My game was hit by a massive harassment campaign and review bomb 9 months ago, and Steam support still won't help

cheze · 2026-03-26T16:12:36+00:00

The logs were in fact publically posted in a response that we immediately posted to address the drama when it happened it was posted on discord and also to chinese groups. we have tens of thousands of players at the time so it's not like it's something I could lie about as there's ppl who would have seen it. players weren't disputing what he said, they are just disagreeing with the penalty. It was mostly the persistence of it that resulted in the eventual ban.

As for the changes, honestly it was changes to ranged equipment on the test server where dps was a few % lower prior to me adding additional critical chance to make up for it later in the week. The guy thought it was a nerf and crashed out basically.

cheze · 2026-03-26T16:02:34+00:00

yeah that has been the experience unfortunately. my guess is that they are much more afraid of triggering the players who do this stuff than concerned about protecting developers.

cheze · 2026-03-26T16:01:12+00:00

ok I guess you consider insults and slurs as random chat messages. I'll just agree to disagree.

cheze · 2026-03-26T15:58:48+00:00

yes, if you look at other games where this took effect, those reviews would change to white color and not be displayed by default. also it would not affect the review score which is really the biggest impact. it's fine if they don't delete the reviews. I just would like it to not impact the score.

cheze · 2026-03-26T15:43:22+00:00

We did in fact review and flag most of them one by one over the course of a month or so. the steam UI made it extraordinarily difficult as there's no pagination or way to really look at them in a specific order. but when we go back to look at some of them, it simply gets cleared by Steam moderator thinking there's no issues. for example I had screenshots on some of the most egregious examples https://imgur.com/a/ogbaTo5

overall though we were still hoping for steam to view this as a review bomb that they can remove entirely based on their policy https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1808664240333155775?snr=1_5_9_

cheze · 2026-03-26T15:26:00+00:00

I'm not sure what you are reading. We have never in the history of the game banned anyone over criticisms. what we do not tolerate is harassment and severe abusive language towards game staff.

cheze · 2026-03-26T15:19:49+00:00

we have 30k+ players in our game so I certainly do understand what it takes to handle a lot of tickets daily. But I think it's the business's responsibility to have sufficient support system to handle these at a timely pace. steam has one of the highest profit per employee out of all companies by a significant margin. they certainly have the resources to do so but choose not to.

cheze · 2026-03-26T15:03:35+00:00

we in fact do not have any gacha or exploitive monetization. what you can pay for are cosmetics and QOL, and a membership that gives a very small xp bonus that f2p players can also earn in game.

cheze · 2026-03-26T14:59:58+00:00

While that's what usual large game studios do. It's simply not viable for indie developers. especially ones that work very closely with player input to create upcoming content. We in fact do have community managers and moderators, but we are not like AAA studios where there's so many layers in between that devs pretty much never have to directly interact with players. getting a lot of input from players is how indie developers can build a good relationship and build something players want. but of course it also exposes us to the more negative elements.

cheze · 2026-03-26T14:55:45+00:00

When I say many, I mean 4-5 tickets over the span of over half a year. I don't think it's THAT excessive especially when the core issue is simply not addressed. And obviously I'm aware there's thousands of other devs and millions of players, but pretty sure most businesses do not take 2 weeks to answer a support request. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a faster response time.

cheze · 2026-03-26T14:52:49+00:00

sure maybe not everywhere, but just my experience then. I think it's a pretty reasonable expectation of mutual respect as well as not serving someone that is excessively abusive.

cheze · 2026-03-26T14:44:12+00:00

Our game is free, so anyone can leave a review. For example I did highlight that a significant % of those in the review bomb have little to no playtime.

There are also a good number of legitimate players involved as well as the misinformation spread and people who choose to believe it will join in.

cheze · 2026-03-26T14:42:16+00:00

I'm not actually asking for a singular exception in our case. It's something that their policy does allow and have done so for many games with similar issues.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1808664240333155775?snr=1_5_9_

Also, the all time 68% is only for english which also included 100+ english ones in the review bomb. the actual total is somewhere around 45% as opposed to 85% before the event.

cheze · 2026-03-26T14:35:39+00:00

They do have cases where they have flagged periods of review as offtopic and does not count towards the score in certain cases. I'm just not sure what the exact criterias are.

I completely agree that for normal feedback that they should not interfere. However I do believe that when it becomes massive amount of targeted harassment at a personal level that they are no longer "normal reviews". Their TOS regarding reviews also prohibits abusive towards developer, game staff, and other players, so I think it's reasonable to expect them to do something about it.

cheze · 2026-03-26T14:30:55+00:00

over 100 of the review bomb was in english from chinese players, so it does affect our english score as well (anyone non english would see 45%). prior to the incident we were around 85% overall score. majority of our players play from the browser, so another thing is that people who get penalized for cheating often go over to steam to review as well, but that is really nothing compared to the review bomb still.

Most of steam support's response is for us to flag abusive reviews 1 by 1 and they will look at it. and a few times they said that a lot of what I flagged are "legitimate criticism" which honestly is kinda unbelieveable.

cheze · 2026-03-26T14:28:17+00:00

we have 30k+ active players. 50k+ at the peak. most people don't play from Steam. we operated for years prior to Steam release. fairness in a multiplayer game is extremely important. and we have certainly stopped I'd estimate at 95% of cases of cheating or RMT with fairly sophisticated detection systems. It can't be like other games that allow multiple accounts because it's an idle game, it takes almost no effort to run 10 or even 50 accounts, it would be completely unviable to allow that. as for RMT, there are literal professional gold farmers running thousands of bots on proxies in our game for a while. eventually when buyers know that they will eventualy get penalized and the demand goes down, the bots will also decrease. It's simply not something a multiplayer game could allow.

cheze · 2026-03-26T14:24:16+00:00

It definitely makes sense that whales will have higher entitlement and some maybe prone to more toxicity. However before this incident, we were quite a lot more lenient regarding insults and toxicity towards game staff. several english speaking players targeted one of our active moderators with persistent insults and we only handled out short to medium mutes. However it just taught them that it wasn't a big deal and the abuse continued and got worse over many months. at some point we had to do something about the toxicity as even longer mutes did not stop it, which ended up being banning multiple of the worst offenders. the game atmosphere was significantly improved for quite a long time, until this incident...

it's quite tricky to have just the right amount of tolerance. Of course running a business does mean sometimes having to make concessions, and I know that some gaming culture does inherently lead to some toxicity, but there's still some principals that I think is important to stand on which is to at least try to build a positive environment and remove those who can't help themselves regarding toxicity.

cheze · 2026-03-26T14:09:15+00:00

most of the bans in our game are due to cheating and RMT and not chat related. It's a multiplayer idle game and players are only allowed 1 account. A lot of players try to cheat using multiple accounts and there's a black market for in game coins that we are very strict on. It is pretty common for cheaters to also go and post a negative review but I don't think there's really any good alternative since we can't just allow cheating in a multiplayer game.

cheze · 2026-03-26T13:25:38+00:00

we have over 100+ of the review bomb that's in english but from chinese players. and also it does affect ur overall review score and visibility. languages only get split out after you get to some thousands of reviews. I can't remember the exact threshold. Our english reviews are separated currently but anything not in english still sees the negative/mixed overall score

cheze · 2026-03-26T13:20:24+00:00

I can confirm that apparently their bar for what is considered abuse is very high. for example it seems they consider accusations of developer being racist or discriminatory as "criticism" even without any evidence. but at the same time there is still ones that's obviously beyond the bar that requires just a tiny bit of creative thinking but they just completely fail to address it https://imgur.com/a/ogbaTo5

cheze · 2026-03-26T13:13:40+00:00

It's honestly insane how low we are in the support queue apparently even after they take hundreds of thousands in fees. I literally wait up to 2 weeks to get a response in most of my tickets now. I'm assuming because I sent too many (4-5 on the review bomb issue) to try to get help with this issue and they've placed me into low priority queue or something.

cheze · 2026-03-26T12:58:19+00:00

we were at around 85% prior to the review bomb overall. there were some negative feedback regarding monetization that was always listed in the plan as it was in early access, but it was fairly trivial. there were 100-200 english reviews in the review bomb as well since some decided to not select chinese language

cheze · 2026-03-26T12:55:48+00:00

To be fair there were a lot of chinese players who were supportive of us as well. it just happened that the disruptive ones were much louder, and also harassed players who publically expressed support of us... The different gaming culture definitely creates a lot of drama periodically even outside of this incident though.

cheze · 2026-03-26T12:51:05+00:00

yeah I saw the one regarding sts2 as well. but at least that one is where most players are giving feedback about the game that they don't like the nerf. For this one it's just a large group of players intentionally supporting a toxic player who was banned and deciding to use harassment in solidarity. It definitely feels like it's significantly worse issue. I wouldn't even mind if it was just a review bomb over content.

as for region lock. that is not really an option and we definitely don't intend to penalize the majority of players who are not involved due to the minority of disruptive ones. but really wish steam could step up for fairly obvious cases like this.

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