The Witcher 3 Review Bombed by Chinese Due to Gwent Ban
Players from China were so enraged by the ban for one of their own in Gwent that they flooded review bombed The Witcher 3 on Steam.
- Since late November, a suspiciously large number of negative reviews for The Witcher 3 began to appear on Steam;
- It turns out that this is how Chinese players want to punish CD Projekt RED for kicking their compatriot out of a Gwent tournament;
- The player was said to be in collusion with other users who deliberately gave up matches to increase his position in the rankings.
Those tracking Steam user ratings have noticed a recent influx of negative notes for The Witcher 3. Interestingly, most of them were written in Chinese. It turns outthat Chinese users are trying to punish CD Projekt RED through "review bombing" of The Wild Hunt. The reason? Ban for a Chinese player competing in a Gwent tournament.
The flood of negative notes began in late November. Currently, only 87% of the ratings given to the third The Witcher over the past 30 days is positive. That's a result most developers can only dream of, but it's a big drop in the average for this game, which until now had a whopping 97% of positive reviews.
Of course, a much more sensible target for such an attack would be the average rating of Gwent on Steam, but The Wild Hunt is much more popular, so that's probably why it was chosen.
The source of the hysteria among Chinese players is the expulsion of a player by the handle Wangid from the Masters Series. It was alleged that he was in collusion with other users who deliberately gave up matches against him (which the system considered to be a quick win) in order to increase his MMR (Matchmaking Rating).
Such behavior is against the rules of Gwent. Therefore, Wangid was punished. The problem is that no evidence has been presented. CD Projekt RED is certain of the player's guilt, but does not have, for example, records of conversations on Discord showing the collusion. The studio analyzed his gameplay history and came to the conclusion that his rivals gave up far too often. In addition, Wangid himself did not inform the Masters tournament organizers of such anomalies, which he should have done, even if he was not the initiator of such behavior.
In the case of other countries you could write that the arguments of the developers simply did not convince the players, but in this case there is also the specificity of Chinese culture. For some time now, the players from that country have been reacting extremely aggressively to everything they consider to be an attack on their country and their countrymen, even if in reality their accusations are baseless. For example, a few months ago they organized a review bombing of Life is Strange: True Colors just because the flag of Tibet appeared in it.
Ultimately, the action of the Chinese players is unlikely to have any noticeable effect. The Witcher 3 has too many good ratings for any such initiative to be able to permanently damage the average Steam score. In addition, Valve does not tolerate review bombing and there is a good chance that the ratings will be removed.
