I gave my assessment over at F13 and Corpnews. Yeah the game needs some work but I wouldn’t go so far as to cry gloom and doom when the game has only been out about 45 days. I think that 6 months from now they’ll see a major decline if they don’t fix their game, but so far its not unlike other MMO’s that launched while being incomplete and patched in later.

My experience with ‘user voting’ is that when a game is new people will stop and vote because they are exited about it. But when a game has been out for more than a year the only people stopping to vote are people who are pissed off about it. (“They nerfed my Left Axe!…Their score is going DOWN!”)

Plus, who can claim the positive votes weren’t planted? If you browse websites that have customer reviews about restaurants, you often spot the restaurant management posting fake good reviews. Sometimes they even forget to change their fake ID before responding to a bad review.

And there are players who want to see their favorite game score high. So they log in dozens of times to post perfect reviews. 733 votes for Conan?… I could fake those by myself in one day!

You cannot trust the score of a magazine that sells advertising space. You cannot trust scores based on unconfirmed voters. All you can trust is the percentage of accounts who are still playing after 6 months… and the Game Company is NEVER going to tell you what THAT number is!

Seriously

how many people read the original article and were influenced not to try the game out? how many beyond that didn’t see the retraction / correction later?

I say it’s time to send a clear message to journalists such as he!

Pluck the chickens and start the Tar boiling!

Seriously, I’m not sure I’m suprised by this.. I’ve always though of them as Fox in that they never let the fact that they don’t know what they’re talking about ever stop them from talking about it.

Or Funcom is running a viral marketing campaign; hiring people to plant reviews and forum posts promoting their game. Viral marketing is the next big thing in the marketing world.

I’ve been saying this for years. The biggest sites still act like amateurs. They write features that get noticably less detailed and more rushed as the paragraphs scroll by, blogs read like high school writing assignments, and reposting other people’s news has gotten so out of hand that I found a summary of the first 4 pages of a comic book on one site.