Now I'm not sure if the following is actually a genuine concern, or if my witchhunting senses are too sensitive and I'm jumping at shadows. What I'm talking about is this game by Glitchless:
There's nothing wrong with the game itself - it seems to be a usual browser mmorpg. What surprised me were the comments: The five most recent ones were all very short with mostly little content, contained high praise, and , most startingly, some were already considered ‘helpful’ despite being so young. This could just be a sign of a very good game, I thought, or perhaps the last five reviewer were just fans who didn't feel like writing much. I decided to look further.
1) I went through all fifty reviews the game has gotten so far. The picture remained the same: Nearly all of them were very short, kind of repetitive and gave 5 stars. Of course, there were some longer reviews here or there, but most of them very contained little more than praise.
2) I looked at who wrote those comments. By my count, out of 50 reviewers, 47 had created their accounts the very same day or the day before. Their profiles were empty save for some favouriting Nodatis and one putting Nodatis in a list titles ‘list’.
3) All positive comments were voted to be ‘helpful’. I do often see one-word reviews considered ‘helpful’, but having like 46/50 that way? That seems weird.
4) Another thing I noticed was, that the score of the game was noticeably lower than the score reviewers gave it. Usually, those who have grievances with the game tend to review it, so I'm used to the reviews giving slightly fewer stars than the game has over-all. Here, the game has 3.5 stars over-all and the reviews nearly unanimously give 5 stars.
This is the summary of why I think there is a certain probability of fake reviews. This is far from certain, however. Most of the longer comments mention that they are old players. Therefore, chances are good that the player-base found out their beloved game came to newgrounds and decided do get an account and vote on it. In any case, I had fun thinking about this. If this is not the right place to talk about this, sorry. (I'm still not sure what this place is even about. It seems to have started as a general discussion and turned into people pointing out rule-breaking games. Hopefully, it fits either way.)
