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Is mmorpg.com and some of the same kind of sites paid to overhype big budget MMOs

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  • dalingrindalingrin Member Posts: 14

    Originally posted by palulalula

    I  don't believe anymore any review about any game what is published on the web. Just look reviews on mmorpg.com about any big mmo title and you will see in most of the reviews only good things. AOC is super awesome, WAR is fantastic, WOW is forever, SWTOR is amazing, GW2 is best what is created by human hand. What you think? Do money paid by big companies affect credibilities of some major gaming websites? Maybe i got banned after this but who cares :)

    While reading reviews you would do well to be conscious of the scope of the review. Did the reviewer play the game for months or just a few days? Of the games you listed, all of them are well done in some respects and their issues only become apparent after having played the game for a while. AOC had/has a great combat system. In the early bits of the game, the content is great as well. WAR I think was also a very cool game early on, public quests, great battlegrounds, large variety of classes, etc. While I don't personally like WOW I can't imagine the game getting a bad review...I mean, you may not enjoy it but I don't think many folks would say its a "bad" game. SWTOR is also great in some respects such as the story and dialog so most folks initial reaction to it will be positive.

    There's one thing most of these games have in common. If you play them for a relatively short period of time you will think they are pretty fantastic. If you play them for a few months the flaws start become very apparent. Game reviewers don't have months to play the game before they review them typically.

    In terms of GW2, I don't think its all just empty hype. Its not like the positive remarks are coming from a handful of people who have exclusive access to the game. Thus far the beta has been pretty open in terms of info and gameplay videos and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. There are hours upon hours of gameplay videos and many are very candid about things they like and don't like.

  • AG-VukAG-Vuk Member UncommonPosts: 823

    Originally posted by palulalula

    I  don't believe anymore any review about any game what is published on the web. Just look reviews on mmorpg.com about any big mmo title and you will see in most of the reviews only good things. AOC is super awesome, WAR is fantastic, WOW is forever, SWTOR is amazing, GW2 is best what is created by human hand. What you think? Do money paid by big companies affect credibilities of some major gaming websites? Maybe i got banned after this but who cares :)

     Honestly, what do you expect ?  This wesite is full of advertisements for a different game every time you click a page. How do you think the site pays for itself and employees. Journalistic integrity are oxymora. The only time you see true criticism is when the funds are cut off. Once the advertising dollars stop coming in from a dev, then you get a semi realistic opinion . I say "semi" because they will use a threat of a caustic review to basically extort money from a dev so a game can keep a good public image . It's slow creeping process , as the funding fades so criticism grows more honest. Pull any game reviews and you can notice a pattern in the writing that  will correspond to availibility of money flowing to the various sites.

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  • GrumpyMel2GrumpyMel2 Member Posts: 1,832

    Any publication that depends upon paid advertisement revenue from the products it is reviewing is simply not going to be 100 percent objective in it's reviews. PERIOD.

    The simple fact is the companies don't provide advertising revenue to venues that routienely trash thier products (deservedly or not). They may allow a little bit of criticism here and there....but if the reviews aren't GENERALY inline with the message the company wants to present about it's products.... that venue doesn't get the companies advertising dollars. If that happens over a wide enough range of products over a long enough period of time....that venue simply won't have the revenue it needs to continue to exist.

    If you want reviews that have a chance of being objective, then you need to look at venues who's operating revenues are primarly dependant upon direct payments (purchase of the issue and/or subscription) from the consumer and/or advertisements that come outside of the subject matter which the periodical covers. Example, if a car magizine is getting advertisement revenue from a soft drink manufacturer that likely won't have any effect on the content  of car reviews it publishes. If a car magezine is getting advertisements from FORD, you better believe it will effect it's content...even if indirectly.

    Now, Ford likely won't call up the periodical and say... "Hey Joe... you better write XYZ in your may 14th article about us or else." However, if the magezine (deservedly or not) trashes Ford in it's reviews of important (to Ford) product releases over the course of say 3 months....you better believe when the sales-people at that magezine ring up Ford (or any manufacturer...not trying to single out Ford here) to sell it advertising space for the next 3 months, the guy at Ford (or whatever manufacturers) markerting department is going to say... "Yeah we're not going to buy any space in your upcoming issue, your periodicals coverage really hasn't been fitting with our business objectives of late."  Translation...you trashed us...you just lost $200K in revenue....thanks for calling, bye.

     

     

  • ZippyZippy Member, Newbie CommonPosts: 1,412

    There are many reasons why games are not thouroughly reviewd by mainstream sites.  One of which is they they do recieve advertising diollars from devlopers.  But it is a lot mroe than that.

    1.  The people that write for mainstream sites like MMORPG.COM TTH and so on do not play MMOS except in the most casual of sense.  They write their reviews on playing level 1-6.  They play 30 minutes to 2 hours and thats it.  They have no idea how to play a MMO except in the most basic sense and they almost never play endgame.

    2.  Sites like this are not worried about news or journalism but page hits.  Page hits are how they make money.  Which means their interest aligns with hyping games.  Because their writers do not play the games they pretend to write about, have very little knowledge of MMOs and  their job is to hype games not to be journalists they generally just repeat developer talking points.

    3.  Many of the major sites uses require their writers to fufill quotas.  2 or 3 articles per week.  The concern here is quantity not quality.  It doe snot matter what they write about except that it has a catchy title that gets page hits.

    4.  Readers are Morons -  It is not entirely the fault of mainstream fansites because the people that read them and play MMOs except it.  We do not care and  do not question.  When companies lie to us we defend them and still buy their products.  We always believe there is a miracle patch, we accpet poor products, and we accept the lies by developers and  thier minions at the mainstream fansites.  We never learn.

    5.  Sites like MMORPG.COM recieve money for advertising from the devopers they write about.  They also recieve access to these games.  Writing critical reviews might put a halt to both.

    Mainstream sites have nothing to do with journalism.  There are no ethics and there is no desire to covergames from a player perspective.  It is simply all about page hits.  Its all about money and that is what drives their stories.  They could care less about accuracy or the genre.

    I know some well known writers that worked for one of the big MMO websites and each wrote 2-3 artic;es a week about a certain game. In the first year and a half they wrote about this game neither of them ever was able to get a character above level 20.  Something most people I know did the first day or two of release.  This did not stop them from continuiung to write with authority about the game they pretended to play.  They are not an exception.  Sadly they are the norm.  Almost  everyone that writes at mainstream sites are ultra casual and simply do not play the games they pretend to write about.  Mainstream sites are simply about making money which is in direct conflict with writing critical reviews. 

    If you want less tainted information you need to visit independent sites.  But even independent sites have a lot of pressure.  Devolpers give these people access to alpha and beta , make frinds with them and give them access to developers which means they need to write nice things to continue to get access. Fanboys will generally not visit an independent site that bashes a game they like.  So if the independent site is game specific there is little incentive  to give an honest review.  The one big advantage independent sites give is the people that write for them while unpaid actually play the games they write about and have actual knowledge of the game they write about.  They might be lacking in writing style, and in consistent updates but the quality is so much better than mainstream sites as the writers are much more hardcore in terms of playstyle.

    It is such a shame the mainstream gaming media is so bad.  The mainstream media does so much damage to the genre by their actions hyping and promoting poorly made games.  Thye help create the buzz and  help hide what games are lacking  and have engaged in shady practices and outright lies in the case of  developer/games like Funcom ,SOE Dark and Light and so many other bad games and developers.

    If this genre is ever going to improve it will be when we get a responsible media with actual journalistic ethics and sites like MMORPG.Com  cease to exist.

  • EdeusEdeus Member CommonPosts: 506

    Has anyone stopped and thought that maybe the reason this website has so much gaming advertisements is because the website is visited by gamers only?  The marketting department of this website sells this fact to the marketting department of the videogame dev's and together they get business done.  I can guarantee the dev's don't even care to read the review's here. 

     

    What any and all of them care about is that: X number of gamers visit this site a day.  The reviews are just around to keep US here... not to feed some whimsical comspiracy theory that they wrote a good review, therefore more people will buy the game, therefore they will give more money to the website...

     

    As for why there are so few negative reviews of any particular game... probably because the reviewer has 20 other things to do, and once a game loses their interest (ie is bad) they move on to other games and can't be bothered with the baddies anymore. 

     

    Give the genre a few more years (like the movie industry) and we'll start seeing more ew.com level slams of videogames.

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    Taru-Gallante-Blood elf-Elysean-Kelari-Crime Fighting-Imperial Agent

  • TheocritusTheocritus Member LegendaryPosts: 9,739

           Theres little doubt that some of these sites receive kickbacks for giving favorable reviews or advertising to some of these games... Some of these bigger games also pay people to go to sites and spam non stop how great such and such game is.....Hype sells alot of copies as alot of gamers are mere sheep that will follow wherever they think the others are going.

  • sanman7890sanman7890 Member Posts: 96

    Hehe, I wish that the developers gave kick-backs for reviews, then maybe I wouldn't have so many bills to pay! HA!

    Sadly, as much as seeing you guys theorycraft is fun, developers aren't paying us writers to say certain things.  Contrary to popular belief developers push open honesty more than anything else, they really, really want to know what people don't like about their games.

    Then again, nobody will believe little old me. :P  on the other hand I've only reviewed smaller games so far (well, not League, but Riot give me no money D:) so MAYBE DEVS DO PAY OUT FOR REVIEWS DUN DUN DUN?

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  • thekid1thekid1 Member UncommonPosts: 789

    I read "professional" reviews to see what kind of negative points they bring up, but I don't believe the overall score and opinion any more if it is good. I think they are not critical enough and often leave out important stuff. Like how the matchmaking or serverbrowser works in an online PC shooter.

    I don't know if they are directly paid to give good reviews although seeing SWTOR and Mass effect 3 getting ludicrously high scores has my alarm bells going off. But there definatly is a conflict of interest. If they give a bad review to a big publisher they might not get any games before launch to review or advertising money in the future.

  • EliandalEliandal Member Posts: 796

    Originally posted by Theocritus

           Theres little doubt that some of these sites receive kickbacks for giving favorable reviews or advertising to some of these games... Some of these bigger games also pay people to go to sites and spam non stop how great such and such game is.....Hype sells alot of copies as alot of gamers are mere sheep that will follow wherever they think the others are going.

     

     

      ...of course they do.....

     

      Conspiracy theorists abound .....

  • stragen001stragen001 Member UncommonPosts: 1,720

    Yes

    Maybe not directly but the ads(some call them reviews) from the MMOs are what pay for this site. If they start giving out bad reviews then the company will react by no longer advertising here, and not giving access for future content/previews/betas/etc

    I think we need to implement something I mentioned in the Eve Re-Review thread. Every time MMORPG.com does a review, we as a community should give that review a credibility score of 1 - 10. The Eve re-review read more like a promo peice on why the author loved Eve rather than a critical review of the game and its features. I therefore gave it a credibility score of 2/10. 

    Cluck Cluck, Gibber Gibber, My Old Mans A Mushroom

  • MumboJumboMumboJumbo Member UncommonPosts: 3,219

    You can read film mags/websites or games mainstream and it's "the same game" being played by reviewers. Albeit you would usually only bother reviewing something:

    1) You're interested in, it's worth reviewing best of the best and best of the rest.

    2) You're by definition part-enthusiast so you'll review looking for the positives. For sure critics job is to cut the cr@p, separate the wheat from the chaff etc, but it's still a fine balance to review every angle.

    Hence:-

    Metacritic data is very powerful indicator of how a game is really going down with people if enough votes and in comparison to other popular games/films. The addition of top critics vs users summary with score and choice quotes is also v useful. But not always definitive. So various different measures produce the best "data" to conclude a decision/verdict.

    MMORPG.com to implement some similar feature or suite of features of users, top critics and "around the internet" for review data on mmorpgs and more. This in addition to the articles which are interesting or a version of X's verdict is in contrast to Y's impression amongst our own staff.

  • nikoliathnikoliath Member UncommonPosts: 1,154

    Originally posted by palulalula

    Nice to see that you have all almost same opinion about this:)

    what did you expect from this lot? Despite the large number of resident anti-mmorpgers here this site is a pro mmorpg fansite. People who enjoy the genre, enjoy writing and have their feet on the GROUND contribute to this site.

     

    Simply because they don't spew the anti-mmo propaganda we see on a daily basis from the same handful of faces and don't see every new release as a "fail lol" because it didn't contain every feature known to the genre and every feature that has yet to be added to the genre, isn't complertely unscripted, open ended and a substitute for real life, doesn't make them shills.

     

    News, features etc bring traffic which pays the bills.

  • SkuzSkuz Member UncommonPosts: 1,018

    Alas!

    Tis the charge of the Tin-Foil Hat Brigade!

  • laokokolaokoko Member UncommonPosts: 2,004

    Originally posted by palulalula

    I  don't believe anymore any review about any game what is published on the web. Just look reviews on mmorpg.com about any big mmo title and you will see in most of the reviews only good things. AOC is super awesome, WAR is fantastic, WOW is forever, SWTOR is amazing, GW2 is best what is created by human hand. What you think? Do money paid by big companies affect credibilities of some major gaming websites? Maybe i got banned after this but who cares :)

    Those games are awson.  What else is better? AAA sandbox game that dont' exist? or old games that no one play anymore?

    Besides, dont' take reviews too seriously.

    by the way I was checking AOC review.  the 1-20 review is 7.9, there are 2 other which is 6, expansion 8.5.  anyway there are bad reveiw too.

    And if you care that much to call all those games sucks, you can submit a review yourself to mmorpg.com. 

  • jazz.bejazz.be Member UncommonPosts: 962

    You have to learn to read reviews.

    Examples:

    This game is great - IGNORE

    The combat is smooth - IGNORE

    There is no targetting - ACCEPT

    The map is huge - IGNORE

    The map contains 15 subzones - ACCEPT

    See, try to only take objective information and ignore all subjective information.

  • SaintPhilipSaintPhilip Member Posts: 713

    Yes.

    Also in B4 deleted thread.

  • superussuperus Member Posts: 94

    Uh ya it's kind of obvious..

    Now calm down and watch another lame advertising stream with the blue haired lady.

  • HorrorScopeHorrorScope Member UncommonPosts: 599

    Agree with OP 100%. All have had big issues and you NEVER hear about them in any review anymore. There is a major reason for this and it does no service at all to those cosumning it. I don't even read their stuff anymore, look for Joe Q, sure he might be a little to negative, but you still can walk away knowing some issues and truths.

  • sonicbrewsonicbrew Member UncommonPosts: 515

    mmorpg.com is not the same place it used to be and has changed drastically for the worse but it certainly caters to a new gaming crowd....

    “Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back in the same box.” ~ Italian proverb   

      

  • GolelornGolelorn Member RarePosts: 1,395

    Two "recent" things have made me question this site's integrity. 

    1) The F2P garbage blog they used to do to try and convince us these asian f2p garbage clones were fun and innovative. 

    2) The incredible amount of hype and news story that SWTOR gets. Pokket is doing a live raid stream? Are you serious? People can barely stay awake when they are actually raiding. Who is going to stay awake to watch someone else raid?

    A bunch of teenagers and old creepy men. 

     

    Head-scratchers.

  • stragen001stragen001 Member UncommonPosts: 1,720

    Originally posted by Golelorn

    A bunch of teenagers and old creepy men. 

    This sites target demographic! ;)

    Cluck Cluck, Gibber Gibber, My Old Mans A Mushroom

  • InterestingInteresting Member UncommonPosts: 972

    It went downhill back when Guild Wars started to get covered as a MMORPG. Then instanced games became being covered as MMORPGs and the whole massivelly required scope of time and effort, territory, number of players, content variety got reduced to "if the characters are stored on the servers, and people can chat with each other online under the most fragile graphic interface, then its an MMORPG". So they basically concocted themselfs an excuse to cover what was not mmorpg and not in the best interest of mmorpg players, while trying to argue their integrity. 

    Everytime the standards got lowered, they didnt took a stand. The monetization would get more and more unethical and they would take it and the companies and publishers would go further and further. I watched with perplexity the abuses that were commited with the genre and every time the community would raise its voice, we would get silenced. One week later we would see articles praising the "inovations" raining on this site.

    The only thing they had was that they started the race first and had already built a community and google ranks. I judge them guilty of alienating the new comers, manipulating and changing the concepts of what mmorpg originally was and affecting the ethics of our cyber culture. What was originally considered wrong, here was pushed as "acceptable". It started with little abuses such as vip, gold and premium memberships being "good ideas" and now we ended up with games being designed like cassinos and there wasnt a single article saying a word to stop this when they had the power to influence the masses and stopped it. They basically watched it happen, as long as they could keep their lead and proffit from whatever blob emerged.

    They lost their integrity when they started to enlarge and twist the concept of MMORPG itself so that they could get $ from the publishers of those popular games.

    The last nail was when it started to push the RMT agenda half a decade ago.

    In the last few years in the games list we started to see all kinds text based browser room based flash fps online games as MMORPGs, as long as it has some kind of cash shop and potential to pay for the advertisement. They no longer try to defend or hide it anymore, and they made an example for the other gaming communities. Its very hard to find a gaming community with integrity, but the damage has already been done. Now it doesnt matter anymore. Weve lost the war.

    There are some of us who know the dark history of how it went downhill and who were there and did nothing and we will never forget.

  • laokokolaokoko Member UncommonPosts: 2,004

    If you are so sick of the review, you can post your own review and give it 1/10(like someone is doing already).

    When I click on the review page, I get the user review on the same page as the mmorpg.com review.  Some one gave swtor 1/10.  so Shrug.

    There are also 2 mmorpg.com review which gave AoC 6/10.  It's really subjective and you could have people who get funding from the game publisher to put good review for them.  That's all I can say. 

    I don't know why people take the review so serious though.

  • SlampigSlampig Member UncommonPosts: 2,342

    Originally posted by Voiidiin

    I think gaming websites that offer reviews and pre-views of video games have lost there objectivity due to publisher pressures and threats.

    Its rather evident when you compare the glowing reviews that games are given constantly now, and then the complete opposite from the average player reviews.

     

    One caveat to this, the hype for Guild Wars 2, for some reason people have taken the recent deluge of information about GW2 and its positive views as a form of hype. I am not sure people are looking at this correctly. This is information most of it in video form, and from that information we the player have had the chance to see how well the game is coming along. Contrast this with how SWTOR was before release, CGi movies, boiler-plate information sent to media outlets from the developers. Really not alot of pre-launch information was allowed to get out.

     

    Anyhow, if i could find someone who reviews games based on how the game actually plays not on how much crap they get from a publisher/developer, then i would pay alot more attention to that site/reviewer.

    The same could be said for people that fall in step from watching videos...

    That Guild Wars 2 login screen knocked up my wife. Must be the second coming!

  • Coltaine00Coltaine00 Member Posts: 52

    Originally posted by Zippy

     

    1.  The people that write for mainstream sites like MMORPG.COM TTH and so on do not play MMOS except in the most casual of sense.  They write their reviews on playing level 1-6.  They play 30 minutes to 2 hours and thats it.  They have no idea how to play a MMO except in the most basic sense and they almost never play endgame.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Hlv5uEgEL1E

    Watch this video and you will see how true this is.  While I really do like how MMORPG took the time to make this video and Garrett is very enthusiatic about the video, it is quite apparent that Garrett does not have a lot of experience playing MMORPGs (especially PvP) at a very high level.

    There are tons of capable people who use this forum every day - plenty of whom are PvPers, they should be enlisted to help with the review of this content.  While there are a lot of quality videos out there, my concern with this video in particular, it was very difficult to get a feeling of how "competitive PvP" actually was in the beta.

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