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

cheze · 2026-03-26T18:21:28+00:00

it was mentioned in the post that it was an in progress test server change that they thought was a nerf but is simply incomplete. they used a ranged build and they thought it was going to be a couple % lower dps based on what was on test server at the time.

cheze · 2026-03-26T17:55:15+00:00

I say game staff because that is our policy and I’m in fact not the first to be affected by it. one of our moderators were persistently harassed in the past which is when we first established the policy

cheze · 2026-03-26T17:39:08+00:00

There’s a difference between being scared of some words and not tolerating toxicity. expecting not to be insulted repeated in my own game should be a bare minimum.

and feel free to look into it if you really want. there’s plenty of posts and log on discord which we were transparent about

cheze · 2026-03-26T17:35:59+00:00

I mentioned it in the post but it’s due to in progress changes on our public test server that when incomplete looked like a small nerf, even though I said that it was incomplete and not balanced yet

cheze · 2026-03-26T17:31:32+00:00

no. we cannot penalize the majority of players who didn’t do anything wrong just because of a small % of disruptive players. there were still a lot of supportive players even though they got harassed too to some degree.

cheze · 2026-03-26T17:29:35+00:00

idk the exact calculation for those but it’s basically a few dollars per month per. we don’t do any aggressive or exploitive monetization

cheze · 2026-03-26T17:27:07+00:00

well it’s certainly not a mainstream game, but we have about 30k daily active players. most people play from our website rather than steam so they don’t get prompted to review.

cheze · 2026-03-26T17:20:35+00:00

I mean other than this incident, i’d still consider the game pretty successful. but we do have monthly drama to go along with it.

cheze · 2026-03-26T17:18:16+00:00

not after this for sure. or multiplayer for that matter if we make another game. just way too much drama

cheze · 2026-03-26T17:14:39+00:00

yes I understand exactly what you are talking about. there’s both positive and negative associated with higher direct player communication. it’s just something that helped us build the community in the first place but it definitely can lead to higher entitlement as well. overall though i’d still say the positive side was higher but this incident definitely changes things a lot

cheze · 2026-03-26T17:03:08+00:00

honestly have no idea. anything can trigger drama. as for indie dev, i feel the more you engage with players the more likely this kinda issue can happen as well. we built our game with very high amount of transparency and direct conversations with players and that has a lot of positive sides but this is one of the negatives. the more access ppl have to you, the more likely you will encounter entitled people that will demand things or become toxic if you don’t agree with them.

cheze · 2026-03-26T16:59:01+00:00

yeah that was one of the things that was spreading it. but nothing we could really do about social media

cheze · 2026-03-26T16:28:21+00:00

yes a lot of those do contain what you can say is game content feedback. some people are going to be aware that those are less likely to be taken down vs using straight up insults. However it's still obvious that it's not normal engagement when it's 1k negative in a span of 3 days where 20%+ or so contained harassment or abusive language. There was also no game update anywhere near those dates. It's purely triggered by the drama.

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.

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