Topic: Review Bombing

@Chaotic_Neutral Umm low scored are justified by someone not liking a game, not a political movement. Reviews along with Review scores are opinions and like every opinion everyone is not going to agree. For one thing the game may not be their game style or can be broken to deserve a low score.

For example, I would give Breath of the Wild a 6 due to the whole weapon breaking thing. Is it a bad game no but the weapon breaking just ruins the game for me. Now am I making a political movement no it's my opinion, Politics has nothing to do with reviews.

@Owl1 stop pushing to shut me down, you are starting to sound like my wife 🤣🤣🤣

If we keep things civil there won't be any need to close a discussion.

@Chaotic_Neutral... Alrighty then

@Chaotic_Neutral I totally agree with that. You me, the nice pepole in here so far, but this won't last. I've seen it over & over. Since I joined here in 2017.... a thread can start totally fine and friendly, rational, nice NL regulars, but this is still the internet, a world wide site. Someone will come along who is triggered just by the mention of something that may intersect with political or ideological leaning. And they will ruin the thread. It's so predictable. If it doesn't go bad today, it's highly likely at some point, maybe tomorrow, or the next day. At some point randoms will have ruined the vibe of the thread & turned up the heat, and a mod has no choice by to lock the thread.

I'll agree it's stupid that we have to tip top like that, but it's a reality of talking in a world wide forum where everyone is anonymous.

@Chaotic_Neutral There are literally people whose job is positive score-bombing. Mostly for advertising products rather than e.g. movies, although it has come up with games occasionally. It's a big problem for things like Amazon which have a lot of discoverability based on rating.

As for Peter Pan, there seems to be a lot of people who don't like the movie for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons is people who want an exact copy of the older movies rather than changing some things. Although what is the point of making identical movies rather than reimagining them? Disney trying to be creative and likely also trying to reach out to a wider audience (presumably for attempted profits rather than any political reason) might make some people (generally people outside the target audience) angry simply because the movie didn't meet their precise expectations. However, if the movie had been a true success, the subset of 'review bombing' would have hopefully been lost in the noise. However, there were a lot of mediocre reviews as well as the unrealistic 1/10 type reviews so it seems a lot of people seemed to have simply not been fans of the movie.

As to the overall topic, I think there is a big difference between low scores (e.g. somewhat snobby reviewer saying Mario movie isn't fine art so 5/10) versus review-bomber who never actually watched the movie giving it a troll rating of 1/10.

I'm gonna go sit in my corner and watch Hook and Peter Pan (2003) again...

@WoomyNNYes ugh that happened to a thread I started once. Became a argument in no time.

Also keep politics out of gaming. People play games to avoid politics not get dragged in it. (And Also to have fun but still.)

@Greatluigi Can you define what you mean by "politics" and explain why games should avoid them in more detail?
Because it's not the same mentioning real world political parties in a game than Peach not showing a skirt in one scene but in certain corners of the Internet nowadays both get labeled as "political".

That's my whole issue with this point nowadays. Saying "political in games is bad" sounds nice and some time ago I even agreed but after seeing it's use recently... not so much.

Going into the original point about review bombing. My logic is that, if I know that the game got the attention of "certain corners of the Internet", I compleatly ignore the user score because I know it won't be fair (example: the recent Horizon Forbidden West DLC).

Edit: By the way, I'm not even saying that the Horizon Forbidden West DLC is good or bad. Just that I know that due to... a piece of the story that was revealed, it is prime review bomb material unfortunatelly.

@jowe_gv the Horizon thing felt really forced, and was probably included with the sole reason to stir up controversy to drum up sales (the base game underperformed by all accounts) and shift focus away from the fact the DLC isn't available on last gen systems even though the base game was. Sony seem to take this approach quite often and thrives off the publicity that the "review bombing" drums up.

That's one of the reasons I love Nintendo, they don't force any form of diversity on us and the games are much better as a result.

Morning folks! I do agree that this is a topic that has a very interesting discussion to be had, however, let's try and keep this civil/not a political debate or unfortunately it will have to be locked.

This is Nintendo Life, after all. Plenty of other sites out there for political chats 😇

@DreamlandGem Thank you, totally agree with that sentiment.

I would not give a game 1/10 just for politics in it. I would simply never play it.

But I had people tell me that I am a bigot because I scored The Last of Us Part II a 5/10. Well TLoU is ALL about the story for me. No amount of amazing graphics will push it above 5/10. I hated the story so much that it ruined the whole experience for me. And yet those who gave it "10/10 it is so BrAvE!!!" are going to call it negative review bombing

PS: People say do not mix politics and gaming but there are more and more games that put politics inside them. Like Disney is doing with their movies now.

Nah Nintendo are just more subtle about it. Birdo, the symbolism behind Kirby, Ganondorf’s monologues in Wind Waker, the Inklings and Octolings becoming friends, the inter family love in Fire Emblem etc.

I’m firm a believer in games should be fun and about playing though which is why I laugh at how some talk about how they play games for the “stories”.

@Chaotic_Neutral Like I mentioned, I don't know if the DLC is good or not looking at users reviews. Due to the fact that it has any representation at all it means that it won't be fair unfortunatelly.

Maybe the DLC is the worst gaming experience in the maket or a masterpiece, I just don't know. And that's my biggest issue with review bombs.
Like, if they only happened when the quality of the game itself was bad or because of a controversy that actually made sense (a horrible PC port for example) then ok... but for stuff like this? Hm.

@jump Japanise family focused company so they have to. Although it's not like they never tackled those elements, like you mentioned but they have to by careful about it.
(Nintendo: Pearl and Marina are just best friends, we swear)

I wouldn't be against them going further in a couple of places. Like, having a Fire Emblem where everyone is Bi in terms of romances would be a good think in my opinion, for example.

@DreamlandGem Yeah, I'm done here. It's a shame we can't have this discussions due to some people taking it way too far but it's not like I can do anything about that.

"but what is the difference between people not liking a product and voicing opinions and people "review bombing" a product."

• People illegitimately and unfairly label people trolls when they express their opinion (no matter how rational it is), whether its because they don't like how a person says it, or because they're just personally hurt by it, so they throw buzzwords around like "review bombing" and "troll" to cope and delude themselves. Nobody ever takes anything into context, except their feelings.

now on paper, "reveiw bombing" would mean something a large majority of people think is garbage and poor quality; but people dont use it for that intent & instead use it for what i just explained earlier.

@nomither6 Last comment from me here since this post is so getting locked XD.

This point of "people are just angry when other don't like a game for totally valid reasons" doesn't work when the reviews in particular are "gay character 0/10".
And it's even less valid seeing how easy it is to organize bots to review bomb a product or being a large influencer and telling your gullable audience to review bomb a product you just lambasted in a video.

And review bombing can also go both ways Like, did you know some of those awful NFT cartoons had actually quite good positive ratings? That's because their totally unbiased Discords "enourage" them to leave positive reviews.

I think there is a slippery slope of review aggregators banning or "moderating" review bombs and a result where all negative criticism of media becomes deligitimized.

But I do agree it can be annoying as I personally don't take issues with broad representation and political messaging in games. More common art forms like music or literature are frequently taking stands on things, categorically denying this to games strips games of their artistic characteristics. There are games with conservative and progressive messages and ultimately I think thats ok and represents the maturity of the medium.

I think review bombing is not moral however I also think that companies add political content into their games/movies so that they can blame bad reviews on review bombing