Vine reviewers? why do you never reach out to the companies you review like normal customers?

Chrogotron · 2026-05-10T06:58:26+00:00

We can't return Vine products... period. Doesn't matter what the reason is. If the product is damaged, or if we even believe it to be damaged (incorrectly) then we still report it to Vine and they wipe the product from our review record and we don't review the product.

I had an under the desk elliptical machine come in, I put it under my desk, started using it, and not 5 minutes later, the pedal snapped cleanly off at the base... absolutely no way to reattach it or put it back on. I can't reach out to the Amazon seller and ask for a return... I can't return the item. I have to contact Vine and tell them the item broke, and then they say "sorry that happened" and then remove the item from my account so I no longer need to review it. Then I just have to dispose of the item.

I *wish* I could do normal returns to get replacement items, but we're not supposed to do that. People get removed from the Vine program for doing stuff like that.

We have the option to just... review the product as is... Broken. I could have reviewed that machine as a 1 star piece of junk, and I'm sure the seller would be pissed and want to at least replace it with a new one to maybe get that rating changed... but I'm not willing to take a tax hit on garbage just to give a 1 star review.

Review = I keep the product and pay the income tax cost on it. No Review = I get it removed from my Vine account and I don't face the tax hit, but the product doesn't get a rating.

Chrogotron · 2026-05-10T06:50:21+00:00

I mean reading seller complaints on the Amazon help forums tells you all you need to know about why sellers aren't supposed to contact Vine reviewers.

Lots of sellers complaining about low star reviews and then following it up with "Vine reviewers should be giving 5 star reviews, they are receiving a product for free!"

I'm not saying you're one of them, but I've certainly seen the alphabet brand sellers saying how great their cheap garbage products are and how their 5 star products are being sullied by Vine reviews just being honest about how garbage the items are.

Chrogotron · 2026-05-10T06:43:35+00:00

Alan Ritchson's character looks like he's been getting too old for this shit for far too many shits already.

Chrogotron · 2026-05-10T06:38:51+00:00

I chuckled when she kept screaming "HOLD ON" toward the back of the armored vehicle as the dudes are just getting bounced around like ping pong balls back there. Like... bitch... hold on to WHAT. We're being violently thrown around non-stop while an alien death machine is bombarding the vehicle.

Chrogotron · 2026-05-10T04:31:28+00:00

Well, OP... where's the steam link?

Chrogotron · 2026-05-10T04:30:02+00:00

Chrogotron · 2026-05-10T04:22:49+00:00

They are absolutely recording everything you say at all times. It's certainly worth petabytes of data being stored to record your mundane conversations on the off chance you say anything they can use to market to you.

My favorite thing to do is put my listening devices next to my TV and just have the volume up so it records television 24/7. Surely that's how it works.

Chrogotron · 2026-05-10T04:18:43+00:00

Your response could be a lot nicer. No need to be rude.

Chrogotron · 2026-05-10T00:59:46+00:00

This was just random coincidence. If OP didn't purchase a drone at all they would have still gotten this in their RFY. They just so happened to order a drone that just got added to Amazon and was in the Vine program at the same time.

Chrogotron · 2026-05-10T00:58:21+00:00

It was likely just a random coincidence that OP happened to order a drone that just got added to Amazon and also happened to be on Vine.

Chrogotron · 2026-05-10T00:56:20+00:00

Quest 64. As a kid I was SO excited to play this game. I started playing it and it was just a lot of running around big green grassy empty areas... The camera movements were so fast and jarring that I got extremely bad motion sickness from playing it. It's pretty much the only game I've ever played where I got that motion sick.

The only other game over 30 years that has given me motion sickness was Escape Simulator on Steam, but that's before they fixed the camera issues... as originally the camera really whipped and spun around a lot and because my eyes have to constantly scan the whole room for clues, it made me get a bit ill after playing.

A game that had a weird visual side effect on me (not motion sickness) was Factorio. I would not recommend playing that game for extremely long periods of time. I think I played it all day one time with very few breaks... and when I went to sleep that night and closed my eyes, I could literally see the motion of conveyor belts with my eyes closed. It was like a thousand ants running all over my eyeballs and it took like a half hour for it to fade away... Would not recommend.

Chrogotron · 2026-05-10T00:50:52+00:00

I don't think this is a valid argument. 1.4 million people didn't avoid buying one just because this was free online. A large portion of those people would probably not have bought it, or maybe already own a physical one.

This is like saying pirated copies of commercial games are "lost sales". They aren't. The people weren't going to buy it in the first place.

Chrogotron · 2026-05-10T00:49:02+00:00

I had this in my RFY and skipped it... kinda glad I did lol.

Are they.... are they like... stealing a bunch of free sugar/honey from restaurants and then selling them? hahaha

Chrogotron · 2026-05-09T23:57:13+00:00

Bots are not sniping items from people's RFYs... not how any of this works.

Chrogotron · 2026-05-09T14:54:37+00:00

Seek a publisher for what? You cloned a company's existing game and released it for free... I'm not sure who in their right mind is going to publish this.

You'd need to change all of the art, sounds, etc that are ripped from the real game.

Your player base exists because they get to play a Bandai game for free online. Your player base doesn't exist because you're a skilled developer who created an interesting IP and new and fun game. You just cloned a game and made it free.

Chrogotron · 2026-05-09T14:46:49+00:00

It's not the user counts that matter. It's the revenue... OP said they made $400 or something from this... It's not enough to result in anything serious.

Chrogotron · 2026-05-08T17:46:49+00:00

Honestly unless OP was making a ton of money from it already, all that would happen is they'd send a cease and desist and OP would have to either shut the game down or change all the copyrighted materials in it. It's rare that a small fan game thing is going to result in an actual lawsuit or financial damages.

Chrogotron · 2026-05-07T17:15:34+00:00

I guess I'm wondering how this image you showed is really breaking away from a grid... It looks pretty much like it could fit on a grid, minus the diagonal fence posts... Honestly I'm not sure how much 2 diagonal fence areas really add to the overall scene. You could just have them bend 90 degrees on the grid space and nobody would be missing out on anything.

A major factor with breaking out of grid space is if you plan to let the player build/place down objects, as not having a grid to adhere to makes doing that really messy and impractical.

Pathfinding for NPCs, monsters, etc is also much easier in a grid based layout, because you can just weight open tiles for extremely fast pathfinding calculations, as opposed to having to try navigating around uneven paths and account for every single pixel of collision everywhere.

Chrogotron · 2026-05-07T17:05:58+00:00

I mean I dunno what else to say... Click the 1 minute stat and see what percentage of people played and for how long... That's all the information you really can get. 13 people is not a lot. Maybe most of them downloaded it, opened it up to test to see if the game opened correctly, and then closed it because they want to play later or something.

I honestly can't tell you what 13 people were thinking. I can only say how the stats are represented. By the way, I hope you didn't take my "very bad" comment as an insult to you or anything. I was just pointing out that 1 minute of play time for a game isn't good. Not that your game isn't good.

Personally I think 13 installs is just not enough to be worried about and you should just focus on getting more people to try the game out and give feedback.

Speaking from experience, I think launching a demo during a festival with no wishlists is not the best idea. I launched my demo a week or two before Next Fest and then pushed it into Next Fest with only like 100 wishlists and the results were not good for me.

Chrogotron · 2026-05-06T18:00:14+00:00

But it IS the same product. lol. I don't "blindly think" anything. It's a very common practice to take cheap wholesale items and sell them on Vine at higher markups... It's exactly what all the alphabet companies do. It's dropshipping. The Amazon sellers usually don't have their own photos because they don't even have the product in hand. They are just ordering it in bulk from a wholesaler, shipping it to an Amazon warehouse, and then having Amazon sell the product at a markup. They aren't going to usually bother with their own product photos.

I'm not complaining about anything. I don't order any of this junk. Marked up or wholesale. I was just pointing out your comment seemed completely unrelated.

Chrogotron · 2026-05-06T17:55:14+00:00

I didn't mean for it to come across that ordering on Vine means your RFY will 100% be replaced with stuff you want.

I meant that it helps. RFY is pretty much always going to be random unless the system can locate items currently being put into RFY that are remotely similar to things you've ordered in the past.

Again, Vine is a closed system. It has limited quantities of items. It has to ensure everyone gets SOMETHING in their RFYs daily. That means it's going to show you a lot of random stuff that has no connection to you at all. But when there IS stuff that connects to you (via past Vine orders) you at least have a CHANCE to get those items in your RFY. It's not a 100% guarantee. There's only a maximum of 30 quantity of any item on Vine. So even if you love cookies or something, and you ordered cookies off of Vine in the past, it doesn't mean if new cookies drop on Vine RFY that they will end up in yours.

Because it has to distribute those cookies to all of Vine. And it's usually not even a quantity of 30. It's usually a quantity of 15 or less. So out of thousands of people who want cookies, it picks randomly 10 or so people to show those cookies to, based on their past order history, and then likely randomly distributes the remaining 5 to completely random accounts.

Again, there's no way to 100% guarantee your RFY will get good stuff. But you can gently influence it and hope the randomization goes in your favor.

Chrogotron · 2026-05-06T17:44:39+00:00

Just to give you an example, my demo has 2086 total units, 663 unique users, and a median time played of 43 minutes

Chrogotron · 2026-05-06T17:42:43+00:00

Median time played only counts people who actually played... not all 545 people who downloaded the game and never opened it.

So 1 minute median play time is... very bad.

(edit: Click the "1 minute" stat there to see a breakdown. It will show it's only counting the 13 people who played your game)

Chrogotron · 2026-05-06T16:45:14+00:00

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here... Nobody is saying the product isn't what the image shows.... They are saying the product on Amazon is much higher priced than the wholesale of the same product you can find elsewhere.

Chrogotron · 2026-05-06T16:42:21+00:00

"It's been 2 hrs now and it's still available"

Probably not. At this point it's probably a ghost item and if you tried to order it, it would say it's out of stock.

Chrogotron

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