On the subject of the so-called “crybabies”, I put more value to their opinion than a thousand official reviews on official review sites and/or in official publications. Why? Because we live in an age where game companies actively lie to us.
We are lied to about quality of product. We are lied to about DRM. We are lied to when we are told they didn’t remove a chunk of the game just to sell it back to us at £10 a pop. Pirates get a better version of some games than legal customers, and legal customers get treated like pirates.
There is no reason to believe anything a company says, because odds are everything they say goes through a marketing filter to try and paint themselves in the best possible light. Notice now no games company can ever admit they were wrong? Notice how they never acknowledge their naysayers, or accept responsibility for financial failures or god-awful design choices?
Why, then, should I believe anything they tell me about their game. Why, for that matter, should I believe the ‘opinion’ of someone who could lose their job if they piss off such a company? Who can we turn to then if not review sites or the game creators themselves?
The people who are pissed off. Even now, years later, there is uproar over Mass Effect 3 or Dragon Age 2. Hell, I still get bile rising when I think of that piece of crap. But why? Why do I still get so angry at how Dragon Age 2 tanked the franchise to hell? I didn’t make the game, I don’t profit from its popularity, positive or negative. Why should I care so much?
The answer is simple; I loved Dragon Age: Origins. I sunk far too many hours into that game and I wanted to see it do well so we would get sequels. When we got Dragon Age 2 it wasn’t what I, or many other fans, wanted. Now we don’t want the franchise to do well because we don’t want more games like Dragon Age 2!
The same thing happens here. A lot of can see great potential in Star Conflict, but we have virtually no control over the game. All we can do is spend money or not spend money; encourage others to spend, or not to spend. When we appear to be driving people away it is not because we are malicious trolls who are trying to ruin a company for a laugh; it is because we strongly disagree with the company’s business model, their development direction or some other key aspect surrounding the game, and we want them to change it.
Let’s take it to an extreme. Imagine that I am a God and, with but a single word, I could convince 90% of this game’s playerbase to uninstall and never return. I guarantee you that if I were to post “I don’t like lasers being red - they should be green” that next week’s patch would give us green lasers. But I am not a God, and I cannot sway you all in that fashion… but collectively, we can achieve the same thing. In theory, at least, we can unite to decide whether a game lives or dies. If 90% of the community logged out for a fortnight in protest over a change, that change would be undone. It would have to be; the alternative is for the game to die.
We rant, then, because it is our only weapon. We rant because we see a fundamental flaw in what should be a great game, and we want to convince the developers to fix that flaw. Our only hope of doing this is to watch the evolution of the game and act accordingly; encourage people to play when it is good, drive them away when it is bad.
If the game dies because of that, it isn’t our fault; it’s the developer’s fault for not listening.
I put 10x more value to those ‘trolls’ as well, since 9/10 times I find those defending a game have issues with tunnel vision, they only see one part of the game instead of the whole game. Same as Sim CIty, there are a few peeps that enjoy the game, but they dont see what the rest of us sees. I am still playing, I did quite for a while, and I dont like the new patch however, a CEO of a guild wanted me in his corp, After declining him first because I was unsure if I would play, I accepted, and I do enjoy the teamplay it brings, but the game itself is still very vague for me, well the game isnt, the developers are.