it's reminding of what I saw withthe marvel heroes launch and number of others thing where people are just plain nasty but they refuse to say any in helpful way it's just swear at the devs ore the people that public comunity manager and say your gonna sue or kill them , and the half the fan become divided and it really gets nasty. oh not mention people that didn't buy the game are even nastier and just come to attack the makers . oy.
the stuff I see I tell ya.
I may be misunderstanding you, but I hate this narrative. Bioware played that same card during the ME3 launch, with devs boo hooing on Twitter and social media about how unfair the fans were being and even threatened to close down their message boards.
This isn't a case of entitled fanboys running amuck. Are there a few people who overreact, throw tantrums and cross the line? Sure. But that is standard internet trolling. Go to CNN.com and read any article's comments and you will see the same. Ditto if you go to Bleacher Report or ESPN.com and scroll through those comments. TVLine, Politico, even official Facebook pages, any site with commentary has trolls.
But focusing so heavily on that bothers me because Bioware has used trolls as a marketing diversion to victimize themselves and invalidate legitimate criticism. Mind you, other studios and athletes and filmmakers (I'm looking your direction Zack Snyder and DCEU) have employed these tactics. But I am picking on Bioware for a few reasons: (1) we are in the Mass Effect thread; (2) Bioware seems to have mastered this tactic better than any other video game publisher; and (3) Bioware's employees are among the most active on social media and use that social media presence to fan the flame of this narrative.
However, I digress, my point is that Bioware launches games with deficiencies, be it a ****** and rushed ending that completely contradicts every pre-launch marketing promise Bioware made; a game that is repetitive, lifeless, and empty, and also contradicts every pre-launch marketing promise Bioware made (DA:I); or now, Andromeda, which seems to be a glitch filled game with a generic plot, bad voice acting, mediocre graphics (that Bioware intentionally hid in marketing) and...again, contradicts every pre-launch marketing promise Bioware made. Then when people start to call Bioware out on this, Bioware sends its employees on the internet marketing tour where they jump onto social media and play victim. They whine about how they are being picked on unfairly by ungrateful fans. Its an attempt to shift the narrative off of the poor product Bioware has released and instead use a few trolls to fuel a false narrative about how fans are just irrationally angry because they are entitled crybabies who didn't get the game that they wanted so they are being unfair. In other words, because Bioware cannot defend against the criticisms, they instead attack the critics and try to lump them all together as trolls.
It is a disingenuous narrative. In fact, it is one we now see Donald Trump employ as POTUS. Why respond to valid criticism when you can instead make up a false narrative about the "dishonest media" and "paid protestors" on the left. Obviously, it is far more dangerous when Trump does it on that scale, but it is frustrating none the less to see Bioware do it also.
And perhaps I am overly sensitive because I have seen this before, from Bioware. As some here may remember, I was one of the early critics of the ME3 ending. And as soon as you mentioned that you didn't like the ending, you instantly had to defend yourself, because the allegations of being an entitled, ungrateful, whiny, troll started coming down. It didn't matter how poor the ending was. That substance of the criticism wasn't the topic of debate. Instead the critic was.
Ultimately, history validates the critics. NO ONE today will say "MASS EFFECT 3'S ENDING WAS AMAZING!" The ending has become a joke in video game circles. Hell, the TV show Silicon Valley had a line in, I believe, season 2 where a character says "this is Mass Effect 3 ending bad."
But history validating the critics does not change a damn thing for Bioware. They make their money at launch. Not 5 years down the road. So, since ME3, Bioware seems to have employed a strategy where they will release flawed games, demonize anyone who pushes back, then laugh their way to the bank. And when the next time comes around, they will make a bunch of promises and swear how they learned from their mistakes...then repeat the same damn process.
I dunno, rant aside, it just really grinds my gears when the conversation of valid criticism turns into the direction of how mean and unfair the fans are.
