and wholly outside their control. Instead they are offering it as this "game speeding super VPN service" which should generally improve everything in all your gaming. It's a sham.

It's utter bullshit because the merchant is selling you something that they do not in fact have any control over, and passing it off as magic network code. It's like selling you rain to water your crops. That it causes a seeming improvement in one game today because of a known flaw in a public router is not an indication that it will do so an hour from now. The vendor taking your money has no control over how or if his product will work, and he counts on your lack of knowledge of how the public networks work to keep you as a customer. It's Snake Oil. Some people did get better taking snake oil. That does not mean it was brought about by the snake oil, nor did it make the snake oil a valid or valuable product.
Is it the carjack's fault if the manufacturer tried to advertise it as a turbo that adds 100HP to your car? Nor did I say it's only for FF14, it's just an example I'm most personally familiar with - case in point, a guild member yesterday had to use a VPN (pingzapper I think) to get functional connection to the server. She's from Sweden, so her ISP was probably bouncing her connection all the way to Mars and back, and viola, the VPN worked. But I guess according to you she, and the thousands of FF14/other MMO players all got the "fluke" right?

No, it's not some "game speeding super VPN", nor would it work all the time - it can't help if nothing is broken in the first place. Go ahead and rail at WTFast's dubious advertising if you want, I certainly don't disagree there, but going overboard and start railing against reality is where I draw the line.
 

Gladion

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Jan 19, 2009
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MonsterCrit said:
That's a joke website.

@OT: Good on... us? I suppose? Every product on steam gets its share of troll reviews, and there seems to be no reason to believe this one was hit worse than any other. Maybe if a lot of the people who downloaded it didn't even know how it works, but that's to be expected if you advertise your product the way this company did.