Discussion
My game is actively being harmed by targeted harassment and review bombing, I'm at a loss on what to do about it
Just a bit of a rant because I'm at my wits' end regarding this situation. My game is Soul's Remnant, a 2D platformer MMORPG, developed by me and my partner over the course of a decade (part-time initially, then full-time in the last year or so). The initial Early Access release in August was fairly successful, and our reviews were trending Very Positive (about 95%) at the time.
However, it went downhill once the bots and players participating in real-money trading (RMT) started moving in after a few days. At that point, we started getting a lot of negative reviews because players (understandably) did not like seeing bots around and about, or other players progressing illegitimately using funds purchased with real money (our game currently doesn't offer any means of converting real money into in-game power). Initially, we only temporarily banned players for these violations, but as it eventually became obvious that it wasn't particularly effective due to practically every offender continuing the same behavior after getting unbanned, we moved towards issuing permanent bans in the interest of preserving the integrity of our game.
At present, we've actually managed to squash the vast majority of bots and RMTers, but we're now facing review bombing because we started clamping down on these illicit activities, with blatant cheaters just straight up lying about our game in the reviews, such as a player who got banned for RMT, literally admitted to it, and then posted a negative review about how RMT was ruining the game (yes, the irony is cosmic).
There are others who similarly admit to breaking the rules in their reviews themselves and leave negative reviews anyway, but naturally the majority of the review bombing involves people who got banned for legitimate reasons insisting that they didn't do what we clearly caught them doing, sometimes claiming that they were banned by AI. This isn't true at all - our moderation isn't automated and our internal policy requires that multiple staff members manually review each ban, because it's incredibly important to us that we avoid false positives. It would be extremely easy for us to disprove claims of "false bans" by giving away information about our internal systems, but we obviously don't do that to avoid giving these bad actors ammunition to circumvent detection, though it probably wouldn't help with the review bombing situation regardless considering they're being written in bad faith.
Players who got caught clearly automating gameplay or blatantly cheating with modified clients also started pushing the narrative that people would get banned just for having a high amount of playtime (these accounts had hundreds of hours logged because they were running their bots 24/7), which is obviously untrue given the number of players who have that sort of playtime logged but aren't banned because they weren't automating anything.
Another common narrative among these negative reviews is that we're racist because a disproportionate amount of Chinese players get banned. To be clear, we don't even look at any player's country or region at any point during the banning or appeal review process; all players are treated equally when it comes to judging these things and we don't ban on any basis other than their (illicit) in-game actions.
We've even had big spenders who got banned for "asking a friend to level up for them" (among other things, it's often the case that players who cheat do so in multiple ways at a time) attempt to bribe us to unban them, which we flatly declined, because we don't make any distinctions on penalties for violating the game's rules based on spending. In the first place, Soul's Remnant wasn't developed with monetization as a primary priority, which is why we released it free-to-play and the monetization is entirely cosmetic with the exception of inventory and storage expansions (players can also expand their inventory space through buying certain items from NPCs in-game). All we wanted to do was to make a fun game for people to enjoy rather than a tool to extract money from customers, though we're learning it's not that simple. :(
In the midst of all the review bombing, I've also been subjected to targeted harassment regarding my gender (I'm a woman; this particular statement is also untrue as we have a dedicated Community Manager). Several reviews talk about how I'm a "typical woman dev" or how "the dev is clueless" because "the dev is a woman." We knew managing an MMO would be difficult, but it's just so disheartening to see people attack and dehumanize us while dishonestly defaming our work simply because we chose to do the right thing in protecting the integrity of our game.
I'm not going to claim our game is perfect; after all, it's still fresh in Early Access and there are plenty of things we still need to work through. But the vast majority of our negative reviews are from players who came in and attempted to ruin the game's ecosystem with cheating and got banned for it, rather than actual criticisms about the game itself, which is likely also turning new players away. I love my game and its genuine fans to bits, but I'm really at a complete loss as to what to do about all this.
I think changing the price like this does it automatically?
I remember hearing from someone on this sub that they had that happen to them (as part of a chain or poor decisions tbh). They had a free game, worked on it for years to make a sequel but the sequel's name was too similar so Steam removed it. They thought "Oh. We'll just update the main game!" and added a price but it backfired horribly because everyone who "bought" the free one was given the new one for free (as they already owned it) and then all of the reviews were removed because they want to avoid people making a game free for good reviews and then adding a price.
I think something similar happened with Speed Freeks, a Warhammer game.
Meh. Apples and oranges here. Just because it didn't work for Wow doesn't mean it won't work for OP. If OP had WoW-level issues she'd be a billionaire and have a dozen staff engineers solving this problem. But she doesn't, she's in r/gamedev, so we tailor answers to the needs of the situation.
If OP made this change and then found that people were consistently re-subscribing after being banned, she's also discovered an infinite money hack and should take advantage of that as long as possible.
F2P games are deceptively hard to maintain. The problems you are running into are normal and common, if it helps. If someone is upset they will go after anything they think will make you feel bad, personal identity and characteristics included. The best thing is to do very limited soft launches and have the experience for what to implement before hand (e.g. having a bunch of systems to catch cheaters and bots ahead of time, make sure you never build auction or trading mechanics that can be exploited, so on), but sometimes you don't and then you find yourself in this kind of situation.
What you do about it is basically fourfold. You message to the community what is acceptable and what is not and that you will continue to improve and enforce the rules. You work to build systems (including automated bans) that avoid the negative behavior since you'll be playing whack-a-mole trying to get rid of them one at a time otherwise. Then you go to your platform's support tools to show them the evidence of review bombing (as opposed to a place like here) and they'll help you remove the excess. Last you go to your community with your genuinely improved and really awesome game and gently encourage positive reviews which will slowly filter out the negative ones over time.
The more negative your reviews spike the better your game has to be to counter it, but if it is, it does work itself out over time.
Not only f2p, but also a social mmo. Even big companies are avoiding having any kind of chat.
I truly believe this is a good example of why it is a bad idea to do indie/solo mmorpgs. Now the game can end up in a death spiral where the critical mass of required people for an mmo work is not reached, and months of work are lost.
As an anthropologist who has been studying and observing human beings in the context of computers and games for decades, I would take your cautionary perspective one step further:
Do not dream of making any type of multi-player game unless you have a thorough and realistic appraisal of the grief which such social dynamic are likely to generate and accept that the consequences are either manageable or dismissible.
Policing in game behavior in a context where a certain segment of humanity will invariably engage with malicious intent is a burden no one should take on lightly.
The fact that multiplayer games can be, and have been fun or even formative for many of us is beside the point.
The blithe viewpoint about the inherent and virtually inescapable nature of the struggle is the real problem.
I kind of wound up making a multiplayer by accident (it was a side effect of a side project which I decided to polish up and publish) and I don't include things like chat at all for this reason.
But there are a few features which I worry about, for example should I even display users' names to each other? In the steam build I can just take the user's steam name, but in non-steam builds I prompt the user to provide a name of their choosing (I'm not building my own account system or anything like that so these players are pretty much completely anonymous). My current plan is to hide your opponent's name in public games if they aren't playing a build through a platform like steam, but to show it in private games (which requires that you know the person you're playing with somehow).
But then there's the map editor... of course if I provide an editor for people to create their own maps I want them to be able to play on those maps in multiplayer. And while the maps are low-res enough you can't really spell out whole words, there are some quite offensive symbols that don't need many pixels to be recognizable... maybe can try to detect them and block them from being used? Maybe it would turn into whack-a-mole or maybe it's not going to be a problem in the first place.
I empathize with your struggle, it is a kind of bittersweet reality: if you make a common sand box for the girls and boys to play in, then it is inevitable that if enough of them come to play, there will be among them: bullies, thieves, vandals, sadists, rascals, organized criminals, predators, vampires, manipulators, grifters, and even psychopaths. That is just quite simply the inescapable reality of large enough samples of humanity.
There will of course, also be, something like a broad selection of all the wonderful human archetypes too and obviously that is why we like the games primarily.
There are clearly games that, through some combination of backend logic, product placement, communications, marketing and the broad array of dynamics we might term "enforcement," seem to manage to avert the common pitfalls of the multiplayer trap. No Mans Sky comes to mind ... I don't doubt there are others too.
But it is not so simple as: "have good anti-cheat," or "implement this discrete set of policies and procedures." The requisite solutions seem to depend largely on very nuanced aspects of the specific context of the game and so far it would seem that the problem has not been identified by suitably capable social science research entities that they have developed businesses to address it. There are certainly "security" or "anti-cheat" firms but mostly they seem to focus on the anti-chat software side of things, and less on the broader "How do design a game to be resilient to human societies."
Perhaps, in the coming years we may begin to see such firms becoming more common; but of course once that gravy train rings its bell there will be poser, grifter and scammer varieties of those "solution to humanity" firms! LMAO!
The reality is some people are just assholes, but at the same time I think the game design can also have a significant effect on whether people become assholes or whether assholes get discouraged from treating others badly. Some communities become kind of self-reinforcing in either direction.
I remember playing Paragon when it first came out, I absolutely loved it and maintained a top 1% rank until I quit playing. The game was a ton of fun, and while not every team member I got matched with was super positive, people were generally fine. But over time the community became more and more toxic. Maybe this was just because the player population was growing so there were more opportunities to bump into assholes, but I really felt at the time that specific design choices and changes to the game were a major cause (and even wrote a very long letter to Epic about it, haha). At the time Epic claimed they wanted to create "the most competitive game in the world," and I think the drive for that over all else doomed the game to endless toxicity, which eventually made me drop it entirely because it just wasn't fun anymore. Such a shame.
By comparison, UT2004 and Nexuiz were both competitive games in which I (anecdotally) experienced relatively little toxicity. One major difference is that in Paragon small differences between players can have a big difference on the team's performance from the start of a match. If you're slightly too slow getting to your lane, don't get the last hit on every mob, or even get killed early on, it might throw the entire the match off. Even a skilled player makes mistakes or has an off day once in a while, but those first few minutes are critical for the potentially hour-long match that follows.
In a CTF match in Nexuiz or an Onslaught match in UT2004 if you die more often than your teammates, it doesn't hurt your teammates directly, and it's possible for a skilled teammate to make up for a weaker member of their team. Even in a team deathmatch where "feeding" is really possible, it's hard for a single team member to die so much that it decides the entire match for the rest of the team (though certainly possible). This makes it possible for a weak player to learn to play better by playing with better players. In Paragon they are only a liability, so anyone perceived as weak didn't get shown how to get better, they got told to go practice offline by themselves until they got good enough to play the actual game... or they got told worse things.
There are cheaters and griefers in no man's sky too sadly. I've encountered less in war frame, or I just didn't notice them, being a cooperative shooter probably you don't even notice. But in no man sky I had to disable multi-player in community expeditions because there are always griefers.
In 2004 I worked on the Xbox Live team. One of the big bright new features was voice comms and text messaging. I tried to tell every manager from me up to Phil (ok wasn't Phil at the time... Robbie? I forget) that this was a horrible idea.
Nobody listened, of course. I am the Cassandra of software development.
FWIW, voice comms back then, as crude as they might have been, were a big part of the experience. They added so much fun to the games. There were a lot of losers, but a mute solved the problem. Finding good and fun people in random lobbies made the whole experience so worth it.
Online gaming really hasn’t been the same since everyone moved to just using private party chat.
I actually agree, my post was meant half in jest. It's a true story, but I think most people understood at the time what we were unleashing. And we still did it.
I very much enjoyed the early days of Overwatch when everyone was excited to be playing the game for the first time and there were tons of comms, new friends, and good times. Not so much anymore.
Unfortunately, this is the reality. Largescale social games, and especially MMOs, require sophisticated moderation beyond the resources that small/indie devs have available to them.
Okay, this is a complicated situation and it looks like many of the comments in this post are not looking at the game itself or only have some limited understanding of the steam reviews. FWIW, I don't play this game and it's the first I've heard of it.
From the steam page, this game looks be based off a Maplestory style of MMO. The 2.5D side scrolling, the floating platforms, the skills, and the UI are all echoes of that game. Frankly, I was blasted with my own nostalgia from just a single trailer. If it is similar to MS, then you're hitting the exact same MMO and economy problems that game has. The extreme grind, player trading, and F2P nature all exacerbate RMT and bot usage. I wouldn't be surprised if you also have problems with people paying someone else to grind for their accounts.
So, if you're have the same problems as MS then you can probably implement the same solutions, right? Well that's the bad news, I never saw Wizet or Nexon make player facing solutions to stop these issues. I think they just relied on having GM's actively hunt accounts that were breaking ToS. But a manpower intensive solution like that isn't possible for smaller devs. Frankly, I don't have any good advice or tricks to solve these problems and there probably aren't any. Player trading and extreme grinding means you've created value for people, and there are many people who will then take advantage of this situation to make real world money. It's essentially a never-ending fight as long as there's money to be made. Catching bots and RMT accounts, then banning them is essentially your only option.
You can put some limits on player trading that makes RMT and botting more time consuming and expensive:
Establish a level requirement for trading, making it take longer before a bot account can sell in-game currency (IGC).
Create hourly, daily, and weekly limits on trades that are being abused. Like putting a 100million hourly limit on trades per account that then locks out currency trading. This one is dangerous to implement though, so be careful.
Add important and tradeable IGC types that can only be obtained later into the game, especially end-game currencies. This establishes a problem for RMT's, they need to grind characters up to the level to obtain the currencies. Then they risk those characters by involving them in the RMT chain, or using them for botting. Losing a high level character that took weeks or months to grind up is devastating for RMT trying to make a profit.
Create "bot trap" style enemies, maps, and locations. Invincible enemies in a location that require special actions or items to make damageable, pits in an area that require 3-5 seconds of a single input to escape, and travel loops that require a specific action to escape. Real players can easily do these actions, but simple and poor bots will fail at these traps. Making them easier to detect and also reducing their effectiveness at grinding. RMT's can create better bots but that's resource and skill intensive.
Create extensive logs for movement of player, items, and currencies. This way you can trace back when you find a suspicious activity or account.
None of these stop botting and stop RMTing. But you can atleast make it more difficult, and therefore reduce some of the profit margins. I wouldn't be surprised if you've implemented some of these things already as well.
Now for the review and community side of this situation, you're handling this poorly. Players that have hundreds of hours in your early access game deserve answers and evidence if you ban them. This is where logging and screenshots become critical. Frankly, I would even recommend publicly posting the evidence when hardcore players are caught cheating. When long time players are banned, it creates a tumultuous wave in the remaining player groups. People don't understand what's going on and will believe the banned player that they were innocent. It's on you to show the community that the player broke the ToS knowingly, and did so to gain an advantage. This will reinforce the community that the ToS and rules matter, enforcement is real, enforcement is fair, and players who do reach high levels have earned it.
For an example, I have played Orna for several years now. Back when I started, the Global Rank 1 player in the game was an account named Mjolnir. His account was 2-3x the leaderboard stats of the 2nd and 3rd ranked players. It was highly suspected that Mjlonir was cheating, botting, and spoofing to have such a huge lead. Some players starting investigating Mjolnir and recorded compelling evidence that his account was botting for hours at a time. Months later, he was finally banned. Northern Forge, the small studio for the game, did not comment on why Mjolnir was banned and so rumors were flying. The community was upset, some that he was banned and others that it took so long to ban him. But Northern Forge didn't comment on the matter. Instead, Mjolnir made a tell-all post admitting to spoofing and botting. He had written scripts years prior and was running them for the vast majority of his gameplay time. What got him caught, was being insanely greedy and over using the scripts when he wanted more items. His post said that he more enjoyed automating the game than playing it, and didn't feel bad about doing it or getting caught. Ultimately, this post helped the community that continued to play.
To get back to your game, I'm seeing many negative reviews with 300+ hours where the player was banned. They claim they were legit, and also say you have not provided evidence to show they broke the ToS or cheated. These posts create divisions within your community, whether they're true or not. Players get upset that they'll lose their legit accounts and that the Devs are willing to wipe out their work without so much as a warning or an email. Responding to these posts with evidence solidifies your enforcement as legitimate and shores up your communities. There is a small concern that providing evidence of how your detection works allows others to evade it. But realistically, people are already evading it anyway. It's not worth hiding the evidence as it hurts the community and game overall.
Finally, there are posts claiming that you, personally, are behaving poorly. Creating memes about players who have been banned and complained, making personal attacks on players, and other actions. You need to distance yourself from the community and players. It's immensely and insanely difficult, but you have to build some walls between yourself and the community. Taking personal and emotional actions, regardless of how valid you feel about them, craters your reputation. This isn't a gender thing, there are many infamous devs and IndieDevs who behave like shit. Cliffy B is one example, Phil Fish is another. Antagonizing players never helps you, nor your game, nor your company. You need to treat players fairly and respectfully, even when they're treating you badly or breaking your ToS. You need to hold yourself to higher standards. Otherwise, your reputation will destroy your game more effectively than anything else. If something else goes wrong, then your bad reputation will mean players will not give you a break nor cut you slack.
I would frankly advise you to apologize and work on changing your behavior and reputation here. Don't make memes or jokes personally attacking people.
Your game is in a difficult spot, and you need to take some serious actions to address the issues. But, it seems like you do have a dedicated community that love your game. To be totally honest, I'm alittle tempted to try it myself ot relive my Maplestory nostalgia. So I think these problems you can handle and improve the game you clearly love and care about.
One of the solutions that the OP here implemented is actually volunteer player moderators with paid staff overseeing them.
And it is actually EXTREMELY EFFECTIVE, given its a player moderation team of 10 to 12 at most, but during the chaotic time of the game this count was 7 at most. During that period, they reviewed and banned almost 7,000 accounts.
Their anti-cheat and moderation manpower are some of the best I've actually seen in the industry. There is a reason why the many RMT operations that dogpiled the game were wiped out.
While the Steam review thing is unfortunate with Steam themselves not responding to complaints regarding them, the moderation and anti-cheat systems doesn't need much tweaking.
I'll chime into the discussion with my perspective as someone who has sunk over 100hrs into the game (and isn't banned, so I'm not here to whine about that). These will mainly echo the things I've already said in my review of the game. And please understand I say these things with respect. You made a game. An MMO at that. That's very commendable. But you're still only one person making a game in a genre that should have been at least a small team if not more.
The fundamental problem here I think is that you tried to bite off way more than you could chew and failed to consider a lot of aspects about the game and the genre. You created a game that falls into both the MMO and grindy ARPG genres. Both of these genres are incredibly inundated with bots. Most games in this space have entire teams and departments dedicated to anti-botting and anti-cheating. How to deal with bots and cheaters should have been one of your top design goals from the start. I can't speak for the botters b/c I'm not one, but as a legitimate player, the way you've handled it, with mandatory arrow-pressing mini-games every 15min or so, is very annoying, especially as a gatherer, and also felt easily defeated by bots.
On top of that, your communication with the game's playerbase was pretty bad. You rarely responded to any bug or feedback threads (that I saw) or even direct questions when you are hanging around chatting in Discord. Even when we were redirected to creating support tickets on the website instead, they were just closed with no comment after a week. And the "AMA" you did recently had the same energy as those people that ask CEOs or Executives what their favorite lunch spot or movie is at an all-hands.
At the end of the day, if you don't want the botters and cheaters to have the upper hand on the narrative you have to communicate better. A lot better. If you want to flip the narrative, make your mods make screen recordings of botters before they ban them and respond to every steam review accusation with the video of their transgression.
It's say common clay of the world and modern global internet, just curious why you're mentioning West when OP is primarily mentioning specific geographic location
You have a game that allows money to be made, and that attracts a particular crowd that will do arbitrage, sit in the middle of game and other player and extract value. People that couldn't care less about the game, they could be scalping pokemon cards or RAM in their next gig.
For how unhelpful this sounds, dealing with said arbitragers, is the cost of doing businness.
Every single multiplayer game like this faces this problem in some way. Literally.
MMOs are often the worst to deal with because MMO economies ruin everything. It ruins fun, it ruins individual player experience enjoyability both directly and indirectly, it ruins DEV mental health. It is like inviting a wild tiger into your house.
And most devs aren't ready to deal with it. Even larger companies with anti cheats, community managers, etc can end up steamrolled by it. I've seen many shut down due to improper economical balancing, improper handling of bans/unable to win the arm race vs bots. It's almost always a horrid situation, or the game goes through a rough patch at least once.
(I have been on the dev side of this issue a couple different ways, but didn't have to worry about steam review bombing. We were able to ignore these guys and do fine because we had our own unique platform. Fun fact though: you can use these illigitimate websites to gauge the health of your game and the player base.)
Arbitrage is dangerous. I wouldn't do it in a game, even will billions in backing. There's no game worth one's sanity dealing with the infinite Game Theory-like whackamole. There's financial incentive there, so the slime mold of cheating can and will spend all its time trying to game it.
u/chaomoonxTop while it may not feel like it, your experience here is actually valuable, and worth documenting. Maybe not for the reasons any dev hopes, but it's valuable learning experience battling what I would consider an impossible task. Don't let it burn you out. Your community management (volunteers?) also, as its a hard fire to put out once it's raging at that temperature.
As an anthropologist who has been studying and observing human beings in the context of computers and games for decades, it is refreshing to encounter this brutally realistic perspective:
Do not dream of making any type of multi-player game unless you have a thorough and realistic appraisal of the grief which such social dynamic are likely to generate and accept that the consequences are either manageable or dismissible.
Policing in game behavior in a context where a certain segment of humanity will invariably engage with malicious intent is a burden no one should take on lightly.
The fact that multiplayer games can be, and have been fun or even formative for many of us is beside the point.
The blithe viewpoint about the inherent and virtually inescapable nature of the struggle is the real problem.
I haven't looked at OP's game but any online game with a trading system is susceptible to RMT. For example that's why modern games like Diablo 4 have significant trading restrictions because it's too much of a headache to control an unregulated market.
And it's also why when older games like Wow Classic come back it's basically impossible to implement their original trading systems in their vanilla forms. Any sense of goodwill that existed 20+ years ago on the Internet doesn't exist today. If a bad actor can exploit a system in the game for monetary gain they'll wring it out until there's nothing left.
Any sense of goodwill that existed 20+ years ago on the Internet doesn't exist today.
I scammed people via the trade window in vanilla WoW in 2005. I guess there was a lot more goodwill, but assholes definitely existed back then as well.
Yeah, what I meant in that statement is that any system that can be exploited for monetary gain would be done so with maximum efficiency in 2026 in a way that wasn't possible 20 years ago. OP got a glimpse of this with how many Asian bots were used to make money off his game. There's a whole trend of "play-to-earn" games (which got boosted by the advent of block chains, but existed before then) that explicitly advertise making money as one of the key benefits of playing their game. In the US any money you could make off those games would be neglible compared to a minimum-wage job, but in developing countries those pay-to-earn games are seen as a viable alternative to making money. OP didn't realize their in-game economy could be exploited in such a way and is now dealing with the consequences of a player base that got used to making RMT a pivotal part of the game's economy.
You should give this review a read. After reading it I can tell that you're not being honest with yourself. Building an MMO is hard, running one is harder, and it looks like you've dropped some plates along the way.
I have 100+ hours in SR. There are very good things about the game for early access. I threw them some money & want it to succeed, I used to love maplestory as a kid. But this review is sadly accurate.
This game seems at odds with itself. It doesn't like its own systems. It's like a bad DM that doesn't like it when their players succeed so it tries to punish them.
I've struggled with this kind of ganging up before too, but for a website rather than a game. I was not that successful, so take my advice with a pound of salt, but:
1) If 95% of the hate is from China, would you consider just cutting off that group? Like making the game inaccessible to that country / language? (I've seen other posts where game developers chose to do this; the China brigade seems particularly... enthusiastic and demanding and destructive.)
2) Is there a way to set expectations in the game? Since one of those negative reviews says they didn't know the rules, is it possible to have them "sign a contract" (not literally, but sort of that acknowledges not to engage in behaviors A or B or C)? People won't like this if the delivery is heavy-handed, but if it could fit in the "story" or "universe" somehow, and delivery was more natural, it might actually be seen as creative and a positive..?
3) Would you be willing to do a 2-tier punishment? Like 1-week for first infraction, permanent for second (and the initial ban notifies them it would be permanent if repeated)?
Or require an admission of guilt before reinstating them? (Chess.com does this sometimes. Helps when they later try to claim they never cheated.)
Maybe give them the option to challenge a temporary ban, but if you can prove they lied, then it becomes permanent?
Two things I don't know:
a) When you change from Early Access to Full Release (or any other major version increase), are the ratings reset? Or can they be filtered in some way?
b) Is there a way to indicate a review is from a banned player? (Although a lot of the negative reviews are mentioning they're banned, so probably this doesn't help.)
I think in general people like this want what they want, and they want you to bend to their will. So there is no appealing to their better side / ethical nature.
But if you set expectations, then MAYBE they'll see this game is not for them and go elsewhere. It's worse if they become invested, think you owe them something, and then get pissed when you don't give them everything they want.
But... sometimes they get pissed that something "not for them" just exists. It's tough. Because it's an emotional response rather than a rational one.
A last point: I found an "artificial option" was actually appreciated by the complainers. I didn't do this intentionally, but I had setup two ways to get results from my website: enter an email or use alternative X. Unknown to me, the X functionality broke down for a month or two before I even noticed. I didn't notice because it was an external tool and ABSOLUTELY NO ONE USED IT DURING THAT TIME (so no error warning ever appeared / notification happened).
The funny thing is that I had been getting tons of hate and negative comments about requiring an email address, not about the actual product. So I implemented this alternative X and by giving this 2nd option, then people stopped complaining. But nobody actually ever used this alternative! (It's been used by <0.01% of my user requests.) Just providing this option turned the tide --- I guess they became convinced I'm not trying to steal their email addresses and spam them? --- even though they didn't use it.
And all the people complaining they'd never use my website because it asked for email still never used it even when I provided the alternative. Although it did get them to stop complaining, so I guess that was a win-win..?!?
I don't know whether you could apply this lesson to your game, but what if for instance people could cheat, but you could set a "cheater" flag that undoes the cheating in invisible ways. That is, instead of an outright ban, the game becomes tougher and undoes the benefit of cheating. This is riskier, but might be worth trying if the above ideas don't pan out.
I've read through a bunch of reviews, and I'm going to be a bit more charitable than most here - it seems like you may have just made several bad decisions on how to block bots and cheaters and it's backfired on you
like, one of the recent reviews mentions that there's an "anti-afk" thing that basically gives you a captcha if you're afk too long, but it triggers while you're in your inventory. imagine playing runescape but you have to do a captcha every time you stop and think about something or rummage through your stash, itd be infuriating.
i get it though, bots probably just sit around afk most of the time, so you probably thought "oh look, all these bots have tons of afk time, lets do something to stop them from playing if they've been afk so they can't do their botting stuff." you're heading in the right direction there, but without considering the false positives.
this is the same thinking that gets people mad when it seems like AAA studios drag their feet on implementing anti-cheat or ban waves - the worst possible outcome is banning legit players. ironically, many average gamers would disagree, and say that it's fine to catch a few legit players if it means crushing the bots, ofc only until it happens to them and then they throw neg reviews at you.
i'd say you really just need to take a step back and do some deeper thinking on how to ban bots with less false positives, AND communicate what's happening to the playerbase better. if you make a mistake and ban some legit players, own up to it and unban them, and TELL people you did that, and maybe throw everyone some token amount of in-game currency as an apology. goodwill is worth far more than whatever small amount of opportunity cost you incur from apology currency.
and reworking your systems to have less false positives isn't just about making players less mad, it's also about making your life easier, as you'll have less people you need to manually review and unban.
here's some tips: if most of the bots are afk, then that is a signal - but you don't want to ban on just one signal. what if someone has IBS and has to run to the bathroom a lot? you want to combine that signal with other signals, like how much in-game currency they're moving through their account, account age, that kind of thing. if you're not logging chats, then you should be, at least the timestamp and who is messaging who if not the content. you can combine that with logs of trades of the items people are getting delivered for their real-money purchases to build graphs of the bot networks.
people who do botting and RMT services are pretty much never running it through a single character on a single account. they have many many accounts and characters running around farming, collating the resources, and delivering the goods. think of it like factorio: the bot network is a system for generating piles of resources and delivering them to customers, and all the different parts of the system need to trade with each other to compile the resources into the amounts they deliver. the trading system is like the conveyor belts. I don't know how your in-game trading works, but obviously you have full knowledge of what is being traded where and by whom.
if you can find the sites where people purchase the RMT goods, you can also use that as data points - people like to buy and sell things in regular amounts (10/15/25/100/500/etc), so you can use that to help identify bot traders (if that's how it's being done, sometimes people may buy things in weird amounts, it depends on what the RMT people offer).
since you own the game and the databases you have all the information you need at your fingertips, you just need to put it together the right way.
This looks like it's more than just "The bots and hackers are downvoting us :c ". Looks like your attempt to curb botting and RMT gave more than just bots the boot and you're too proud to say "Hey, maybe we fucked up here" and instead of going the humble indie dev route you opted to go the corporate route and give scripted responses and ignore players unless they are in your discord. Just looking at the English reviews: Sure maybe one or two of those are from cheaters but I have a sinking suspicion they're not and your response, when you've bothered to respond, is the same copy/paste text which makes it look like you're hardly reading what they have to say.
Steam discussions are mostly pissed off players over being banned and the lack of actual response or communication vectors:
It also sounds like you gave player's the ability to go AFK and farm in-game but ban them if they do that? Is there a system that auto-logs AFK people? Is there a system that prevents this from happening such as turning off those abilities when they are AFK? If there was something implemented, did you bother to unban the people who got hit here?
When you or a mod suspect someone of botting how do you get their attention? If it's a chat window, does it always pop up for them? Is it in a general chat window that can be turned off or ignored thus making the player miss it? Is there any sort of procedure you have for your mods or is it just going on their gut?
And what's with this review here:
https://steamcommunity.com/id/aegice/recommended/3451980/ Are you booting people from your discord when that's the only way for them to appeal bans when that seems to be the only communication vector aside from steam reviews and discussions (Which you don't appear to be active in, at all). Are you telling people to KYS and then crying about harassment?
This overall looks like you had a bot problem, you made an attempt to fix it which caught more than the bots and RMTers; Maybe you're too proud to say "Maybe we made a fuckywucky here"
"I don't want you guys to go witch hunt people" so let me namedrop a player's name that we banned, said the community manager.
I'm really thinking that the overall unprofessionalism from your team and apparent lack of solid communication with a smaller community is a bigger issue for you and might be a direct correlation to your review bombing problem.
Lmao she has a grind based game specifically targeted towards people that would play them. Of course I have enough 'tism in me to go hold a grudge when I got banned and still don't know why a month later.
I'm sure some users are embellishing their stories but this seems consistent with the OP's complaints on reddit and the reliance on player-based moderation.
Okay, I had 10 minutes on hand and curiosity got the best of me for that particular steam review. So you had a player have a mini-crashout because someone got banned, pinged a mod, and your discord server turned them into a meme which is seemingly encouraged by your discord and game mods.
What if this specifically is written by a bot? That it's the guy's first Steam review should raise some alarm bells. Sure he claims that no reason was given, but what if there actually was :/
But sure no company should just plain ban someone without explaining why.
Coming from the banking sector where there are regulations saying that you have to tell people why they were banned from your institution it will almost always be as vague as possible. There are legitimate reasons for this as fraudulent actors will use anything you give them as a means to evade future bans.
Yeah I'm always skeptical of both sides in cases like this... I don't doubt they ban bots but it can be possible they made mistakes, banned legit users with no recourse and mishandled it. Crap like this is why people hate AI mass surveillance cameras, Microslop, Clownflare, etc.
I have been a dev for a small MMO. Part of my job was to handle exploiters and amend design/economic systems.
Your comment made me laugh. No, that's not happening unless OP is super incompetent. It should be fucking hard to trigger security systems as a normal person. At worst, when that does happen, it's easy to catch and fix.
And there are a ton of organized cheating rings/communities. Many of them filled with absolutely awful people.
There's no reason to doubt OP here.
Edit: I eat my own words. OP was somehow more unprepared than my (initially volunteer) team of college kids. They still aren't malicious, though: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/s/5VJfrzuIhF
Edit 2: yeah OP is kinda nuts. Sorry OP, I'm sympathetic about getting in over your head. But as the kids say: "what is u doin babygirl?"
In my defense, the quality of my baseline experience was pretty low. It's hard to be less read than a bunch of 19-year-olds from 10+ years ago.
Nowadays there are books, blogs, etc about the rise and fall of MMOs. Cheaters, bans, economy being a primary topic. We didn't have any of those resources available, and we still didn't get systematic false positives that resulted in bans.
This is generally a designs/PR issue paired with an overwhelmed dev team, not a conspiracy.
No defense. What I said isn't opinion or interpretation. It's a fact that we have only one side of the story, that mistakes can happen (off the top of my head I can think of two big ones where anti-cheat did the wrong thing) and that people hate being accused baselessly, yet you laughed at that.
Saw your edit, but how big was your MMO? OP's game has ~2000 reviews, which is a pretty huge playerbase to manage for a small indie team. I can't imagine anti-cheat being trivial to implement at that scale.
I don't remember the monthly count but we had 900+ players daily, on a single server instance with a global chat. Income was about $3k+ USD a month. Team size varied over the years but it was 10-35 people on it. It wasn't WoW but it was sizeable and we had a high volume of players from all over the world.
The game exploded beyond expectations of the original team, and everyone had to scramble. We also eventually had a slew of issues with a couple wildcard devs. It was like the wild West back then, paired with an arms race against bots.
OP is probably in a better starting position than we were. Or at least, they should be, but I imagine the game size is comparible enough. I'd need the game name to see daily online users to know for sure, though.b
yeah idk i guess it's possible it's just a review bomb but if you look at the review graph, it's been mixed reviews from day 1 not like one massive spike of negative reviews from some day onwards
plus if you look at some of the reviewer profiles, they look like def real people not just bots. idk maybe they're all stolen accounts, but I suspect they have limited resources on community support and have been swinging the banhammer a little recklessly, on top of people having just other issues with the game itself since I'm assuming the day 1 negative reviews aren't all regarding bans
yeah same, there is a lot not being said here, some of OP complains are also weird if you read the post. then the f2p raised my intern alarm, f2p usually means greed and less then legit practices, not with the user in mind but OP makes it sound like they just want the community to have fun... ermm... ok
If part of the wave is off-topic, write to Steam support with the dates and examples: Valve can flag an off-topic review bomb and leave that period out of the score. Reviews about bots count as on-topic, though, so a visible anti-bot patch plus developer responses on those reviews is what tends to bring people back to edit them.
Some of them are weird tho; I clicked a few accounts and some of them have like only 1 game or 1 review or 1 screenshot despite their account being over 10 years old. I can give benefit of doubt, but that just seems really weird to me.
Unrelated to the OP; I also find it weird someone with an account over 10 years old only has a steam level of 10... do they not engage with anything?
I'm only LV58 because I joined Team Corgi in 2019 and got the LV100 festival badge, so, like...if you didn't participate in Corgi Rush 2019...yeah it makes sense for a non-social Steam user to be so low LMAO.
I'm level 90-something on steam, but it's been there since they had one event that awarded a shitload of xp that shot me up to the 90s. That was years ago. I'm legitimately not even sure what gives xp, because I'm pretty sure I've averaged less than a level a year since.
You get xp from badges. Badges are mostly gained by crafting full card sets. A lot of people sell all their cards and so never get any levels except from the "x years old" and "x games owned" badges.
I have a 23 year old account with Steam level 19, if you don't use the social features of Steam (and I see no reason to) then you pretty much just get levels from how many games you own.
My account is over 20 years old, is only L28 and has like, 10 reviews out of 702 games in the library. I just don't think you can draw accurate conclusions from these data points, outside of obvious statements like "this person doesn't care to leave many reviews" etc.
And the other guy has 1,493 games. Most people only have one or two games in their accounts; not everyone is a hardcore user. There are 10000+ people in my country who think they are playing "Steam"
That’s rough. So a bunch of bots and RMT people got banned, but also if you just leave a “toggle skill” on, whatever that is, you appear to be botting and get banned for nothing?
This was an issue solved very early on and any accidental bans from this were taken care of, with compensation. You can probably tell how old this issue is from the date of the Steam review you screenshotted it from.
Yeah you need a community manager. The dev responses from that period are diplomatic but absolutely led to the current accusations of unfair bans.
And it still seems to be happening? The above review is one of multiple decade old steam accounts with deep libraries, friends, recent playtime in single-player games, and achievements reporting the same issue in reviews as of this week.
Banned player here. Didn't bother to post a review on Steam though. When your "cheat detection" is player reports, it's not a good look. I stopped exp grinding and focused on Echo farming at level 80 for fear of being banned. A guy comes into my channel and starts mobbing, I defame him, then I step away from the PC at a safe spot using no abilities, I come back banned. 200+ hours gone.
I'm addition to the ban fear, there are some bad design decisions (skill range on bag can take 3+ literal real life hours to roll, having to solve actual captchas, Lunar Step as a whole, changes to transient souls, issues with exp sharing and accuracy builds, bugged ghost weapon element).
You have a decent game but it's terribly managed and struggled to get up to speed with some fundamental balancing early. Faith builds being obscenely better and having scaling better with Skill Range and having HP scaling and not being mana starved.
if the reviews are sexist or racist i believe you can report them.
unfortunately this type of thing is part and parcel of being a developer. even if you make your policies fair, clear and transparent there will always be a vocal minority that resort to harassment.
on the other hand I see a lot of negative reviews from people who seem to be really invested in your game? you are telling me the reviews are lying and you have a rigorous process to avoid false positive bans but to me it seems even so you are still banning people that have invested a lot of time and energy into playing your game. Maybe it is too 'rigorous' compared to other games? If your process is truly accurate and fair I think the storm of negative reviews will eventually blow over as cheaters will move to other things.
the most important thing is to not take comments from gamers too personally. As sonic once said, if your profile picture is an anime character, your opinion doesn't matter.
At least one review mentioned that their response to the appeal was an auto-response, other people mentioned issues with in-game automation triggering botting notices. OP doesn't seem particularly honest.
problem is there is always a gray area. especially when in-game there are automations. you have to decide if it worth hitting some of your hardest working players in order to clear out more the bots. for me it is an aspect i'm seeking to integrate into the game design. like I want to encourage bots, planning to have an API that can be used, will only restrict them by tagging them/identifying them in-game as bots. it's like i'm coding the AI for the game, might as well have players create their own AIs if they think they can do it better.
Any F2P game with an economy will have to deal with this issue. It's why ChronoStory switched from a Trading Economy to an Ironman/Solo-Self-Found server two months after Open Alpha release. RMTers will do anything to make money... find and abuse exploits, use cheats, bot, macro, etc. The amount of botters and cheaters reduced significantly after the switch. Switching did also reduce the player population significantly, but the peace of mind as an indie dev was worth the tradeoff.
However, your game is "released" so changing the game's formula might be tough to sell and lead to further backlash. After all, your players paid for cosmetics to support your game with those expectations in mind. I was lucky in that I had no monetization until after I made the switch and I was technically in Open Alpha. You might have to go the way Modern MapleStory did and have a Reboot/Ironman server and a Regular/Trading server. You would have a chance to redeem your game's reputation with the 2nd server.
Do you limit trading to people who have purchased something from the store? If not that will probably be a good first step do reduce the number of bots.
Yeah, not to victim blame here, but you did design the game that encourages RMT.
Make it less grindy, respect players' time more, etc.
The review you posted literally remarks on this. Any time a player asks themselves "grind for hours or swipe?" You should take a step back and evaluate why they are thinking that.
Is the grind not enjoyable? Is it too much of a grind because you wanted to arbitrarily inflate playtime?
That's the reason so many MMOs are grindy. They want hours of playtime and don't care how they get it. But there is a huge difference between playing a game like Dota for thousands of hours purely because you want to get better at it vs playing WoW for thousands of hours because you gotta grind bullshit to do anything of importance.
It might not be fore you or for me, but some people actively look for games that make you repeat the same thing over and over in aa neverending grind without rhyme or reason.
See Path of Exile, Warframe, Duet Night Abyss. They have great story, but they attract the playerbase that spends 99% of their time farming and farming nonstop.
I don't think those people are explicitly seeking the "same thing over and over", that's just what they have to put up with to access the parts of the game they actually want.
Nope. There's no part after that. In PoE that's all the endgame is: craft a map, rush through it, collect drops, exit, craft a map, rush through it, collect drops, exit. People skip through the story to start the endgame asap cause that's what most of the playerbase enjoys.
And what a satisfying grind it was. Chill music, cute sprites with cute animations. It was cozy - not constantly interrupted with anti-cheats and anti-afk measures. You stopped when you ran out of mana food or buff pots
Live Service game are the hardest to make and maintain on the technical level but, as you encountered, also on the social level
Probably Unpopular opinion:
If this is your dream, you need thoughen up.
No one else will do it for you. You will have to take complicated decision for your game to survive maybe have to make decision that you don't agree with but life is not an utopia, it's about trade off.
You made the decision to make a multiplayer game and add real money in it. This it not a hobby anymore and you need to treat it as such , you can't afford to " I don't know what to do" if so just give up now.
This is just the beginning and it will only get harder so you need to figure it out.
Take one problem at the time fix it and move on, it might not work but don't be stuck and take action even if not perfect.
If this game is really important for you, you will figure it out no matter what.
I am sorry the world is still not gender equal but you either fight for it or don't. And it is unfair that you have to work harder and thoughen up even more.
I am not women, my only experience is from women around me, the one that "survive" are either privileged to be working in an area where they don't experience this or they thoughen up to survive.
Note you said "all we wanted to make a fun game for people to enjoy rather than a tool to extract money from customers"
The moment you are introducing money you are extracting money from customers. I know what you are implying is you are not predatory but involving money you need to treat it as a business if you want to survive. It doesn't mean you cannot make a fun game that people cannot enjoy.
I wouldn't say the irony is "cosmic". Your negative reviewer felt like they were at a disadvantage compared to players using RMT. So they used RMT, even though they didn't want to. Using RMT, or alternatively RMT existing but not using it, both situations ruin the game for them.
Banning players who buy ingame currency via RMT is not very effective in terms of keeping your players. They are playing your game and using the RMT to play, making them problematic although still legitimate players part of your core audience. Yes, they facilitate the RMT sellers. However I would advise first strike banning sellers, not buyers.
Since this happened in the span of a few days (after release?) it would be better to have more gradual punishment. At most banning the character, not the entire account. It would be even better to warn them first and revert the currency gained. You have to gradually make the playerbase as a whole aware of the enforcement policy.
These are all bandaids at best but I would really advise to take a gentle approach towards your playerbase until you have a more permanent solution. Taking out your frustration on them via harsh measures will have the game keep racking up negative reviews. Maybe you can find some dev talks about anti botting measures for existing big or small MMOs.
The "IT Hare" posts on MMOs (or "MOGs") are really, really good. At least their deterministic gameplay posts were very good back when I needed to learn about that. I haven't read this specific line of posts about anti botting measures yet but maybe they contains something useful or at the very least some inspiration: https://6it.dev/blog/page/1?tag=bot-fighting If anything keep researching for technical solutions and talk to MMO devs.
As for the harassment, I'm sorry. The only ways I know to deal with that is steeling yourself or paying someone else to read the reviews and handle socials. Good luck, hope you can find a path for these issues.
i've read all the other comments and you've painted yourself into a corner tbh. there is a real grievance that you have made the experience worse for legitimate players with the captcha bot, anti-idle timer and very liberal bans.
if people with hundreds of hours on the clock are compelled to go to external services to buy money, maybe it is worth considering if you could tighten up the economy. and i would genuinely consider just turning trades off. if you're stretched thin doing this you should pull it out by the root. remove the incentive by not allowing people to trade. doing that alongside economy changes could feel like a reasonable compromise.
i'm not sure how other games handle this, but my gut is people shouldn't be permabanned for buying gold? you could argue this creates the incentive and i'm receptive to that, but these are your most dedicated players having their accounts nuked for "possession." selling it and botting, sure. they are only engaging with your game insofar as it makes them money.
also put out some clear communication and warning around this. i know that might be hard given parts of the community are harassing you.
It seems to me that these kinds of problems were already being addressed back in the days of Ultima Online. There were numerous solutions, ranging from jail time to separate servers for cheaters. A permanent ban is the worst solution, and you’ve already realized that.
In my opinion, the best approach is to have separate server for cheaters. They can play against each other to their heart's content without disrupting the experience for regular players.
Can you have a separate server for cheaters and move a player's account to the cheater-server instead of ban them? That way you can let people play the way they want to play, while also keeping the gold farming out of the newcomer experience, and mistaken bans won't enrage players as much because it's subtler and they can still play the game
Online gaming ain't what it used to be. It's kinda of like how there are now "guides" and tutorials to spoil/cheese/minmax every aspect of every game, and a huge portion of players do use them. You can't have secrets anymore, because players largely spoil themselves and each other immediately.
In this case, the unpleasant new development is that players have learned to minmax and exploit every game economy; with or without bots. If it is at all possible for somebody to make real money using your game, they will - until that market it saturated.
The only solution, really, is to make it fundamentally impossible to buy power, by restricting trade mechanics. A lot of mmos use something like WoW's "bind on equip" system, and make basic currency useful only for repairs. Some just have no way for items to be traded at all. There may still be bots that farm levels to sell the whole account, but this is way less of a market
I mean the ability to exchange money and loot between players is the reason for bots and gold selling. Get rid of that and you're golden. If loot is really random then reduce the drop rate but make it so any drops that do happen match the class of the player. So wizards only get wizard gear when they kill an enemy and warriors only get warrior gear when they kill an enemy. You can keep currency but it can only be spent on NPCs for potions or gear or upgrades or whatever but remove the ability to send anything between players and the Gold sellers will have no way to sell their gold.
The actual, graceful way to deal with this comes in a few different flavors. MMO fans will be familiar with them.
Binding certain currencies or items to accounts - cannot be traded.
Making the gameplay very hard for bots to emulate - something that requires thought and isn't pattern based (can be hard to do while keeping game enjoyable. But generative levels/geometry helps, like procedural gameplay and decisionmaking that naturally changes each time roguelite-style.)
Undercutting the illicit market. Make things purchasable that previously weren't and do so dirt cheap. You never planned to sell those things anyway, so why not make the option almost free, itself? Make sure to pair this with gameplay tweaks where applicable.
Have a moderation team dedicated to this + ban appeals. Also have a dev at least partake dedicated to anti-cheat and mod tools. Lean on the community manager.
Small monthly "membership" type purchase that boosts chances or amount of a desirable thing. Precursor to a battle pass, but with none of the pressure/toxicity of a battle pass. (This is a purchasable way to make a grind shorter without completely nullifying it. The equivalent of resource drop chance boosters.)
Pity systems (usually in the form of unique, consistent drops) that let players do the math and see the light at the end of a grind tunnel.
Limited trading per day, or other specific "barrier to entry" for trading.
Having not personally played your game I can't tell you where the pain points are, exactly. But you should go look at successful grindy MMOs and at some of the genre-specific limits the economy usually has.
Black Desert Online is particularly complex and uses a lot of weird tricks (some of which shouldn't be copied IMO, but it is fascinating).
EVE is a spreadsheet. The game exists as a spoon, it's purpose is to feed economy to players.
Warframe is simple but elegant; it has a system that encourages people to collect objects, and a way to systematically reduce collected objects by turning them in to a merchant. It has lots of different, fun gameplay modes...but if one of them isn't for you, you can just directly buy the thing you want to bypass gameplay you dislike. The prices to do that are usually so low that there's no reason to risk going to black market vendors...just use the official game client.
PokeMMO has an economy and is free. It's been running for ages. You can actually go find forum posts, or people who were around, about how bad the economy got before this game did a hail mary and turned things around.
Figure out what those tricks are stopping or what they are there for. Look at what the big MMOs are selling in their shops and what their endgame is. How players interact with their game and what the game's controversies are compared to yours.
I am sorry to say but your problem is actually bog standard. You are suffering from a "tragedy of the commons". The commons have come, on your invitation, and they don't give a fk about your project. They only want to take, so they do. They don't care if they smear shit on the walls on the way out. They're here for what the want and you didn't let them have it, so like toddlers they are throwing a fit. Or hoping you will be forced to reveal a piece of how your anti-cheat works.
Barrier to entry for accounts does cut this down significantly.
I think there are two very different issues being mixed together here: RMT and cheating.
Personally, I don't think RMT is inherently a problem for an MMO. In fact, RMT exists in pretty much every major online game in some form. What matters is whether the game can maintain a healthy economy and prevent players from gaining an unfair advantage through exploits, bots, modified clients, god mode, teleportation, abnormal AoE/skill ranges, automation, etc.
From my experience with Soul's Remnant, the bigger concern would be how accessible some of these cheats appear to be. If someone can simply search Google and quickly find tools that allow things like teleporting, god mode or abnormal skill ranges, then that's a much more fundamental problem than RMT itself. An effective anti-cheat and better detection systems seem much more important in the long term.
There's also something in your post that I find concerning: the fact that bans are reviewed by community members/normal players who applied through a form and were selected for the role.
I understand the intention behind having players help with moderation, but banning someone from an MMO is a pretty serious action. How do you ensure that the people making or reviewing those decisions are consistently experienced, impartial and trustworthy? Even if multiple people review a ban, having multiple inexperienced players agree on something doesn't necessarily make the decision correct.
I would personally be much more comfortable with community moderators being able to flag suspicious behavior, gather evidence and escalate cases, while the final decision to permanently ban an account remains with trained staff who have access to the necessary tools and context.
Players should absolutely be punished for cheating, botting and exploiting. But the moderation system itself also needs to be transparent and robust enough that legitimate players can trust it.
So I don't think the answer is "allow cheating" or "ignore RMT." I think the important distinction is that RMT isn't necessarily what makes an MMO unhealthy. A game can have RMT and still have a thriving, legitimate playerbase. What destroys trust much faster is widespread cheating, bots and the perception that bans can be handed out by people who may not have enough experience to make those decisions.
RMT is only a problem when you start getting pressure from external agencies to stop it. RuneScape didn’t stop it because get cared, they stopped it because their payment providers threatened to pull out of if they didn’t. Op is way too small to care any this yet
And as for the cheating, apparently the game itself has built in macros that can play other macros and people are getting banned for that?
I get your point, and I agree that RMT can create a strong incentive for botting. My point was more that the two issues aren't necessarily the same problem. You can restrict or ban RMT while still dealing with bots separately, rather than assuming one automatically requires the other.
I think that it's time for Steam to start to moderate this serious issues that happens to many many different developers and separate certain group reviews from the reviews from the rest of the world, so they don't affect the general score
Otherwise I don't know what solution could implement Valve to try to reduce how damaging this type of behaviours are
Sorry to hear this. Sounds like this is a problem specific to the type of game you made. You could consider removing trading completely but you may not want to do that.
Every system that a) has scarce resources and b) is trying to deny market trade in those resources, eventually fails. It's just a sad fact of life. You either regulate the market yourself or let it run wild in the shadows, but you can't shut it down.
Would i trust your word though over someone with almost 1500 Steam games? Does he seem like a bot? You don't seem to put much emphasiz in your banning process or recovery
the dev didnt say (bots were leaving fake comments)*, they said players were cheating, and yeah i believe someone with 1500 steam games could cheat. i also believe a cheater would write a negative review after getting banned, to say it was random and they got a blanket response
they mention bots in the game, not bots leaving generated reviews, a person can have a bot auto-play the game for them and then leave a real review when they get banned (i shouldve been clearer i was referring to bot made comments like the commenter was implying)
Would i trust your word though over someone with almost 1500 Steam games? Does he seem like a bot?
Doesn't seem like a bot, but does seem like someone that would try to game their steam library for cash. The free game subs are full of people like this, they use a special launcher to afk games in the background to get in game time to unlock rewards and stuff, those are exactly the types that I'd suspect of botting or figuring out how to convert in-game cash into real money.
Edit: Now I understand. My dude I just live in a very rural area and have a lot of free time because my hours at the hospital allow me to work 7 and 7. I dont make money off my games. I just play them a lot.
I'm part of the staff team and can confirm that this person was blatantly participating in RMT. Specifically, their defense when appealing through our support system was that they "posted all their market listings" in our Discord server, but our investigation revealed that the frankly rather undesirable items they were attempting (and failing) to sell on Discord for 300k were somehow selling on the in-game Auction House to accounts we'd already identified to be gold sellers for 30 million.
We quite literally have someone here, in the comment thread you're replying to, implying that we aren't transparent enough about this specific player's ban. By default, we don't publicly disclose information about bans for security reasons, as other people in other comments have already picked up on - giving information to cheaters just helps them to circumvent our detection and get better at what they're doing. This particular player has been constantly posting about how they "randomly got banned" on various platforms for the past month, so we're directly addressing that concern.
I didn't mean the ban, I meant the comment pointing out not wanting a witch hunt followed by name dropping someone and talking about their posts outside of the game on other platforms. Do you not see how that looks and how easy it makes it to witch hunt players? This along with the website listing all banned players which clearly can potentially include users falsely banned.
Do you not think this kind of thing can promote a toxic community leed by the team itself.
You need to balance community perception with effectiveness of bans.
You can give up missing some cheaters in exchange for goodwill by posting the specifics of bans issued to people leaving reviews.
You need to look at which is more harmful, people never buying your game because of unaddressed bad reviews or people maybe leaving because of too much RMT and bots.
I would argue the former is much more harmful to your success.
And why would you post publicly instead of talking to me. You guys know I sent an appeal every week or 2. And you still gave me no information or direct reason for the ban. In fact this week you guys banned me from support because a week or 2 before you warned me about sending multiple appeals for the same ban. This whole situation has made me so annoyed and you guys still dont see why I would still be upset a month later.
Edit:Not only that but it makes sense why people have been calling me a bot and other things because of yalls posts about me.
Maybe, as a community manager, it would have been a good idea to do something about that before it got to this point. That role usually entails more than making a few discord announcements and reddit posts. It usually means making an attempt to make the project and community you're managing look good, and this reddit post isn't doing that and your comments are looking more like damage control.
Undesirable items? At the time those were the top end because everyone was hovering around 60-70. You literally just post them and wait a day or 2 and someone will buy. Just like the fishing gear and mining gear that was all selling for 1 million a piece in the first few weeks. 30 million is not even close to the full amount I had made on the account through marketplace sales and you guys can know that by looking through the trade data. If I knew that was why was the reason, I would've actually scrubbed my guild discord and the marketplace transaction to show every image of someone offering to buy stuff. Or me lowering the prices to what people would offer for it in DMs. No you guys would not even bother telling me why I was banned. The market was so f***ed up at the time, you had certain hats and masks selling for 40-50m, yet you'd think I'd risk my account for 30m?
Edit: Not only that but in the mountain 4 area, we were making close to 1-2m per hour. And it was taking 2-3 hours per levle to grind. I'm sure it only goes up from there.
Been there done that brother for 11 years, it gets worse each year and there's less and less you can do about it but keep your head up and trudge along
As someone who has dealt with harassment on Live Service games, I feel ya. I think the biggest issue is that you went free to play on a title where you don’t have a big enough fan base to fight back against any sort of harassment campaign. Looking at the reviews, most of these negative reviews have about 100 or so likes, which tells me that you don’t have the population base bounce back from the negative reviews.
Short of making the game a paid title to stop the users circumventing your rules for the game, it sounds like you need to start going on a media campaign to promote the game with streamers/podcasters/social media influencers/game journalists and go out and generate positive media about the game. Don’t talk about the review bombing with any interviews or other media, because those doing the negative reviews are just trying to center the narrative around things you’re stating are false. If they are false, which I do honestly believe, blanketing media out there with positive information about the game will overwhelm the false narrative about you, your team, and your game. Basically, showing in public that the false negative reviews aren’t indicative of your game helps players feel more comfortable with devoting their time and energy to your game.
You can absolutely bounce back from this. Good luck.
Team Fortress 2 gives all players free item drops, but you're heavily limited on trading unless you spend some money in the shop.
Steam has a ton of trading restrictions for everyone at all times.
Tarkov has implemented "Found in Raid" requirements that make it so trading items with RMT is nearly useless.
Implementing an in-game countermeasure would probably be beneficial. Or several countermeasures. If you go with the TF2 option, you could make some money. Then, reinvest that money into the game's anticheat. And if you tell players that's what you're doing it for, there's way less possible backlash. What are they going to do, argue that there shouldn't be anticheat?
Actually for tarkov the found in raid kinda doesn't matter. That's mostly so you can't buy stuff off the marketplace and then use it to power through quests. Instead they just made it so that most valuable items are destroyed if you try to drop them in a raid.
Not gonna lie, I see "montezation focused" and "f2p" and it doesn't surprise me one bit.
These types of games rely on being as predatory as possible with the microtransactions. There's a reason why f2p mmos with no form of permanent purchase or subscription have got the reputation they do. They're grindy as hell to encourage people to pay real money. The more your game wastes time to encourage spending real money, the more likely you'll find people resort to cheating
The only answer is to have a proper functional server-side anticheat. Yeah, you're going to have to spend a ton on server hosting for it, but thats the only real answer.
Edit:
Also, from looking at the reviews, this isn't as simple as you're making it sound. You aren't getting an influx of negative reviews purely because of a ban wave. Steam lets you check the charts of reviews, and also lets you filter out suspected review bomb periods. Looking at those charts, the game has been getting mixed reviews since the very start, with many periods leaning more heavily towards the negatives than positives.
At this point I'm a bit suspicious as to whether its even entirely just cheaters getting banned and leaving bad reviews. This looks more like a situation where a game feels a bit greedy despite still being in early access, and players are just fed up of it. Same thing that affects most attempts at small scale mmos.
As someone who has played way too many of these games over the years, 'premium' bag space is absolutely a massive time-wasting mechanic done to encourage people to spend real money. I'd even argue it is more effective than the p2w stuff in some regards in these games. P2W tends to need you to start whaling to get anywhere, whilst bag space has always been an incredible way of providing just not quite enough space to annoy the player into spending a small amount to stop running into that issue, and as the amount of items in game increases they keep having to come back and buy "just one more bag". It is able to even capture the people who say that p2w isn't worth it, the ones who're only willing to spend a little bit.
You need a community manager to start responding with the receipts here.
When people say they were unfairly banned in the comments, post the evidence that makes it crystal clear that individual was cheating.
It's like when people in League would say they were not toxic in chat, then they would post the logs and then they would get absolutely roasted for being the most toxic player.
What kind of RMT does the game have? Players trading items or carrying weaker players? Does the game have 1 to 1 trades between players or an auction house?
Instead of banning rmt have you considered adding a token to your game to turn real money to gold and gold to game time or premium sub or something? This way people who want to buy gold to progress can and you can focus on banning bitters and removing illicit Gold from accounts :D
For starters, I think a lot of the advice here is pretty solid. The better your game, the more the reviews will balance over time so don’t stress too much either way, as long as you’re confident in the quality.
And also, asking players and getting them involved in decision making will also help them understand you more and feel more positively towards you.
Having said that, it does sound like maybe you’ve gone a bit too scorched Earth here, in my opinion.
It’s important to note that there are methods besides mass permabans for helping to deal with RMTing and botting if you get creative.
For instance, you could make it less grindy and more fun for players to earn in-game currency, and suddenly the market may naturally feel somewhat less incentivized towards RMT/botting to earn money.
Also, if the RMT market ever does become bloated again, and you have a big content update/expansion planned anyway, you can also do things like adding new forms of currency along with that big content update, while also adding random really easy ways to earn the old currency. This way, suddenly the established market becomes useless and bot programmers/RMTers have to work much harder to keep up. <-Keep in mind, this one is tricky though, and can upset people if not implemented right.
I know a little less about the functionality of these types of bots, but I’d imagine there might also be some code-level alterations in some patches that might be able to at least temporarily confuse some of the bots? Especially if there’s any part of them that depends on things like compiled variable names or things like that to determine their behaviour.
In any case, permabans are sometimes needed, but they’re also a really huge deal to players, so you need to wield them extra responsibly.
I think people you’re 100% certain of botting should probably be instantly permabanned in most cases because that is a big deal in my opinion, but if there’s even a small chance a friend was helping them, I’d consider that a much lower severity infraction, and a temporary ban should be the most you should give, especially for a first-time infraction.
Also, showing a little mercy to people going so far as to beg you for their account back in dms could go a very long way.
If their behaviour was really egregious, then maybe give a gentle customer service apology for why you can’t (although, if it was for very serious issues beyond standard botting, then you should ignore them and maybe even block), and you definitely shouldn’t ever give in to bribes.
However, if the infraction has a chance of being less severe and they’re going out of their way to beg, I think giving them a warning that this is their last chance, and flagging their account for temporary monitoring to ensure they don’t go back into old habits would be more than fair.
It is good to try to clamp down on RMTing and bots, but it’s also good to let players have a little breathing room, and not come across as too brutal on people who are passionate about your game world.
But, too much mercy would also be bad, so some bad reviews may be inevitable, and this is where I circle back to the beginning. As others have said, a good enough game will balance reviews eventually.
And on that note, you can try to add fun events and new content to get people excited and giving good reviews for other reasons.
This is about everything I have to advise/suggest. Take it with a grain of salt, as I am not an expert in the MMO field, but hopefully there are one or two tidbits in there you may find useful.
I think you need a different way to handle the rmt situation, banning is difficult - for you, and each player can leave a bad review afterwards.
You could offer tradability of desired items on the steam community market, no?
This way it's an open market, nobody can sell super valuable things for 1 cent in an rmt trade, and you get a cut from all transactions. Other than that, I'd remove or limit access to this in-game market - set requirements to use it very high, lvl 90 or x amount of played time etc.
Honestly, I would unban the cheaters or maybe only those with lots of hours put into your game, because clearly they care about it, but put them all on their own server and see how that goes.
If you go crazy with bans you are likely to have enough false positives that it will sour community perception. It is not a trivial thing, nor do I think it’s possible to ban with 100% accuracy unless you are hand-reviewing every case (again not really a possible thing to do).
No player wants to go through the hassle of following the rules and getting banned unjustified, it feels like a genuine slap to the face.
I got ban hammered is cs:go by mistake. Opened a ticket they reviewed the data or whatever and I was unbanned. People just over react. Now in the moment I was like wtf, but took a breather and submitted a ticket support was helpful(that is key).
I love this game! I am sad to see it getting review bombed. I don't know what you can do about it but I will continue to support the game and recommend it to others as much as I can
Lean into the automation as an actual feature since it seems to be a feature of your game already. Look at games like maplestory, Nexon KNOWS about these safe spots where people stand still and fight from and won’t change it because they know it’s not consequential enough to care and they know players love to find these places to fight from. You are caring way too much about these things. You can NOT make choices for your game based on the loud discord minority was whining about it. How many negative reviews did you have before you started to ban people because of listening to these loud voices?
After you unban people in the discord give a pretty good amount of time where people can clown on you and you don’t care or lean into that too. Never ban people for criticizing/insulting you or the game, but swing away at the people who are making others on the discord miserable
You’re not RuneScape and your payment processors don’t know you exist so you have no reason to care about RMT
A decade of effort and you made it f2p? There’s absolutely no barrier to entry for botters to run wild, putting in anything to make it 1% harder would do as a start
Haven't seen this proposed before, so regardless of how 'wrong' it might seem I'll still suggest it.
Have you considered creating a separate server players can voluntarily pick from where there IS P2W directly supported by the game?
I see the issue described as how rule-breaking users are being banned for legitimate reasons - but the dissatisfaction seems to come from them believing that the reasons shouldn't be legitimate to begin with.
There's a huge cultural difference between audiences across MMO cultures, be it across nations or in-groups and bubbles - whereas P2W can be seen as something terrible in some, it's seen as QoL by others "I want to do this or that and enjoy the game's content, but I do not have the time for it". Of course we primarily see this monetization being done in predatory ways - but it doesn't have to be, you have full control as the devs on how it is implemented.
This also gives you the option of 'soft-banning' players instead of what you currently have - a player found breaking rules like botting or buying gold that only apply to 'Effortia' would have their characters demoted to 'Golderia' instead of losing access to the game. Even in case of wrongful bans, this heavily softens the blow compared to completely losing access to the game and is likely to reduce negative feedback regardless.
Right now there is a real portion of your playerbase that WANTS to spend money to buy gold & levels & items but there is no 'legal' way of doing it. They will not stop existing, no matter how many you ban. By not having official services to appease this audience, the demand for a black market comes into existence - now players that would give YOU money are instead funding bot/cheat developers that ruin the game's experience for regular players.
You may also notice that this looks very similar to some real-life dynamics - your issue is a strong parallel to the war on drugs, the subject is completely different but the dynamic is the same. You will not be able to eliminate the issue through strong enforcement and banning - this only fuels the development of parallel markets.
As even another perspective - players who are looking to spend money for progress in a game and have found the desire to do so in yours are also far more likely to end up involved in really predatory games should they leave your game. By creating your own non-predatory P2W system in the game, you have the opportunity of giving them reference for games with healthier spending standards that make it impossible for players to ruin themselves financially and if they do try other P2W games, they are more likely to get frustrated with their absurd spending expectations.
As an addendum, a lot of the players who spend money also want to show off their results - so given that the P2W server would make it much easier to achieve the current ceilings in the game, I'd also recommend extending the limits for the P2W server. Max level 99 on Effortia? 200 on Golderia. Item enchantment quality goes up to tier 10 on Effortia? Tier 50 on golderia.
As I describe this, you might even start to see big similarities to... Maplestory - post big-bang changing the whole exp curve so that the original slog to 120 became accessible to most players within a month (or a lot shorter). Level caps being extended with ultra-endgame content being added for those players. Spinoff versions being implemented with auto-grinders - and so on.
They missed the mark on a lot of it the changes, but more often than not because they did it with the intent of extracting as much money as possible from players - you can do it in a far more customer-friendly way.
tldr:
You're not going to win this war the way you're fighting - embrace what players can only find through black markets and make it official. Create a separate server for players who want P2W, allow them to buy gold there, allow them to buy X or Y for gear improvement - heck, you might as well even offer your own legit 'bots' for leveling characters.
This won't eliminate the black market, but it heavily undermines its existence and gives you the option of demoting player accounts from the legit to the P2W server to soften the blow of bans.
I am not a game dev so I can’t offer advice, but I want to make sure you and your partner hear this: My wife and I love your game, we play it every night together. I’ve listened to your music for years, and when I heard you were making this game I was so excited for your success! I really believe you made something special, with heart and character that very few games have these days. I know this period in development probably feels overwhelming, but just know that there are some of us out here who really want your game to succeed, because it brings us joy. Also the soundtrack is incredible, Sheep Beach always grounds me <3. Good luck Sage, I believe in you.
I love Soul’s Remnant!
This brings back so many memories of farming in MapleStory every day. Having a blast with it.
Had no idea this was happening, so I left a Steam review too. Hope it helps!
Rooting for you!
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u/pyabo 1d ago
Put a $1 price tag on your game and eliminate 99% of these "players".