With social media, consumers can express their opinions easily. However, they often use it to complain about trivial things.
One common method used by consumers is called “review bombing,” where they flood a review page with negative reviews. While this happens a lot on sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, Valve, the developer of Dota 2, is one of the first to take action against review bombing. They are now monitoring the number of negative reviews posted within a specific timeframe.
However, for Valve, the implementation of this system has an embarrassing downside. On its Steam page, Dota 2 received over 7,000 negative reviews between August 25 and onwards due to a mass-effort by unhappy fans.
This negative reaction appears to be fueled by disappointed fans of Valve’s Half-Life series, which has not had a new game since 2007. Many major staff members who worked on the franchise have also left Valve.
The fans’ frustration started with a blog post titled “Epistle 3” by former Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw, which seemed to conclude the story of the Half-Life series, indicating that there may never be a final game. This coincided with a spike in poor reviews on Dota 2’s Steam page, with fans mentioning Half-Life 3 in their comments.
Half Life 3 will never be released because of this game. TF2 [Team Fortress 2] will never get updates because of this game. CSGO [Counter-Strike: Global Offensive] will never get 128 tick servers because of this game. Also the community is toxic and full of even more Russians than Trump’s cabinet.
*** you for killing Half Life 3 you piece of******cash grab.
Microsoft: Age of Empire 4. Rockstar: Red Dead Redemption 2. Valve: A f***ing dota card game.
Time, Mr. Newell? Is it really that time again?
Many fans believed that Valve’s announcement of the upcoming TCG Artifact meant that Half-Life 3 had been canceled. However, Laidlaw personally denied this interpretation of events.
Dota 2 fans have also participated in review bombing. In 2013, they engaged in the same behavior when Valve did not reintroduce a Halloween game-mode known as “Diretide” that was available in 2012.