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."
Re:Fraud? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, since EA is publicly traded, couldn't this count as a material misrepresentation to the stock market?
Re:Works for Slashdot as well... (Score:2, Interesting)
I've noticed that Slashdot admins have been using their unlimited mod points to deep-six anti-Beta posts into moderation oblivion.
Thank god.
Now maybe we can talk about something besides the Beta.
Re:Works for Slashdot as well... (Score:2, Interesting)
While I'd long suspected that Slashdot comments were becoming the community for the irretrievably disgruntled to vote up each other's misanthropy, it's a bit anticlimactic that the community's last and most vehement rant is not about privacy, nor those old favourites "the evils of proprietary software", "the terrible patent system", or "if Microsoft did something today, it must be wrong", but the much more disappointing "how dare the website owners redesign their UI".
And so they marched on Washington, pickets waved in the air, and cries of anger filling the wind, not at the government's policies, nor at its governance of the economy, nor at its honesty or care for the most vulnerable, but at the inferior design of its latest brochure.
Re:Fraud? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: Works for Slashdot as well... (Score:3, Interesting)
And if you bother to look at the mod points awarded you will see many many -1 levels (much more than normal) and even the GP modded to 0 as off topic
The point is that the topic of this article is corporate overlords HIDING negative comments about their products
Oh the fricking ever-loving irony of it all, a story about some despotic game maker shuttering off negative comments about their products being displayed on a nerd=site where all negative comments about the quality of the site are hidden away as -1 or off topic
Wouldn't it be hilarious if the dice-lords of slashbetahell are making certain that their advertising customers never make low mods visible, because it is all noise...
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Works for Slashdot as well... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Works for Slashdot as well... (Score:2, Interesting)
I am not OP, but I since i think i am part of that audience.
Sure i don't have a 3 digit ID like you, I am fairly recent user, I comment rarely, my comments are barely interesting, but guess what? people like me are the vast majority of the users, most of them don't even have an account. I am happy that slashdot is trying to stay relevant and there are people like me still joining and visiting the site and it has not (yet) become a site of old men complaining about the good ol'days.
if the community is thinking that slashdot can continue being a viable new site by catering to links browsing sys admins from the 90's it is unrealistic.
It is not like dice is changing a winning formula, readership is dwindling, they have invested a lot of money, are they supposed to just sit and watch it all collapse? If you really want to make a difference and keep slashdot classic, offer to pay for it. if enough active community members do, they will keep it. Advertisement based business models need certain critical mass, slashdot is fast losing it.
Don't want to pay big bad DH anything? build your own news aggregator, there is enough unhappy with the beta people with serious talent and plenty of time on hands in this site. Do something useful and quit bitching about.
P.S Beta IS shitty, broken, very JS heavy etc etc,However #fuckbeta doesn't help either, giving constructive feedback is more meaningful? Dice may not listen/execute it, but at least it has better chance of working than #fuckbeta
Re:Works for Slashdot as well... (Score:5, Interesting)
guys seriously I think beta is stupid... but all the anti Beta posts are ruining this site more then that is.
Um, you are aware that disruption is the point of picketing, right? The idea is to get not just the slashdot editors to notice, but the upper management who may be unaware of what's going on.
Disrupting the forums enough that it awakens those with power to actually make decisions is necessary to save slashdot.
If slashdot feeds us non-committed platitudes and corpspeak svada, chances are they do the same upwards too.
Hopefully some paying advertisers will notice soon, and make a phone call. It's not in their interest to sponsor a forum full of unhappy people, whether they're unhappy with DICE or unhappy with the protests.
I hope it won't take too long before someone is forced to swallow a camel and finally admit that they messed up. Then we can move on, get a new usable design made from scratch, and have a thriving community of posters.
But I'd rather see a few days of picketed topics now than to see Slashdot die within a few months. All your guys postings are worth a lot more to me than rational discussions right now and a dead site down the road.
So forgive us for disrupting your comment reading right now. If you can think of any other way to get the top brass to see that the site is broken, and that an overwhelming majority of those who make people come to visit the site won't accept the beta, even with band-aids on it, please let us know. Using the "appropriate" channels have gotten us exactly nowhere, they've ignored feedback for four months.
Hate the beta protests but.... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
No joke. Total biscuit gives you a quick look in this video.
http://youtu.be/6DJmS7prcmE?t=... [youtu.be]
If this is the future of gaming according to EA they can shove it up their arse.
Re:Works for Slashdot as well... (Score:2, Interesting)
Ironically, you're destroying /. when you're trying to save it this way.
The point of the distruption is to bring awarness and that has clearly been accomplished. You're continuing distruption however is fueled by a different motive which is to control /. and make /. do what you want them to do. That's a violation of property rights and I'm not going to support it. Let me let you in on a little secret. It's not you're fucking Slashdot! Trying to control them won't work and will cause more harm than good.
Here's a superior way to accomplish what you want. Once you've communicated your displeasure and have gotten confirmation from the owners that they understand your concerns, simply wait to see what happens. If the owners decide to not please their audience then they'll have a natural consequence of losing that audience and revenue. It will also create void for someone else to fill with perhaps a better site than the "perfect" classic /.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
I tried (Score:4, Interesting)
They, of course, did not change, and so I, of course, did not subscribe.
FWIW, my main point/suggestion was:
There is, at present, zero value in subscribing. Slashdot should take a lesson from Ars Technica -- they let you download the entire article, in PDF format, if you are a subscriber. I suggested Slashdot allow subscribers to load an entire comment thread on a single page (to get rid of the annoying duplicate post bug that has been around for more years than I have fingers). They didn't go for it.
So here we are today, with Slashdot providing nothing of value to subscribers, and losing money. Color me shocked.
Boycott begins tomorrow, for at least a week.
Re:Works for Slashdot as well... (Score:5, Interesting)
Ironically, you're destroying /. when you're trying to save it this way.
The point of the distruption is to bring awarness and that has clearly been accomplished. You're continuing distruption however is fueled by a different motive which is to control /. and make /. do what you want them to do. That's a violation of property rights and I'm not going to support it. Let me let you in on a little secret. It's not you're fucking Slashdot! Trying to control them won't work and will cause more harm than good.
Don't ascribe me motifs. You're dead wrong in several respects.
1: Awareness has not been accomplished. There is no indication that the awareness has reached farther than the slashdot editors and the design team. If you have other information, please point to it. The point was not to make visitors aware, but tot make the stink big enough that it would reach those with the ability to cut the crap and make decisions.
2: I have no wish to control slashdot. I have a wish for slashdot to stop the headlong rush towards a cliff that the users won't follow them over. I don't want them to do a Digg.
Slashdot is not too big to fail.
I would welcome changes, but not changes that will drive away a majority of the posters. I do not believe that slashdot could survive that.
When a toddler walks towards a busy road you yell to stop it. If it continues walking because it's obstinate and you're not its mommy, you continue yelling to get the attention of someone in the position to intervene.
Those that advocate doing nothing and please stop shouting that will are the ones thinking only of themselves. I will not stand idle and watch with you.
It is not too late to save the site, but it won't happen through hope.
Because I want to see lots and lots of posts and discussions here over the next fifteen years. Including yours, and others on my foe and freak lists. Slashdot is too important to be allowed Death By Redesign.
The number of sites that died, or are just a shadow of what they were, are plenty. Yahoo Video is another one. It was lead by the same man who now leads technology for Dice Holdings. The vision is strong in that one.
Re:Works for Slashdot as well... (Score:5, Interesting)
Meanwhile in RealityWorld:
Exec: Wow, those neckbeards really hate change. It's a shame. That site is losing money already, and they're trying to destroy any chance to revitalize it. Guess we should just shut it down instead. Alright boys, let's auction the servers.
That might not be a bad alternative to running the site over a cliff. It could be sold to the users, like WELL.
I still hope for reason to prevail, but if not, I would welcome a user-owned slashdot, and contribute my share.