Eurogamer vs. Aventurine/Darkfall

Ivan

Eurogamer writes a damning review of Darkfall, giving it a 2/10 score. Their worst rating ever handed out.

Aventurine respond claiming that their logs demonstrate that the 2 reviewing accounts were hardly used. 1 account, they claim, was used for ~4 minutes in which the reviewer never left the character creation screen.

The second account was logged in for ~3 hours and 33 minutes, of which most of that time was spent deleting and recreating the single character available - 9 different times.

Their logs, they say, show that the reviewer spent the remaining time <20 minutes asking in public chat for help on how things work before saying in the global channel "help... how do I cast spells?" and then finally logging out.

Eurogamer have since stood by their reviewer however offered to employ an additional reviewer to give it's reader's a second opinion.

Aventurine refused, stating that "...it seems bizarre to us that Eurogamer would pay someone to try to prove them wrong. This is about as strange as us paying someone to write a review of Darkfall for them".

Original review:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/darkfall-online-review

Aventurines response:
http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=185060

Eurogamers blog defending the review:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/editors-blog-darkfall-aftermath-blog-entry

Aventurines response:
http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=185299

Aventurines final response:
http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=185733

All in all, I personally have to laugh at the whole situation. The amount of fanboisms on both sides alone, makes this whole situation hilarious.

I play Darkfall, have become less active than I used to be but I've still clocked several hundred hours in the game already and I can tell you from my personal experience that the reviewer couldnt have played the game for any more than an hour. Really throws their re-review of Age of Conan into question imho and it causes me to seriously doubt their credibility.

Darkfall is deeply flawed, but no more than any MMO to ever be released since World of Warcraft which was man-birthed by Blizzard atop a bed of the 100 most beautiful virgins :rolleyes:

Aside from that though it has several significantly redeeming features that are completely ignored in the reviewed or worse, construed as negatives from a person; who, if he truly believed they were negatives: never should have been set to review the game in the first place.

It's simple, a checklist for a good darkfall reviewer:

A) Is open, "non-consentual" pvp a bad thing?
Is full loot a bad thing?
C) Is FPS style targeting a bad thing?
D) Is Player built cities and economies a bad thing?
E) Is non-faction based but rather player based clan RvR a bad thing?

To qualify you must choose No for one or more of your answers and "FÚCK NO" for at least one or more of your answers.

In short, I cant imagine Eurogamer coming out on top of this one...

Mods: Please move to Massively multiplayer if you feel it is more appropriate, however the thread is specifically aimed at Eurogamer and the associated scandal rather than the MMO in question...

CCCP^

Had a read of it all but it doesn't make much sense to me, I don't have the game and most likely will never play it because it's not something I would be into. I don't know what the game is like but the review is a bit harsh, hard to say whether Darkfall's makers have taken it very personally but I know I would. The language the reviewer uses towards the end is a bit much, there are more constructive ways to deliver a thumbs down than "Pity them, and pity the fools that stock it and more so the morons that end up buying it without checking first."

That just sounds like somebody trying to scare players off. I don't know if I really want to read Eurogamer now. Anyone else played this?

RobertFoster

I used to use EG as one of my main sources for news and reviews. But then they got bigger and bigger. When it started having two clicks to read a review score (to generate more advertising traffic) it all started to go downhill.

Now, rather than reading reviews, I just skip to the score and read a few of the user comments. Even those aren't as good as they used to be. It seems so cliquey and full of smart-ass gamers, and their forums are even worse.

I still get some news from EG, but mostly I get it from blogs instead. Any gaming site that gets too big, seems to become very corporate and it sucks the life out of them for me (IGN, GameSpot, and now EG it seems).

super_furry

Read most of the fallout drama stuff and while Darkfall looks terrible, three hours, or even the nine hours that Eurogamer claimed the reviewer played the game, is no length of time at all to judge an MMORPG on - especially for such a well respected site.

L31mr0d

I don't think a lot of reviewers ever actually complete the game, which is why I don't play a game based on reviews alone. It's like reading a movie review of a person who walked out 35 minutes before the film ended. Like movies, games can be saved in the last act and if the ending is solid.

For MMORPG, reviews are pointless. It's like trying to review football, as it's community based, your experience will differ depending on who you play with and how seriously you play. Reviewers with a deadline aren't going to play it seriously.

The problem is, some people do base their opinions on games from these arbitrary and subjective reviews. I can't count the number of times someone has said "don't play that game, the reviews are crap". I read reviews (I find gametrailers to be fairly unbiased) but if I like the look of the game, the premise and the gameplay I'll try it, regardless of what the reviews have said.

humanji

Am I the only one who thought that Eurogamer reviews were always shìte and untrustworthy?

Jack Sheehan

2/10 is not the worst score they have ever given. They gave a 1/10 to a few things. One was a DS version of Settlers I think.

dreamers75

How did they know when the game was unplayable for a month ?

ohh maybe eurogamer used NO CDs like the rest of schmucks that bough it

SeantheMan

I gave up on them after the below concerning OnLive, aren't these people meant to be journalists ? They seem as bad as the Sun for making up stories or their own facts

Eurogamer's Richard Leadbetter also expressed concern about OnLive's system.[21] Though the article was published while OnLive was being demonstrated to attendees of GDC 2009, the article does not reference any personal experience with the system, nor does it include any comments from GDC attendees who tried the service. The piece does not fact-check what Leadbetter calls "OnLive's claims." For example, Leadbetter writes that by stating the OnLive video encoder has 1 ms of latency, OnLive's Perlman is, "saying that the OnLive encoder runs at 1000fps [frames per second]. It's one of the most astonishing claims I've ever heard." The OnLive website FAQ[22] states OnLive operates at 720p60, which is a 60 frames-per-second video format, contradicting Leadbetter's assertion. The 60fps rate is also mentioned in Perlman's VentureBeat response.[23]

Interviewed by the BBC on April 1, 2009, Steve Perlman responded to the skepticism by saying that OnLive has developed a custom compression technology that will make the service possible. "Rather than fighting against the internet... and dropped, delayed or out of order packets we designed an algorithm that deals with these characteristics," he explained. He also dismissed Eurogamer's article as "a very ignorant article [with] conflated issues of frame rate and latency".[24] In the VentureBeat article, Perlman gave further details about Leadbetter's claims by stating:

He's confusing compression latency (1ms) with frame time. The frame time is NOT 1ms (which would imply 1000 fps). It’s 16.7ms (which implies 60fps). Just as linear video compression time is much HIGHER latency than one frame time (e.g. 500ms latency does NOT imply a 2fps frame rate), interactive video compression is much LOWER latency that one frame time.

MooseJam

logs don't lie