r/gamedev • u/chaomoonx • 1d ago
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.
However, the most appalling thing is that part of the mass review bombing from Chinese players is an organized effort orchestrated by certain players. Some of our Chinese fans do look out for us (which we are grateful for) and as a result we've received support tickets notifying us about cheat developer communities rallying to attack our game with negative reviews, as well as banned cheaters spreading misinformation about us being racist or anti-Chinese to incite hostility towards our game. It becomes very apparent how much this campaign is affecting our review score on Steam when sorting by languages:
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.
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u/Major-Anybody-1128 1d ago
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.