Sign in to follow this  
elentari

Should steam reviews be addressed & answered by a GM/ CM/ Dev?

Recommended Posts

Considering it's been 1 year since the steam release, I've occasionally been browsing the steam Wurm page to see how the game has been received. 

 

Atm we stand at 41% negative steam reviews, which honestly, is quite a lot. Most good games usually have a 10% negative reviews and most of those tend to be due to players giving it a thumbs down on account of technical issues or simply the game wasn't in their playstyle (although one could argue why give a negative review to a game that isn't to your tastes? I don't usually play 1st person shooters but that doesn't mean they're bad, anyway back on track). 

 

Wurm however has quite a lot of negative reviews and I haven't seen any attempts from the staff or a GM/CM/Dev to respond to some of the reviews there, thus showing some community engagement. 

 

 

A lot of other games I've checked out on steam tend to have some form of feedback from a dev or community manager that responds on the steam page. Granted, most of those games tend to be in the indie market where developer - community communication is more important than say AAA games where player-company communication tends to be shallow. 

 

Thoughts? 

 

Should the team respond to the reviews on steam, yay or nay? 

  • Like 2

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Not sure about reviews, to be honest i have read some of them and it seems like most complain is about old mechanic/grind etc and we all know this not gonne change, so it seems for me that this game just wasnt they thing and shouldnt be reviewd by those ppl as you said.

 

However i am supreise that noone of the devs seems to follow the steam page, including the forum. But then again it doesnt seems like we getting mutch respons on this forum either.

  • Like 2

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I would rather have the players support tickets responded

  • Like 1

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
2 hours ago, Stinboi said:

most complain is about old mechanic/grind

 

Well they will be happy to hear there are 50+ (majority) fast paced instant gratification mmos out there, funny how they complain about what is considered a rare niche these days, they can have their fast paced instant max level mmorpg but they be ready to take out moms credit card for that "free to play" mmo boost

Edited by Jeston

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
3 hours ago, elentari said:

Considering it's been 1 year since the steam release, I've occasionally been browsing the steam Wurm page to see how the game has been received. 

 

Atm we stand at 41% negative steam reviews, which honestly, is quite a lot. Most good games usually have a 10% negative reviews and most of those tend to be due to players giving it a thumbs down on account of technical issues or simply the game wasn't in their playstyle (although one could argue why give a negative review to a game that isn't to your tastes?

 

 

 

Well, going outside the fan circle showed that other open world + sandbox fans have a different taste than a handful of longtime fans, shocking.

I am writing about it all the time, Wurm has two options to remain a game for narrow circle of interested people and fade away over time like any other niche game in past, or to change and take into account voices of newer players, from outside of the veterans circle.

Edited by Darnok

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
57 minutes ago, Darnok said:

Well, going outside the fan circle showed that other open world + sandbox fans have a different taste than a handful of longtime fans, shocking.

I am writing about it all the time, Wurm has two options to remain a game for narrow circle of interested people and fade away over time like any other niche game in past, or to change and take into account voices of newer players, from outside of the veterans circle.

So because profiteers like huge profits, everyone has to like the same mainstream games everyone else likes, or go without any games at all?

 

Thanks for showing you really have the best interests of everyone but those who are already catered to 50+ times over, at heart.

  • Like 4

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
12 minutes ago, Drayka said:

So because profiteers like huge profits, everyone has to like the same mainstream games everyone else likes, or go without any games at all?

 

Mainstream games are mainstream because most people like them. Apparently, almost half of the players interested in the open world + sandbox did not like Wurm that much or they felt disappointed after the stream put it in featured game because they played something similar.

 

12 minutes ago, Drayka said:

Thanks for showing you really have the best interests of everyone but those who are already catered to 50+ times over, at heart.

 

It doesn't matter how much someone cares about, it's pure business. In the subscription model, you have to make the number of customers grow, because if it gets lower, it will end badly.

 

 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
24 minutes ago, Darnok said:

It doesn't matter how much someone cares about, it's pure business. In the subscription model, you have to make the number of customers grow, because if it gets lower, it will end badly.

Of course it matters.  It is only business to the seller.  The seller is in the business of finding a way to get buyers to care about the game.  

 

Having someone representing the company responding to reviews would demonstrate at least some minimum engagement of the company with the game.

  • Like 1

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Let's try to keep the thread on track guys ( @Drayka & @Darnok, I know you guys have been sparring on the forums recently). The topic is about whether the team should take a more active role in responding to steam reviews, since there's a lot of negative ones and I find that to be an important issue that can directly affect the potential number of new people joining wurm or not (obviously games with a lot of negative reviews can instantly turn a customer away with nothing more than a 3 second judgement call) 

 

Yes, the ones regarding taste, that's something no one can change, people will leave negative reviews about absurd things ( people conflate "I like = thus it is good"). I'm more concerned with the lack of engagement with the community to be honest. 

 

After all, releasing a game to steam then seeing a lack of engagement between the wurm team <-> new steam wurmians is a bit of a head scratcher to me. A kind word in the right place at the right time can do wonders, just saying. 

 

 

Edited by elentari
  • Like 2

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

For a game like Wurm I fail to see that 41% negatives is a bad figure. I reckon that Wurm does not fit the taste of 80-90% of the steam customers.

 

As to negative reviews, there are mainly 2 types:

  • Complaints about the game being grindy, being dated, being slow, being no fun. Often 2 liners. They make the vaste majority of negative reviews.
  • "Revenge reviews" as have been announced and threatened with since even before the steam launch. Those usually have an "audience" in always numbers (50-70) which gives them highest marks of being informative, funny, whatever raising the suspicion of a banned butthurts' crusade. 

In the latter case, there have even been a couple of replies by Retrograde in the past. In my eyes, waste of time, as the crusaders did not care and doubled down, with stories about what the evil Enki did 13 years ago. Leave them alone.

 

Generally, should the team be more visible and more transparent? Of course. But first of all here, ingame and in game forums, with better bug tracking and publication of bug handling, information about ongoing work, e.g. about the AH disaster (not just deafening silence, non briefing Demona and leaving her in the cold for weeks).

 

Certainly, PR in Wurm steam presence would be a good idea, maybe commenting about the few constructive critical reviews, and the issues raised there. But as communication is a total failure here, what do you expect?

Edited by Ekcin

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
4 hours ago, Ekcin said:

For a game like Wurm I fail to see that 41% negatives is a bad figure. I reckon that Wurm does not fit the taste of 80-90% of the steam customers.

 

 

Dunno how you balance things out, but for me at least 41% negative reviews would be a "no touch" for any service / product. I wouldn't go to a restaurant that had those reviews, I wouldn't use a car that had those reviews, etc. 

 

It's not a number we can actually test out in an experiment, but I do wonder how many steam customers look at the reviews and pass due to that. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
1 hour ago, elentari said:

 

Dunno how you balance things out, but for me at least 41% negative reviews would be a "no touch" for any service / product. I wouldn't go to a restaurant that had those reviews, I wouldn't use a car that had those reviews, etc. 

 

It's not a number we can actually test out in an experiment, but I do wonder how many steam customers look at the reviews and pass due to that. 

 

I always look at the positive and negative reviews with the most hours played, when I browse for a game on steam.

I dont care about the "overall" score a game gets. If I still doubt a game will be my cup of tea, I look for it on youtube to see if there are any playthroughs and see if the same negatives/positives return, and if there is actually enough depth in the game to keep me interested.

 

There are so so so many negative reviews on various games that hardly say anything, that are based on 1 moment in time, or that are even political.

For Wurm Online, when it launched on steam, negative reviews were coming in fast, and when I looked closer, allot of them were from bitter players, who got fed up with the game because some features were taken, things were nerfed, bad experience with GM's, their kingdom pulled on the short end in some pvp-drama, etc...

 

I just mean, such "negative" reviews are purely based on emotions and say hardly anything about the game itself (well, the "gm-stuff" reviews can tell something about the game, but then I just play the game, or read/hear ingame about how many people got help from GM's with problems, and then you see there is always another side to the story, the negative ones are usually the most vocal).

 

If a person gets Wurm recommended through steam due to the steam algorithm, and sees its "mixed" reviews and instantly skips it because of that, then Wurm wasnt a game for that person in the first place.

 

 

 

EDIT: Was browsing through the negative reviews, and on most of them that have comments, there is one familiar name commenting in allot of them:

 

Edited by Lycanthropic
  • Like 2

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
12 hours ago, elentari said:

Let's try to keep the thread on track guys ( @Drayka & @Darnok, I know you guys have been sparring on the forums recently). The topic is about whether the team should take a more active role in responding to steam reviews, since there's a lot of negative ones and I find that to be an important issue that can directly affect the potential number of new people joining wurm or not (obviously games with a lot of negative reviews can instantly turn a customer away with nothing more than a 3 second judgement call) 

 

Yes, the ones regarding taste, that's something no one can change, people will leave negative reviews about absurd things ( people conflate "I like = thus it is good"). I'm more concerned with the lack of engagement with the community to be honest. 

 

After all, releasing a game to steam then seeing a lack of engagement between the wurm team <-> new steam wurmians is a bit of a head scratcher to me. A kind word in the right place at the right time can do wonders, just saying. 

 

*sheepish smile* Oops. Yeah, I probably got a bit carried away. Ironically, I DO actually have something relevant to contribute to this topic, BECAUSE of searching for useful images for a meme war with@Darnok a week or so ago.

 

Needs to be adjusted for the context of Steam reviews of a game, as opposed to residential housing reviews, but it's the same principle:

(Yes, I read the entire article, and no, I couldn't get the original image to work as a click-link.)

G2Mve26.png

Trolls.pdf (hubspot.net)

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
5 hours ago, Lycanthropic said:

Was browsing through the negative reviews, and on most of them that have comments, there is one familiar name commenting in allot of them:

Hardly surprising, on not unforeseen at all.  

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
1 hour ago, TheTrickster said:

Hardly surprising, on not unforeseen at all.  

Got me curious now...

 

Okay, those negative reviews in general are plain depressing.

-1 that the staff should feel obliged to address this stuff.

Based on: I never suggest things that if someone turned it round on me and said "you do it then" I wouldn't be prepared to try to, and keep trying.

I wouldn't poke that mess even whilst wearing a radiation suit.

And I tend to pride myself on talking to people no-one else will talk to (IRL).

 

I value our staff members more highly than asking them to deal with that.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
3 hours ago, Drayka said:

 

*sheepish smile* Oops. Yeah, I probably got a bit carried away. Ironically, I DO actually have something relevant to contribute to this topic, BECAUSE of searching for useful images for a meme war with@Darnok a week or so ago.

 

Needs to be adjusted for the context of Steam reviews of a game, as opposed to residential housing reviews, but it's the same principle:

(Yes, I read the entire article, and no, I couldn't get the original image to work as a click-link.)

G2Mve26.png

Trolls.pdf (hubspot.net)

Games are an entirely different beast than *reads up* residential housing views 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
1 hour ago, Drayka said:

I wouldn't poke that mess even whilst wearing a radiation suit.

 

I understand the sentiment. 

 

However let's look at the optics. Now I will make perhaps an unfair analogy here but when X number of employees of a company, any company, are accused of a certain negative behavior and said company doesn't respond to those accusations in any form, that in itself can give credence to said accusations. It's the "no comment" phenomenon you often see in companies / politicians when they're accused of shady practices. The "no comment" tends to leave viewers thinking the accusations are true. 

 

People (potential steam players) might look at those reviews and think to themselves "The number of accusations against the GM/dev team seems a bit too high to be made up, something's fishy here". 

 

Leaving accusations unchallenged over time can give people the impression that part of those accusations are true. 

 

Now I'm not saying the gm team should respond to every negative review on steam I know if they'd do that it would turn into a ###### show that does more harm, but doing some damage control to mitigate the number of "vengeance posts" might be wise, at least imho. Even a short sentence, anything, might be useful than letting vengeance posts pile up. 

  • Like 1

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The thing with vengeance posts is that you HAVE to be capable and willing to empathise with both sides, with the absolute confidence and bull-headed determination that you will not rest until both sides have reconciled to at-least neutrality. And in some cases that's just not possible, yet.

 

It's like being an attorney. Only, instead of seeking persecution and punishment of one or the other party, you have to be dedicated to peace, yet LOVE war. Otherwise it will break you. The sheer intensity of the emotions and opinions in some of these reviews, are too much to blunder onto and comment on. I love our staff, but I don't always feel that I would have said the same thing in their shoes. They are very much human beings, no better or worse than the rest of us, bar their expectations of themselves, and there's only so much any of us can take without losing the will to live in backlash.

 

Unless you can know in yourself that you can never judge either party as being truly toxic, you shouldn't be answering those reviews as a representative of the game - these are my rules for myself, when posting on these forums, or in in-game chat. I'm allowed to sound many things; scathing, angry, judgemental, paranoid, weak, irrational, retarded... I am allowed to be judged and misjudged. What I am not allowed to be here, is someone who can be baited into truly careless banter of telling a user to leave, no matter who says it first. Such talk is for dedictated PvP channels, where blatant statements to go-away translates directly as bait to stick-around-and-escalate - something I am still trying to master the pacing of, as I think I escalate too fast and zerg in written conversation. (Wish my account stats weren't the complete opposite of that.)

 

So yes, there may indeed be a need to address these negative reviews. But I am neither volunteering to do so, nor volunteering anyone else to do so. This challenge is beyond my current skillset to rise to. I'd crash into seeing myself as the toxic one, from failure to achieve something as yet too far beyond my reach. I'm only just beginning to realise emotionally (slow developer) that this is no more acceptable than viewing any other party as toxic. I'll need to spend a LOT more time on Wurm PvP, before I've skilled up enough socially to be equal to that task.

 

Most of our staff are PvEers. This isn't a PvEer's primary social skillset, from my own observation of the two cultures. PvE doesn't require you to love war, even as you seek peace, it requires you to love being polite even as you seek to create rules. Vengeance posters are not polite, and they are not going to obey your rules.

Edited by Drayka

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

They don't give feedback on the forums to people who have been around for years (longer than some staff in certain cases).

 

Let's be realistic here; they should but it's not going to happen.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Most of the negative reviews are quite literally targeting developers and staff for poor conduct or inaction. Here's the top 10 "Most Helpful" reviews according to Steam:

 

Traslogan (Negative) - 526 Helpful

Nadroj (Negative) - 442 Helpful

Lord Bob Saget (Positive) - 359 Helpful

Jenshae (Negative) - 337 Helpful

Dilbert (Negative) - 336 Helpful

Malfor (Negative) - 314 Helpful

Armynator (Negative) - 292 Helpful

Wood (Negative) - 220 Helpful

Nepocrates (Negative) - 219 Helpful

Jocktor (Negative) - 212 Helpful

 

Honorable Mentions:

EpicPhail (Negative) - 211 Helpful

Tiny Rick (Positive) - 168 Helpful

 

If I missed one highly voted in the list, it's because Steam doesn't actually allow you to sort by reviews rated most helpful. I had to manually scroll through several pages and find the ones with the highest votes.

 

Personally, I'd rather see the concerns mentioned in the reviews addressed rather than respond to the reviews themselves.

  • Like 1

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
1 hour ago, Sindusk said:

Personally, I'd rather see the concerns mentioned in the reviews addressed rather than respond to the reviews themselves.

 

Yes, so a written response to the reviews themselves could be along the lines of, "Here is what we have done to resolve that."

  • Like 1

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
5 minutes ago, TheTrickster said:

"Here is what we have done to resolve that."

images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRzy1CfzaJmr1FN62FQFVC

  • Like 2

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Sadly it's a thing that needs to be managed.. recently heard a ~big streamer comment about a game.. checks it's stream page and reads out loud the rating from player reviews... lets say. 60-70 and anything below means the game is absolute garbage.. or whatever below that rating it was at the time.. guy was almost vomiting based on just review rating, self explanatory if this should be given attention.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
Sign in to follow this