Anyone noticing a trend in fake reviews for the top apps?

Discussion in 'Public Game Developers Forum' started by Balloon Loons, Mar 31, 2014.

  1. Pixelosis

    Pixelosis Well-Known Member

    Jan 28, 2013
    157
    0
    0
    A matter of opinion. Anyway, it doesn't really explain the snapped to the roof ranking imho. It's like someone flipped the gravity switch.
     
  2. Pixelosis

    Pixelosis Well-Known Member

    Jan 28, 2013
    157
    0
    0
    A good preliminary question would be how much Google and Apple really care about the "indie" section of the app market.
    I don't think it's that important to them, but on the other hand, a paper I read some months ago argued that it rather was relevant to Apple to maintain the idea that any small studio could make it big on their platform, in order to pull devs and generate activity. If the second idea is true, then it's literally asking devs to go rogue with the flood of fake reviews.

    Perhaps the main reason the procedural generation of praising review is illegal is that the platform holders don't get a share of the cake. :D
    Despite their words, they're quite lax on the phenomenon.

    This being said, this thread might be a desperate attempt at marketing BL's app.
     
  3. OnlyJoe

    OnlyJoe Well-Known Member

    Sep 29, 2013
    114
    0
    0
    Auckland
    Although I do agree that many of these reviews on some of these games are fake. I think it is very very hard to tell if a review is fake or not. I haven't ever used a fake review service, probably why I don't have many reviews on my apps. But from the few reviews I do have people write really basic stuff, things like: "Thanks", "Nice", "Great app", or "Where have you been all my life?". So it is very hard to spot what is fake and what is real from just reading reviews.

    Really the only thing that can be used is things like number of reviews compared to number of downloads. Or if there was a burst of like 100 reviews in one day, and none before or after. Even then, if they all come from different IP address and accounts its hard to really do much.

    Then apple have the risk of removing real peoples reviews, and these real customers getting annoyed at apple for removing their review. Which can make apple seem like they are being biased over the reviews that are written. This might do more damage to apple than leaving the fake reviews there.
     
  4. Balloon Loons

    Balloon Loons Well-Known Member

    Jun 20, 2012
    209
    0
    0
    Desperate attempt? I think desperate is to create a bot farm to sell crappy games. I also think if I was trying to market by posting and voicing a concern in the developer section of a forum is probably the worst form of marketing in the history of app development.

    What I want to see is action taken to stop this new trend. If no one talks about this then nothing will never be done and cheaters will push legit developers out of the game leading to an App Store with crap apps.
     
  5. Balloon Loons

    Balloon Loons Well-Known Member

    Jun 20, 2012
    209
    0
    0
    Yup that's the problem isn't it. Figuring out beyond doubt that some of these are fraud. Clearly you and I know just by looking at it. But it's difficult to get proof on paper. I'm sure apple has tracking on their blackend that would weed these out. Like I said flappy bird dropped from 4,500,000+ reviews to 500k in less than 2 days. So apple did something. But why the account wasn't banned is beyond me. Maybe he shut it down before they had a chance to investigate.

    I read an article that says exactly that. Scam apps run like that. The scammer will set up several accounts. Run a scam app then shut the account down before they are discovered. Release under a new name. Rotate accounts. Rinse and repeat. So flappy bird followed this exactly. Meanwhile the media sources post this scammer's quotes saying oh I'm an independent thinker, the money ruined my life. Blah blah blah. All lies.
     
  6. tea

    tea Well-Known Member

    Jul 23, 2010
    142
    3
    18
    Oh really

    As a case in point smash hit...
    - is a great game if you bother purchasing the unlock ( awesome free fun if you don't )
    - was featured by Apple
    - was made by an established app developer ( meaning, not first timers )
    - has a killer feature ( need I expand? )
    - is the first iOS game I felt enthusiastic about in months
    - is POLISHED.
    - lends itself to idiotic puns when played with ur gf ( try it! )

    I find this thread extremely interesting, more so while getting my first significant release in the past 2 years, and finding it troublesome to get just 1 review in the App Store...

    But hey before smashing glass on the devs back keep in mind the difference between obscure PC game and big mobile hit is not as thick as you'd like to think.
     
  7. Balloon Loons

    Balloon Loons Well-Known Member

    Jun 20, 2012
    209
    0
    0
    Same here. Reviews are not easy to come by that's for sure. Look we all know that the main selling point of a game is great screenshots. And flappy bird proved that it wasn't selling because for months previous to the cheating it did nothing. Suddenly the traffic just skyrockets? I manage websites for a living and I know that just doesn't happen magically. You have to spend a ton of money to gain traffic. I've been doing it for 12 years. Unfortunately with websites you can't artificially create traffic because it's pointless. But with apps you can artificially increase downloads because you gain placement then.
     
  8. Pixelosis

    Pixelosis Well-Known Member

    Jan 28, 2013
    157
    0
    0
    Or perhaps, if many of these reviews were false, the huge drop corresponded to the normal halt of downloads since the bot farm stopped.
    The account wasn't closed since his other games still are available.

    The app changed in name only once. I don't see evidence Dong Nguyen cycled any account.
     
  9. Pixelosis

    Pixelosis Well-Known Member

    Jan 28, 2013
    157
    0
    0
    I was just being facetious and cynical, but you never know. :D
    (Besides, being spotted by the staff on their boards isn't fruitless.)
    Oddly enough, I expected more activity in this thread but it seems no one cares much.
    You won't see any action taken I'm afraid. They'd have to close the review section and keep download numbers totally internal.
    They'd also have to restrict the factors used to establish the day-to-day ranking and it already cost them a huge amount of money last time they did acquire a company precisely to refine and expand their methods (talking about Apple here).
    Like they say, this shit writes itself.
     
  10. Pixelosis

    Pixelosis Well-Known Member

    Jan 28, 2013
    157
    0
    0
    #30 Pixelosis, Apr 3, 2014
    Last edited: Apr 3, 2014
    So, between rather totally irrelevant and non-exclusive factors and personnal opinions that are borderline shrillish, is this meant to explain the ludicrous rank day one?
    Like if that game had been at the center of some huge and secret planetary cult of enthusiasts. I know there was a ramp up... which was unheard of and almost failed to register on iPad and did barely better on iPhone. Now, unless it involved a massive fraction of the total iOS users (which it certainly did not, according to the charts), I find this quite hilarious to think it would be enough to push the app so high. I've already sent the link to the trailer to eleven people whose opinions I trust and who are different types of consumers but who all own the necessary devices (and haven't been shelved) and about two of them answered with mild interest at best. The rest was more like dafuk. Several days later we're still a total of twelve persons who haven't even bothered look for the app in the store. This wasn't the case with Flappy Bird when it was blowing at its fullest so its rank seemed more like... expected.
    Anyway, it wouldn't be the first app with very, very odd statistics.
     
  11. Balloon Loons

    Balloon Loons Well-Known Member

    Jun 20, 2012
    209
    0
    0
    Lol it's all good. You can never post in a forum and not expect a little cynicism

    I think fixing the bot problem is rather easy. All apple has to do is make it so the app must be actually opened and played for a few times before allowing a review. The way bots are said to work is that they just bang out reviews never actually opening the app. That's why some people have had the experience of seeing reviews but no play time when hiring a company that claims to advertise an app. So the fix seems simple. I think we just need to get more attention to it from the indie community. So let's keep this thread going.
     
  12. mr.Ugly

    mr.Ugly Well-Known Member

    Dec 1, 2009
    1,673
    0
    36
    Berlin, Germany
    well i guess its with every other platform in general.. there are fake reviews. there are paid guys running around in forums writing positive stuff about product x and y.. etc. it all boils down if you have the money to hire or not.

    back in the early days you told your buddies to download your game and leave a rating.. so even the lowest game on the charts had a couple 5 stars reviews.

    so what? do you think people read the reviews? they see an icon, a title , click on it check the screenshots maybe and if they like what they see they download.

    if its free they might even download straight away.. why not its free and trying it out a minute does not hurt and it can be as fast deleted.

    so i as a developer don't care about fake reviews because they do not count anway.

    in germany the ms office apps are the top free downloads with horrible reviews because people noticed after downloading it that they need a paid subscription to actualy use that crap.. so bang bad reviews..

    but the MS apps are in the top spots since they have been released and people still download them apparently not even taking care that the bad reviews might indicate something wrong..

    a free download is a free download and it gets downloaded.

    reviews are meaningless nowerdays.
     
  13. Balloon Loons

    Balloon Loons Well-Known Member

    Jun 20, 2012
    209
    0
    0
    Well I don't know of any way to have reviews removed from the App Store other than apple actually doing the removal. So that to me is pretty much proof that something was not right. How do you go from 4 million to 500k reviews in just two days being displayed in the store. Any other explanation?
     
  14. Balloon Loons

    Balloon Loons Well-Known Member

    Jun 20, 2012
    209
    0
    0
    You're missing one thing. If downloads are what puts an app in the top, which is what is said to be true, then artificial inflation of downloads is cheating. A review isn't important because people read them. You're right who cares about that. But in order to write a review you need to download. Hence fake reviews mean fake downloads. Fake downloads means you cheated to get top rankings. That means if that is the norm today why even bother making a good game? Why don't we all just focus on making bot farms? Make crappy games in a day, and just artificially inflate to the top. This is my point.

    Yea if you have money you can spend on advertising etc. but at least that's not cheating. Usually to advertise you still need a good product. Otherwise you spend money pointlessly.

    However if you cheat. Your product can be crap and you'll still be in the top.
     
  15. Pixelosis

    Pixelosis Well-Known Member

    Jan 28, 2013
    157
    0
    0
    Indeed, this is sending all sorts of wrong signals. A similar thread can be read there.

    The real idea is in fact, if you don't have much money to put into marketing, then aim very low and make clones or shallow products.
    Then with the money obtained, play the system and hope to get a top spot artificially. From there, if you've not been excised, spend the money on some real project (don't make it too big though) and keep a lot of the cash for the promotion.
    Stinks, eh?

    Oh I see now. Where did you find those numbers? Do we know when the deletion happened?


    Besides, you have no control on the reviews customers post. You can flag them and wait for Apple to delete them. Which, as you guess, would hardly be that quiet.
    The other solution is to contact the millions of customers who posted them and kindly ask them to remove their reviews.
    A godlike task, for sure, unless they more or less all emanate from the same hub and some script allows to run the process relatively fast.
     
  16. Appvism

    Appvism Well-Known Member

    Feb 9, 2013
    179
    0
    0
    UK
    This.
     
  17. Balloon Loons

    Balloon Loons Well-Known Member

    Jun 20, 2012
    209
    0
    0
    I so wish I had taken screenshots but I had no clue that would ever happen. What happened is that one day I log into my fb and I start seeing these accounts post about flappy bird. So naturally I think what is this garbage lol

    When checking the App Store I noticed 4 million plur reviews and immediately I thought whaaaaaaaat!? How? That's insane! I've literally never seen that. How is this possible this app is obviously crap! So then I start scrolling through and noticing wow these are all the same review style. 666, devil, evil, appearing in one after another.

    I checked the app two days later and the reviews are down to 500k and I was confused. So I clicked around to try to find the rest. Couldn't. All gone. I was seriously confused. I thought maybe it was an upgrade at first but then when looking for all time reviews they just weren't there anymore. 4 million reviews had just...vanished. Like the damn Malaysian plane

    One week later the developer pulls the app down. At which point my thoughts were confirmed. Something truly shady had just flashed before our very eyes. The greatest app trick of all time had just taken place. My only regret is not taking screenshots of those numbers. No one ever talks about that.
     
  18. Pixelosis

    Pixelosis Well-Known Member

    Jan 28, 2013
    157
    0
    0
    Let's note that Apple is rather very slow to implement smart ideas when it comes to its store. Remember: Apple Should Reset All App Store Reviews.

    Odd. I wish you had taken a screen capture then. From what I read, Nguyen's app reached a peak of 6,500 reviews a day towards the beginning of February.
    Even if that ratio had been true for all days, it would still take more than 615 days (over 20 months) to reach 4M reviews in total.

    On the other hand, now that is done, and looking back at Google Play, a simple math shows that Smash Hit's 500,000 reviews within a month puts the average rate at >16,600 reviews a day (av. >11 reviews per minute). That for a game which appears to suffer from two main bugs (one crashes the app and the other ignores the in app payment; I guess that's some "polish"). :rolleyes:
    Wait. It's now over 725,000 reviews in total. More than +225,000 reviews within 6 days. That's 37,500 reviews/day (26/minute). Keep going! They'll soon reach the symbolic threshold of 1 rev./second.
    I never expected a physics engine demo could be that good! :D
    Must be the fog. It has to be the fog, yes.
     
  19. Balloon Loons

    Balloon Loons Well-Known Member

    Jun 20, 2012
    209
    0
    0
    I don't know if smash hit can be compared to the likes of flappy bird. For one in the App Store it still only has a little over 35k reviews while it's been featured for weeks already. That's nowhere near 4 million in the two days of flappy bird.

    And at least smash hit does look somewhat interesting and appealing in the screenshots. That's what usually sells a game. Let's be honest, would anyone have downloaded flappy bird based on the screen shots if the app wasn't featured? And would it have been featured if it didn't forge downloads? I am willing to bet everything I love on no lol

    The reviews also seem different from eachother and vary. I'm not seeing the pattern I saw in flappy bird and don't step white tile and some other clones / clearly poop apps :).
     
  20. Balloon Loons

    Balloon Loons Well-Known Member

    Jun 20, 2012
    209
    0
    0
    For the record I downloaded don't step white tile and I'm even more confused now than before I did. I mean this app is like a bad joke. It took me 3 minutes just to figure out the ridiculous menu. Not to mention there is text in Japanese which I have no idea how you sell to an American audience. It's almost like this is a prank and I'm expecting someone to come out and say I can't believe you actually played that. You're on hidden camera lol.
     

Share This Page