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EA's Dungeon Keeper Ratings Below a 5 Go To Email Black Hole 367

fplatten writes "I would definitely call this unethical manipulation of the ratings system: the Worst Company in America, EA is routing all ratings made in game of 1 to 4 stars as an email that is sent to EA, but all 5 star ratings are routed to the Google Play store, where its rating is currently 4.3 out of 5."
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EA's Dungeon Keeper Ratings Below a 5 Go To Email Black Hole

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  • by znanue ( 2782675 ) on Saturday February 08, 2014 @10:22PM (#46199913)
    I hear it's going to be called "Dungeon Keeper Beta".
  • by Chad Smith ( 3448823 ) on Saturday February 08, 2014 @10:25PM (#46199925)
    Instead of a black hole you get routed to 'WE HEAR YOU We did tell you we wanted feedback. Here's our response.' http://meta.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
    • by techno-vampire ( 666512 ) on Saturday February 08, 2014 @11:45PM (#46200237) Homepage
      Yes. Clearly their attitude is, "We wanted feedback. We hear you, but we don't care. We're going to make Slashdot beta the only interface whether anybody likes it or not." And, the day that happens is the day I stop following Slashdot.
  • Fraud? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DoofusOfDeath ( 636671 ) on Saturday February 08, 2014 @10:30PM (#46199949)

    Is this not criminal misrepresentation of their product?

    • Re:Fraud? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by DoofusOfDeath ( 636671 ) on Saturday February 08, 2014 @10:31PM (#46199955)

      Actually, since EA is publicly traded, couldn't this count as a material misrepresentation to the stock market?

      • Re:Fraud? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Mitreya ( 579078 ) <mitreya AT gmail DOT com> on Saturday February 08, 2014 @11:14PM (#46200125)

        Actually, since EA is publicly traded, couldn't this count as a material misrepresentation to the stock market?

        Well, it is still possible to leave a lower rating (hence the average is below 5), you just need to edit the initial 5-star rating. So I imagine they have a defense even if someone tries to pursue that issue

        Why can the rating be hijacked, anyway? I am surprised it took so long for someone entrepreneurial to notice that bad ratings can be intercepted to skew the results.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

          I installed the game, rated it 1 star with a note about how much of a rip-off the in-game wallet raping is, the uninstalled it. EA is not the only one that can abuse the rating system.

  • They all scratch & fight from being scared of what they don't understand just before they accept death as the only option.
  • by Sable Drakon ( 831800 ) on Saturday February 08, 2014 @10:54PM (#46200049)
    Never rate an app from within the app itself. We all know it's super convienent, but at the same time it's subject to this kind of trickery.
    • Never rate an app from within the app itself. We all know it's super convienent, but at the same time it's subject to this kind of trickery.

      Never mind that it doesn't actually *do* anything. You can only rate apps from Google Play itself, the star rating in EA is a *separate* star rating system, that happens to forward you to Google Play (to rate again) if you clicked 5 stars.

      It's sneaky and shit, but not actually a security issue in Play ratings.

  • I'm hardly surprised that EA is doing something mendacious and evil; but it's a trifle gutsy to overtly game Google's rating system. Google is a company whose entire value consists of the ability to construct ranked lists well enough that users will endure ads to receive those lists. It may or may not be a safe assumption that they are desperate enough for EA's shovelware mobile ports to let this sort of manipulation go unanswered.
    • It's all the same (Score:5, Insightful)

      by stoploss ( 2842505 ) on Saturday February 08, 2014 @11:43PM (#46200231)

      I'm hardly surprised that EA is doing something mendacious and evil; but it's a trifle gutsy to overtly game Google's rating system.

      Meh, one good coercive scam deserves another. I just checked my Google Play app and attempted to rate an app (never had tried before). Lo and behold, rating apps requires Google Plus and all ratings will be linked to one's public profile.

      No thanks. EA and Google deserve each other.

      Oh, and Dice belongs with them for their plans to destroy this community^Waudience.

      • Oh, I'm hardly crying for poor, poor, little Google (and every time they start shoving Google Plus into one of their services that I formerly liked, that's one less reason to even put up with them), it just strikes me that pulling out your slimey-SEO act might not be the wisest of actions when facing a company that has a more or less existential dislike of such things.
        • Every site on the internet somehow spawned a series of like-tweet-plus1 buttons, and it's becoming impossible to use even the most basic services without an account now. Many blogs and news sites don't allow comments without some sort of social account. It go so annoying I ended up renting a VM just so I could have somewhere uncontaminated to run my own email, website and personal filelocker.

          • As best I can tell, shitty little 'social' share/upvote/whatever buttons at the bottom of web pages are to this decade what toolbars at the top of webpages were to the '90s. Only more tightly integrated with the sites they've metastasized onto.
      • by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Sunday February 09, 2014 @11:00AM (#46202855) Journal

        Allowing anonymous ratings results in rating stuffing. Requiring that an identity be associated with the rating doesn't completely prevent it, of course, but it does reduce it dramatically, especially if the identity in question has a social network, because it makes creating the backstory to substantiate the rating harder.

        The social network also facilitates allowing people to easily discover what their friends and acquaintances think of apps, which often provides more information than aggregated ratings by strangers, resulting in a better service.

        I'm not saying that you should like it, or agree with it, or change your mind about using it. Just explaining the rationale.

        It's related to the reason that so many news sites' comment pages are requiring an identity linkage. Anonymity encourages garbage comments, and requiring people to put their name on what they write makes most of them more thoughtful. Of course this also has the effect of silencing people who have reason to fear that their on-line comments may have negative real-world consequences for them.

        There is no perfect solution, but in many contexts requiring an identity for participation seems to improve quality enough that on balance it's a good idea, IMO.

  • by TheSHAD0W ( 258774 ) on Saturday February 08, 2014 @11:33PM (#46200189) Homepage

    I'm sure Google keeps the referrer information for URLs that hit the Play store. Just throw out all the ratings that come through the game.

  • Oddly, people want Google to do something about this. Unfortunately, some forget that Google gets a percentage of in-app purchases as well, so as long as the app is on the front page of the store and highly rated and can possibly get more eyes into the app being told to "Buy! Spend!", the more likely Google is to reap benefit from it.

    • by SuricouRaven ( 1897204 ) on Sunday February 09, 2014 @06:01AM (#46201575)

      Short term, yes. But if EA gets away with this, other developers are sure to follow, and the loss of an effective ratings would seriously hurt the play store's reputation - pontentially easily doing enough financial damage in lost business to offset whatever they make from this one game.

  • Why when I click to a sub thread, do I get font so tiny I can't read it without action (control +) to make it legible? This messing around with me is getting old. Like, I used to go to Digg as often as I went to slashdot, now I haven't been there in months. Is this place going to be like them, and die because they have some wild idea that won't fly?
  • by ljw1004 ( 764174 ) on Sunday February 09, 2014 @02:00AM (#46200721)

    I see this all the time from service industries, sellers on Amazon marketplace, conference speakers...

    "If you think we did well, please write a positive review. If you think we did poorly, please let us know so we can improve our service."

    It seems ubiquitous. I've always thought it slimy.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 09, 2014 @02:32AM (#46200855)

    I have seen the Beta a few days ago just to see what the protect was about, if that goes live, Slashdot is dead.

    I have been on here since the 1990's, the comments is the main thing that makes this place worth coming to. Even the political stuff. They give great information on the topic even finding things the original articles had wrong or just left out and gives virtually every side of a story. One of the few sites where you can so a political story and get both the left and right views of it with both extremist sides getting called out for that crap and the misconceptions on both sides corrected and the trolls flat out just modded out. Had times where I would read a 10 minute article and then over 2 hours of comments giving more information on it and flat out picking it apart in every possible way.

    With beta, the comments section is marginalized and hard to really keep organized and all the added stuff eat up way too much space. The people who made it have no clue what the appeal of this site is and their setup will destroy that. If I wanted what they are pushing, I would got to CNET news. If it goes live, slashdot is dead and we will have to find a new place and it will be hard to find one as good as this one was.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 09, 2014 @04:20AM (#46201241)

    http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2451671,00.asp

    such BS...

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