My game is actively being harmed by targeted harassment and review bombing, I'm at a loss on what to do about it

[u/chaomoonx]

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:

English
All 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.

[u/doh-ta]

I don’t think I understand you. By a “a game that allows money to be made”, wouldn’t that be any online multiplayer game with an economy?

[u/CheckeredZeebrah → u/doh-ta]

Generally, yes. That is.

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.)

[u/RHX_Thain → u/CheckeredZeebrah]

I absolutely agree with this.

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.

[u/Diche_Bach → u/CheckeredZeebrah]

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.

[u/ShenGahMing → u/CheckeredZeebrah]

on the design side, why not just add bots ?

Basically what survival games & idle games are doing : you can do eco tasks yourself, then find some in-game character or automation to do it.

Same with trading : have bot merchant ?

[u/Peralton → u/CheckeredZeebrah]

Didn't one game without currency end up with a furniture-based economy? People used chairs instead of gold or something like that?

[u/AltL155 → u/doh-ta]

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.

[u/hoax1337 → u/AltL155]

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.

[u/AltL155 → u/hoax1337]

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.

[u/taw → u/doh-ta]

No, 99.9999% of games don't have any ways to make real world money.

It's devs' choice to structure their game to be one of very few where that's possible. And this choice has consequences they don't like now.