Anatomy of Abusive Early Access Practices:
* Advertise game using grandoise, yet vague speech that promises everything and delivers nothing.
* Show game that looks very visually appealing for a short time.
* Attract large amounts of interest.
* Greatly exceed Kickstarter goal.
* Get large amounts of media attention.
* Develop for a while.
* Recruit absurd numbers of video content creators and have them all promote the game a week before release.
* Game, which still looks visually appealing attracts many, who generally do not watch for THAT long.
* Game is released in Early Access. As a result of all the video makers, large numbers of people buy the game, mostly because their favorite streamer liked it.
* Most people leave after a few hours, and don't see the problem. Many leave positive reviews on the way out, you know "10/10 GoTY" "10 hours." *never comes back*.
* Those who do not start seeing the fatal flaw. The game only looks ok for a few hours. After that you realize you're out of unique content, you realize the mechanics are shallow and one dimensional, and the game is nothing like what it is described as.
* Knowing this is exactly what Early Access is for, you post well reasoned criticisms on the forums. They are ignored.
* After a few months of this and slow development in general, a patch is released in which nearly every feature is contentious in some way.
* One of these features is used as a strawman, claiming that it's the only problem with the game as a means of dismissing the other, stronger criticisms.
* Criticisms such as the lack of a meaningful, coherent design direction, the fact the game was nothing like what it advertised itself as, the community censorship, the mismarketing, the deliberate promotion of hostility and aggression in their community all of which started very shortly after.
* The one feature most people get caught on is partially retracted as a result of negative media attention.
* Unfortunately, that reinforced the strawman, as now all problems with the game are optional, going by their narrative (even though this is still not true). Every other problem still remains and now has a convient shield.
* After several more months of slow development, more delays, and complete lack of any meaningful changes from the game's launch state (meaningful change meaning things that actually change how the game works or expand on it in a meaningful way... superficially different classes and areas do not qualify) as well as more of the aforementioned shady behavior the developers married the cause they were courting - namely, that tedium = difficulty, and deliberately introduced a lot more, as well as further reenforcing the already dominant dynamics. So instead of making the game difficult, they merely made it slow, while still easy and the same as ever.
* Around the same time, they finally got tired of the negative reviews that had been dominant for half a year, as they realized that even with more frequent and steeper discounts people were not being fooled, and indeed sales mostly just resulted in the negative reviews getting thousands of recommended votes from prospective buyers who looked around first.
* This was really hurting them during the holiday sale, as at that time the page was 100% strong negative.
* So the developers had the subreddit for their game manipulate votes, and they, being the self selected aggressive advertising sorts they were went along with this. This resulted in 100+ negative reviews being buried very quickly and 20+ positives being escalated just as quickly. This all happened 12/27 - 12/29.
* Not everyone is a fool, and a Steam user pointed this out, did his research, showed his work and spelled out exactly what the developers were doing. Naturally, he was censored, but only after being sworn at and insulted by the "civil and respectful community", in the dev's own words. He's not the only victim, there were dozens in July/August, but it was a recent example of a non aggressive person being censored just because they were against the game.
* A few weeks later, the game finally "releases", if you could call its release state that. It gets literally 600+ reviews, almost all positive within 24 hours. Most of these are from accounts who only wrote one review, who have very low hour counts, who own absolutely zero games on Steam including this one, or are not positively reviewing the game so much as they are negatively reviewing critics. Often, there is some combination of these.
* Meanwhile, one negative review quickly achieves prominence by virtue of spelling out everything. And by quickly I mean 2,500+ votes in the same 24 hours.
* As you can probably imagine, the shills were very offended by that. As you can also probably imagine, the review was mine, and I blocked around 60 people for death threats, suicide requests, general personal attacks and trolling, and otherwise being incapable of reasoned debate. I also got a few hundred that were more positive about the warning.
* As I'm sure you can also probably imagine, the developers were not happy with me. They never are, when anything makes them look bad. In the minds of **Red Hook Studios**, the makers of **Darkest Dungeon** everyone wrong with this game is my fault, even the stuff I have no power over, no connection with, or no real say in.
* Cue their latest, most ultimate, and least deniable censorship antics.
http://i.imgur.com/0nx52oz.png
As if it were not enough the developers perma ban people from the forums simply for being critical of the game (dozens in July/August, me in September, several more in December and January) and never ever touch supporters no matter how much they cross the line, they are now blatantly and obviously censoring reviews!
It would absolutely explain the media silence though if this were bigger than them, and they damn sure aren't spending their 7 million dollars on bettering the game in any way...
