There is a very strange situation developing on Metacritic and Gamespot.
Someone has been creating many dummy accounts and posting false reviews. They have created accounts for Slitherine, Matrix and the Lordz and are pretending to be us and posting false positive reviews. These reviews have been copied and pasted from other CTGW reviews. At least they are reviews of the the right game...
These are the false developer accounts that were created:
http://www.metacritic.com/user/MatrixGames2012
http://www.metacritic.com/user/SlitherineGames
http://www.metacritic.com/user/LordzGames
These accounts were not set up by us.
Then they have created many more accounts giving very bad reviews. These reviews are copied and pasted from completely different games. You can tell because they talk about features not in the game. For example there are no doors & dungeons in Commander the Great War!
All these accounts have only 1 review created just to post post a bad review about CTGW. These accounts are listed below - E.g.
http://www.metacritic.com/user/JMiles - this one talks about "Rugged defence" which is not in the game.
http://www.metacritic.com/user/Gazelle67
http://www.metacritic.com/user/Levada
http://www.metacritic.com/user/jopmores - this one complains the developers are rating their own games...
http://www.metacritic.com/user/Gret - this one talks about the doors and dungeons not working!
http://www.metacritic.com/user/JohnSteed67
http://www.metacritic.com/user/HTTbull - this one talked about inventory management. Inventory - seriously!
http://www.metacritic.com/user/GreatnessWar - this one says its from paradox.
All of the negative and bizarre comments have been marked as helpful by 13 users so not only did the person set up these fake reviews they took the time to go through and like all their fake reviews with other accounts. They also took the time to mark all the real reviews from actual players as unhelpful so all of their fantasy reviews go to the top of the list.
Someone has gone to a lot of effort to do all this across multiple sites.
It is very sad when a small indie developer spends years making a game to be faced with such malicious behavior, than runs the risk of ruining their games chances of success and potentially putting them out of business.
We have contacted Metacritic and Gamespot to try and resolve the issues but its quite difficult for us to explain to someone who doesn't know the game that these reviews are complete fantasy and made up.
If anyone has any information about the culprits we'd really appreciate it.
The other thing that would help is for anyone who can spare the time to report the abuse by clicking the link on the false reviews to add weight to our argument that these are completely spurious.
Please share this news as the more people who know what is going on for real, the less damage that can be done to the game.
