Improving On Fail of the Year

Just when we thought the shitstorm over Bioware's failure of a game called Dragon Age 2 was over... It just keeps getting better and better. Due to the obvious lack of quality in any way, shape or form of the game... Bioware resorted to what every major dev/publisher house would do to try and sell a piece of shit. They went and paid off every major critic site they could think of and bought, bribed, blew or otherwise paid for favorable reviews from most major critic sites out there.

However this wasn't enough to save the game from being called out by fans as the unfinished, rushed piece of garbage that it is.

So they did something called astroturfing, also known as grassroots activities. They had their staff go onto Metacritic and post deliberate inflated reviews with overly positive scores for the purpose of bumping the user score which was languishing in it's well-deserved spot of 3.0 or lower. Quite a common practice sadly, and everyone knows that any major McConsumerist Triple A Bollywood title will have a certain amount of bullshit/fake/paid off reviewing to inflate it's scores just so it will sell to the general McIdiot that actually thinks FauxFox News is gospel truth.

A day in the life of any profit driven greedy major dev backed by one of the Big Three Evils(tm) killing gaming today, nothing new. Nothing new at least, until you get caught redhanded in the act.

How did this come about? A discerning user browsing Metacritic decided it was quite odd that from a 3.0 user review average a few days ago, now suddenly the score has raised to an average of 4.0 due to a number of glowing 10/10 reviews from users that, oddly, only have the 3 platform versions of DA2 as their review. So our anonymous user decides to dox one of the reviewers... and well, the result is summed up in the image below. Click on the image to see the full thing, or simply click here.

 

 Either way, this is fail going from bad to worse. Not only are they banning people from games they paid for, something which, once it hit mainstream media, Bioware immediately went into damage control and called it a glitch. Now they can add astroturfing/grassroots activities to their list of fails, which, mind you, also conveniently includes lying about their DRM that is used in the game. I could also get started about their nonexistent TOTALLY AWESUMS level of customer service where customers with legitimate concerns are fobbed off and their threads locked by Nazi moderators all to happy to enforce the tiniest fine print in the T&C as a way to avoid answering difficult questions they are clearly unable to answer. I must point a finger at the Leader of the Fourth Reich moderator Stanley Woo for his shining examples of how if, you were sexually abused as a child and have no self-esteem, to make oneself feel better by becoming an Internets Forum Moderator(tm).

All in all, everything that Bioware can possibly have done wrong, has been done. Many have known for years that reviews were the result of back room bribery, but it's nice to have it shown at such an obvious level that a large dev/publisher is not above going far far over the line in the name of greed and profit. While it is a sad thing to happen to one of the formerly most loved RPG dev studios, I guess it was just a matter of time.

Congratulations Bioware once again, achievement unlocked.