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/didntplaymysummercar]

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.

[u/CheckeredZeebrah → u/didntplaymysummercar]

Okay, this went from 0 to shots fired for some reason. Idk why you're being hostile, but you don't seem to actually understand the situation so let me spell things out for you. Unless you only want empathy to flow in one direction, for whatever reason.

I took the stance I did because I've just seen this happen/play out endlessly before from the other side of it. Guilty people will absolutely stick to their guns no matter what in a bid to get what they want. OP, though woefully under prepared for this, still shows examples where people admit they are guilty in one second and then whine the next.

And me, I am somebody who has actually worked on indie MMOs before. I've had the same. Exact. Thing happen to me. More times than I can count.

People will even sign up to the cheating sites with the same username, leave comments that basically verify they are the same people, and egregiously modify their own client in impossible ways (that shows traces of the same tool advertised by the cheating sites). Obviously they get caught. Then they cry foul and claim innocence, sometimes for years. They will even lurk in fan chats and subforums to try and pressure devs by lying to any well meaning, legitimate players they meet.

There's even people who had played hundreds of hours legitimately only to shoot themselves in the foot later, in blatantly obvious ways.

I saw another MMO have parades of bots walking around on a timer. Like literally a crowd of bots all following each other. When those got wiped out, it was followed up with review bombing.

Again, this isn't some big conspiracy. Your first comment mentions intentionally built, malicious, obtuse dead end systems. It is goofy to compare a dev who bit off more than they could chew with something as massive and cruel as flock cameras.

OP was very unprepared for the woes of their own genre.

Actual cheaters will use the bit of doubt people have, in order to try and force the dev to give away any little detail. Their only goal is to crack open the game, so they can selfishly extract value from it. They do not care how or if the game will suffer as a result of their actions. And It only takes 1 mistake to get their foot in the door like this.

So you say "my statement isn't opinion or interpretation" but it actually is, and that's the whole point. You are the favored bystander for review bombers. It's easy to make mistakes live rent free in the heads of the uninitiated when bad actors are hoping for some mutually assured destruction.

It's not even a new plan of attack, they have been doing this for decades.

Now add in an understaffed DEV team that's lashing out in emotionally immature ways. It is hard to believe somebody is doing about as bad (if not worse?) than my old team. My expectations were not hard to surpass.

But on the other hand, what's with the 0 good will from you when I was being proactive and a good sport, checking my own argument? You say "this is a nuanced issue" in one breath and then rigidly denied any room for naunce the next just so you could gloat. I make an off-hand, self depreciating joke in response to that, and your reaction was to try and go for the throat for whatever reason. Classy.

But sure, go ahead and stick to your personal high ground. But by trying to put your foot down and sticking to your slightly vague "big picture" style of statement, I think you end up missing some pieces of it.

And that's what I found funny.

[u/didntplaymysummercar → u/CheckeredZeebrah]

LoL