The thing about the internet and the anonymity and lack of personal accountability it affords everybody is that, in some cases, it brings out the very worst in the people. And that, boys and girls, is how trolls were invented.
According to a report over on Giant Bomb, the people working at Supergiant Games and Signal Games recently noticed that Metacritic user ratings for Bastion and Toy Soldiers: Cold War had dropped pretty dramatically within a short space of time, and for no apparent reason.
Turns out a hit squad of morons with nothing better to do was targeting a bunch of games on the site, and rating them at zero with no written reviews to back up those scores.
“A publisher of a different game let us know that he noticed that his game had been ‘bombed’ by a bunch of zero ratings in an unusually short period of time,” Metacritic co-founder Marc Doyle tells Giant Bomb. “While investigating those ratings, we noticed a group of user accounts and activities that were clearly illegitimate and violated our terms of use.”
The perps were promptly banned, but the question lingers, “why?” And by “why”, I mean “why don’t we just push them off the planet, and be rid of this stupidity forever?”
Metacritic finds, bans lame review bombers for being lame << Comments and views
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