Update 2: EA Dismisses Dungeon Keeper Mobile Criticism

[King of Asgaard]

I think my reaction upon reading this is shared by many:

Spoiler

Seriously though, the game's heresy as it is. EA defending it just emphasizes that.

 

[lacktheknack]

To be fair, the game isn't actually aimed at us.

To also be fair, it shouldn't be based off of Dungeon Keeper then.

Also to be fair, apparently it's pretty bad by mobile standards anyhow.

Dammit, EA. You DO want to avoid the Golden Poo, right?

 

[Trishbot]

I could rant. I could ramble. I could say it poetically. I could curse.

I'll just say this.

EA, you are the worst, most unethical, most insulting excuse of a game company I know.


Thank you for the year 2008. Mirror's Edge and Dead Space were fantastic. It was all downhill from there.

 

[BaronVH]

They can dismiss it all they want, but I was looking forward to this and will not and did not buy it. Wait to win, nope, not for me. What amazes me is how many stark, raving lunatics actually buy and play these things. I also think the reviews are not valid. It seems to me that it has to be people behind the game putting up positive reviews. It would be one thing to get a new game and package it this way. It is something entirely different to use an established franchise to do it. How many Steam accounts would be cancelled if Half Life 3 were free and it cost 1000 black mesa coins for a crowbar or $9.99 to get it right away? They are ruining the game market, and idiots are letting them do it.

 

[Mangod]

[HEADING=2]it's not actually possible not to rate the game below a 5[/HEADING]
at least, according to this random guy. If you do, it takes you to an EA support ticket instead of rating the game.

I too would like to confirm this. It's been said by countless users of the game. They are straight up stopping people rating this game lower than a 5 and therefore artificially inflating the score on the store page to make it appear higher when people look for ratings of games.

"Quite a few people fell for our scam therefore it is legitimate" is not an excuse. If anything it makes things WORSE.

This game is a travesty and should be removed from both the iOS and android stores. EA needs to be punished for putting out a product that is so shameful.

I'm quite certain this is the reason seedy companies are trying to kill off the Let's Play "genre", because those are our last chance to see the game without it being manipulated to show us the good bits and nothing else. If it wasn't for let's play's, we'd only have the words of publishers like EA and sites like GameSpot, who're in their pocket to provide us with "information" about a games "quality" or lack thereof.

In short: EA, this song's for you.

 

[Pr0]

I'm fairly sure that it is corporate culture at EA, at this point, to dismiss any and all negative criticism.

Obviously they know far better than the consumer about how games should work and what games the consumer wants because the consumers keep buying their games, so obviously there is nothing wrong with the games they publish and anyone saying otherwise simply lacks the cognitive perspective to understand how good their games actually are.

So yeah. Stop complaining about EA produced games and don't forget to go pre-order The Sims 4 and Sim City 6 right this very minute.

 

[PunkRex]

Ugh. Fuck games. I'm gonna go read a book or something.

*Looks up from his manga*

Did something shitty happen again?

*Reads thread*

Eeer-OH, my word, just... well, hope you enjoy that worst company three years running EA, ain't no way the internet's letting you forget this.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

Fucking clown. If it's meant to be played with a few minutes here and there, why are the timers days long and not hours? Perhaps more importantly, why the fuck is Dungeon Keeper, the continuation of a proud legacy, a game meant to be played with a few minutes here and there? Microtransactions are never fair when the gameplay is solely meant to keep players frustrated and bored. Microtransactions are 'fair' only in some circumstances, one requirement being that the game is a solid experience with ACTUAL GAMEPLAY.

As for ratings, fuck knows what happened there, they probably got their employees to rate the game, but either way, you can't justify this shit with a Google Play score. Why don't you survey fans of Dungeon Keeper and see what the average fucking rating is? Why don't you see the thoughts of a sample group of people who have played actual games?

...a TASTE of the experience? More like a soulless husk cobbled together and marched out as a final insult to the series. I haven't even played one of the games, but since this whole debacle happened I've done my research, and to even suggest it is a 'taste' is bordering on lying, except that some superficial elements are common.

Then again, of course they're going to defend their own game, and if the rating are legitimate by whatever fluke of stupidity, flout those like they're a get out of rage free card. But fuck this guy and the guys he works with. I feel genuinely sorry for fans of the games, and doubly so that they have to listen to this bullshit. "No, you're playing it wrong, you were expecting a game, it is a boring, frustrating, shallow, transaction-riddled experience made only to create price insensitivity and goad you into buying in-game currency. Had you expected that, you'd find it quite satisfying - with the title in there for the fans to show we care."

EDIT: Holy fuck - A quick Google search reveals that through some 'clever engineering', the only way to quickly and conveniently rate the game IS TO SCORE IT A 5. Doing anything else does not actually process as a rating. The fact that there were enough people bothered to change their rating afterwards that it is anything below a 5 is condemnation in itself.

 

[CriticalMiss]

It's not a surprise that EA would fake user reviews because everyone does it (Sony, Microsoft, McDonald's, you name it).

McDonalds has reviews?

And honestly, did anyone expect EA to make anything more than a soulless shell of a game using a nostalgic name for brand recognition whilst utilising the worst of the free-to-pay (sorry) fee-to-play (oops!) free-to-play tactics? What suprises me is how they are manipulating the ratings of the game, everything else is the sameold shit that everyone seems to be doing in mobile games these days (not that that excuses it). Faking the review scores should be against some rule or another.

 

[nuttshell]

Mhh...yea...nothing surprising here, hi EA, bye EA. I'm looking forward to War For The Overworld. https://wftogame.com/

 

[Robert Marrs]

NOOOOO! Don't do it Skalski! Please don't try to excuse away legitimate complaints with the standard, EA go fuck yourself public relations talk. I swear EA seems like the only company who wants to do crap like this on such a regular basis. Its one thing to release a game people don't like but insulting the intelligence of your own customers in order to save face and dismissing totally valid criticisms is the kind of behavior that keeps winning you those worst company in america awards. I swear every time I think EA might be trying to make a turn around they promptly do something stupid like this. Hire a new PR team or just stop letting employees make public statements.

 

[Nazulu]

Ugh, every time I read 'vocal minority' I also read 'ignorant shit head'. It's so over used. It's not a good defense in any way, just more cop-out crap I see so often.

This couldn't be EA, not after some of the good rumours I heard, and after really fucking up some titles already.

This crew just needs to be thrown out, literally. Where the hell do they get all these morons?

 

[songnar]

Could it be? Is E.A. going for a dynasty? Three years straight!?

Unbelievable.

 

[Flatfrog]

Appropriately enough, I'm going to play Devil's Advocate for a moment.

I haven't read the whole thread but one thing no one seems to be referring to is what seems to me the most obvious game that EA were modelling this on, Clash of Clans. My son plays this quite a lot, pretty much exactly as EA describes - he nips onto it every day for a few minutes, monitors his status, picks up any gold that's lying about, looks back over footage of any raids carried out on his fortress, moves a few things around, sets various things in motion and turns the game off again. I don't let him spend any money on microtransactions, but it doesn't appear to bother him at all.

It's not a mode of gameplay that makes any sense to me, but I can kind of see how it fits into the mobile world, and it has its own appeal, in the same sense that gardening or owning a pet does - something you come back to every now and again, give it a bit of love, then reap the rewards a few days down the line.

Would I have preferred a straight port of Dungeon Keeper 2 to mobile at the same price as the GoG version? Hell yeah. And of course I'm aware that EA aren't *really* aiming this at people like my son, they're aiming it at insane people that actually are willing to pay huge sums of money to speed it up. And of course, of course, it's an evil piece of shit. In fact, I'd say that the scam they pulled with the rating system is verging on criminal. But on its own terms, EA's argument is not *completely* ludicrous.

 

[Branindain]

Urrggghh... this company...........

The thing is, it's twofold for me now with them. For one thing, they're clearly confident that consumers will eat up their crap, whine about how crap it is, then happily line up months later for another serving of crap, so that they really only pay lip service to the regular storm of complaints while they wait for everyone to move on. Because of this, I boycott them out of simple self-respect because NO WAY am I gonna be one of the suckers who bemoans EA's shittiness while buying Dragon Ages and Mass Effects and Sim-things and Dead Space Premium Edition and Titanfall because shiny things.

That aside, though, I have to boycott them anyway because, well, you know that saying about "Insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result"? How can you buy an EA game and actually hold hope that it's gonna be good? They have explicitly stated that they intend to shoehorn microtransactions and online multiplayer into EVERYTHING THEY EVER MAKE EVER. My last EA game was Mirror's Edge and I really liked it, but I'm not about to pay them money so that I can find out firsthand how they fucked up Mirror's Edge 2. Because they ABSOLUTELY WILL. Guaranteed.

GUARANTEED. Just learn, and stop feeding the trolls please.

 

[DonTsetsi]

I'm reminded of PvZ2. It has a completely different, but just as broken model. It forces you to replay levels multiple times in order to get enough stars to progress. You can't get stars the first time through and you can't get more than one at a time. Only exception are the stars obtainable by unlocking levels with keys, which you can get by either grinding or paying cash. So, after seeing how many times I would have to replay levels to get out of the second area I just quit playing...

 

[MoltenSilver]

"but theorizes that it is due to hardcore Dungeon Keeper fans coming into the game and expecting a full Dungeon Keeper expereince[sic], rather than just a taste."

So you think the issue is that people who like DUNGEON KEEPER (who have been starved for a decent replacement as is) saw something called DUNGEON KEEPER and assumed it was DUNGEON KEEPER. Yes, how foolish of those people.


EDIT: God Damnit EA, when you were trying to pull your whole image around with the 'we really don't want to be worst company' and the Origin Humble Bundle Charity stuff, I didn't think you would actually keep to that pledge but I was at least willing to meet you halfway give you the chance to get back in my good graces. Way to keep fucking it up.

 

[IamLEAM1983]

I think this just confirms the suspicion I had that some studio managers are functioning sociopaths. They go all in for profit and, well, fuck the user base. If they get fired for being tactless idiots, then it's never their fault. Their boss is to blame.

At least, this is what this kind of behavior feels to me.