1 star reviews

Crap So glitchy

It's just awful. Yes developer, I do understand how to play. The controls suck and the gane is too unresponsive.

Very stupid game....

Crap Gameplay not good pfisicks are rubbish this games just a part of hell <- LOL my favourite so far.

Now, sure enough, if the game was buggy, crashing, un-responsive, I might be able to do something about it, but the gameplay is solid, the input isnt buggy, and ive had zero crash reports, so have to assume everything is ok.

Being a gamer first, means im pretty anal retentive about performance, input, etc, all these things muppets are complaining about that seem to be un-true. The only thing that can be a bit flakey is the web-stuff, but that doesnt effect any part of the game.

Wouldn't worry me so much if more ppl who enjoyed the game rated it.

I cant help but feel the reason ppl think its buggy is because they arnt playing it the way its intended, but then a 12 year old figured it out and got 181 pts (was the first to beat the game)

anyhooo, thats all I got, just felt like having a rant about trolling users.

 

I'm not sure if this is what you're experiencing, but I've read on the Unity forums that an unscrupulous practice that exists is where your game is targeted for negative reviews by thugs in order to help sell you a 3rd party service that will give you positive reviews in exchange for money.

 

Android game?

(would explain the buggy, unresponsive etc.)

 

Not sure I'm being targeted, but there has been a recent influx of 1-stars, which does seem odd... so maybe..

meh. As long as the downloads keep coming I dont really care, but its still frustrating since the reviews are unhelpful. The last one was a complaint from an S4 user, considering I develop using an S4, I know exactly how it runs, making everything the reviewer said untrue.

Is there anyway to track if a user has rated your app? Just thinking about rewards for in-app reviews, try to boost the good reviews.

 

I just tried the Android version. It's actually a pretty cool game.

I feel like it's not really clear at first that you have to queue up your moves. I died a few times thinking I just have to tap when I hit a block with an arrow (similar to rhythm games, where timing is important) and kept getting failure beeps as if it didn't register properly. So it might really be people not understanding how to play.

EDIT: Assuming you were talking about the game in your signature (hardkour)

 

Ah is this your first mobile outing? it's all perfectly normal. You see, there's a breed of entitled gamer that feels important spouting gibberish. It's normal.

If you get a hit on your hands, then you get more positive comments which hide the same bunch of trolls moaning and bitching.

As for understanding how to play, you can't really innovate in the slightest when you make games. If you are going to innovate, you must have step by step tutorials (which they'll also bitch at).

 

yep! yeah you got it. I think its that exact problem. players expect it to be a reaction game, but its not really a reaction game. Reactions can help you a bit, but you need to understand the sequence of upcoming moves.

@hippo, Yep, the entitled gamer.. bane of every developers existence! I wouldn't mind a bunch of 1-star reviews if I got a bunch more good reviews, but the 1-stars are creeping up. Every day I check and there's another one there.. my overall rating has dropped below 4 now.

 

Yeah trolls man.

 

Bro that sucks! I left you a 5 star review a while back. Your game is good and I feel bad that people would purposely lie to give you a bad review. Just remember not to end up like the developer of "Slaughtering Grounds" who had a total meltdown over his bad reviews....

 

Argh, I literally just hit the paywall. The game is quite addictive, I might actually buy it later (need to update my payment information, which is a hassle).

Btw, if there's supposed to be ads, I didn't get any.

 

Yeah the ad's wernt paying off, so I introduced a level restriction to encourage purchases. There should be ad's showing in the non-updated version though. Thanks for letting me know.

Let me know the name you used and ill give you a free upgrade (if i can figure out your account - if you used the name clicky I wont be able to upgrade you)

 

Even on steam a bad review can really screw you over, if it gets voted the most helpful comment. I just wonder if theres competitors actively trying to kill of any competition (although with the number of apps released i guess its not that viable an option ).

 

Just keep on pressing through. Bad reviews happen sometimes warranted sometimes not. I thought your game was good (played it back when there was ads). Your original question on if there is a way to boost number of reviews, I had good results sponsoring a contest on touch arcade for honest reviews. Its common on there to sponsor a week long contest with the prize being a $10 gift card (for high score, random drawing, etc.).

 

There should still be ad's... ill have to look into that. I upgraded everyone to full version a few days ago though for free since I introduced level limitation... figured it was only fair to upgrade all existing users since I was changing the IAP.

interesting... is that a sponser that you arrange through the site (that they manage), or do you arrange it all yourself

 

Just had another run and I did see an ad this time after I died. Maybe they weren't ready to be served up before and got skipped or something.

Oh, and I used the name dabuuker.

 

Cool, Account upgraded :_)

Just restart the game (you need to see the fingerbait logo), and it should update to the full version. You'll be able to tell by going into the settings screen and you should see the color change bars are un-locked.

So got a new 1 star review...

Uninspired and amateurish, plus a jerk dev I guess it's supposed to be a hybrid of planning ahead and timing, but it just didn't click. Graphics aren't everything but this is just jagged lines in two tone color, not even smoothed. It just looks horrible and makes it less enjoyable. UI layout came off as unintuitive as well. Add in the dev going around whining on forums about 1 star reviews and calling anyone leaving them "retards" (his words), and I can't support this game.

I guess its someone on here... ha... you're right GoldenTiger... I was being a jerk.

 

Anything you can do to help with that?

 

tbh, im not sure... I guess I need to provide a better tutorial or something..

 

pm me your game name Ross

 

You do it all yourself. They have a whole forum for contests and promo codes. I don't know at what rate you're getting bad reviews but at least for me a week will get you around 15 or so honest reviews. Obviously TouchArcade is mostly an ios audience, I haven't found a good place to run an android contest.

 

Interesting Idea, might be a good way to drum up some more iOS downloads.

they are all honest reviews, I just dont feel like some of them are justified... if they were like the game sux, fine, I dont mind those 1-star ratings, but ones stating its buggy,unresponsive, etc, well those ones do annoy me! I've tested it on a $100 Galaxy Ace lite (think that was the model - low powered device I brought solely for testing purchases through), and it was still very playable.

 

You just have to deal with it and ship the next game

 

Remember that hardware isn't all there is to a device's performance, especially on Android. If it's too full of junk it's going to perform badly. One of our tests here is to open a bunch of other stuff and then load our app.

 

Then get a phone call and text. Then try it with the internet disabled. And so on.

 

Before the internet was a thing, I had little respect for professional reviewers. "Any idiot can have an opinion," I'd say. Having seen the vast amount of user reviews and how unhelpful or plain wrong they are, my opinion of professional reviewers has improved dramatically.

 

true that... although I figure if it can run on a crappy device, it should be fine. its not like theres much complexity in my game... you're right though... with so many android devices, its impossible to know which ones dont run well, or why.

yeah, im working on the next game, although theres stuff I still want to update in HK. I initially intended to extend the level length quite a way, but hadnt bothered because no-one was getting to the end, now a few ppl have.

 

luckily the professional reviews Ive had have been awesome...

 

Or "Garry's Incident"....incident.

 

Actually this is awesome game. I'm setup your games it really very good.

 

What's interesting is that iOS games can sell or download moderately well and not receive reviews for weeks, possibly months. And the reviews there are often more helpful than not. Not at all the case for Android. It's a cumbersome platform: the various costs for support and dealing with cheap and weird customers and their cheap and weird phone and tablet hardware, and not to mention all the rampant piracy, are considerably greater than iOS.

 

Personally, I'd ignore a review like this "Crap Gameplay not good pfisicks are rubbish this games just a part of hell" when looking to buy a game. Too many fools online, so I need to have a filter.

Now if the review is negative and well thought out, that's a different story.

The moral of the story is, try not to get hung up in the stupid negative reviews, as I think people generally don't pay much attention to them.

Star ratings on the other hand pisses me off as they're visible under the app listing and can put people off even opening the app page.

 

Amazing how petty people can be. It always drops my faith in humanity a percentage point or two to see how money (fear of someone else making it or lust for it themselves) either attracts or turns people into a-holes. The great thing is this kind of behavior will ultimately push consumers to turn to other app review sites since they will learn they cannot trust bs user reviews like this.

 

...and then you realize many of the "professional" reviewers are just as clueless.

 

With a 5 star reviews systems, there's two kinds of useless reviews. 1 star and 5 star ones. 1 star ratings mean that the game deserves the worst possible rating. This is something reserved for completely broken games garbage like Air Control.
5 star ratings imply that there's no way something could be considerably better, which is equally dumb.

2-4 star reviews are where it's at. Genuine praise and criticism.

 

A game player addressing you as a 'developer' in a review? I can hazard a guess someone didn't like your advice.

But anyway, I like the cube runner style artwork, still me favorite mobile game.

I published my game to KitKat and above only because I found that until the Android/Unity algorithms had cached enough graphics to start making cache hits on lower end HW & Android versions performance was frustratingly inconstant and buggy. This is turnkey game and about as barebones as I could make it and it still function. Even with a new quad core cpu (a7) with mp450 gpu if I do things like have live wallpaper running and several apps even with 1GB RAM its can occasionally stutter on rendering; however the game play bugs are gone - well there is still one.

Gaming on mobile is always iffy and you can't expect a normal person to become a sys admin to their cell phone or tablet to play your game. You, I, or Unity can't do anything about all the TSR apps. Android, Apple, and MS need to get on the ball about how much they will allow all these apps to terminate and stay resident. They want to twitter & FB you to A.D.D. extremes to squeeze nickels and dimes and ad views out of you. Do they expect users to manage their phones as if they were DOS admins from way back managing 512K memory?

 

Now that I turned signatures on I can see what game we are even talking about

It's not too uncommon to get random 1 star reviews with not logic but still got to say that it being in the signature and knowing how James replies from time to time I'm sure there are few angry people who just went to drop a review after they got served here

 

(bookmarked)

 

i can understand the 1 stars and those comments.. its just that you made something kind of unusual.. they expect the character to control like common platformers, the graphics arent "amazing" .. so many kiddies want BE4ST GRAFICKS!!! or whatever... >< style is too much for them to understand i guess LOL

LOOL ive griped about gta5 being crappy soo much.. heheh... really its because i wish it was better... they made it too casual gamer... but really thats what its always been .. but the setting of the game felt like it shouldve been more serious, actually plan the heists and stuff idk... LOL

 

Most people put low ratings if they simply do not like the game or it is not playing like they expect/are used to.

I'd rate Barbie games 1 star, doesn't mean they're deserving of it.

 

This tells me most people are insane. Lol Why would anyone be playing a game they know they won't like to begin with? That'd be like me going around playing many FPS games rating them 1 star "rubbish", "terrible control", "doesn't play well at all", "graphics don't look right". Insane waste of time.

If you mean they don't even play the games instead whenever they see something they hate they just stop to rate and comment. That is even more ridiculous. People have too much free time I guess.

 

Thats not what I mean. Of course I'm not going to go play Barbie games and rate them crap, or just see them and rate them crap because I hate them (even though this happens plenty) but if someone comes across a game they downloaded out of curiosity in their perusing around then it looks like something they might like and when they play it only to find out that it isn't what they expected then they'll give it a crap review.

 

This is a free game, right? I've made the same observation. And know what? For my paid games (and even the full versions of the lite ones) I've almost zero 1-star reviews. Having a game free for downloading always collects all kinds of stupid people out there.

Setting the minimum version to Android 4.0 might help, too because it just keeps out all old crap Android devices.

 

That is true. Charging some money would attract a higher quality user. With free the game is wide open to everyone from the 12 year old "expert" to all of the people on these forums who hate you. It is too easy if just anyone can leave a rating and review.

 

Welcome to the world of games development

Any link to the actual game? That could help a lot of people form a better opinion why people respond like that to your game.

Bugs are bad, un-responsiveness is really bad and crashes are a horrible thing. This is probably an Android game, right? Different devices have their own quirks and that can affect your game. Who knows what kind of apps they got running in the background as well. Also, what they perceive as the problem might not even be the problem at all... common problem with community feedback. So just suck it up and try to solve any issues that you can identify.

You got a communication problem if people aren't playing it like intended or... you are attracting the wrong target group (type of audience). Sit down and ask yourself where the problems are and how to fix it? Is it even the game? Maybe you have to change the images in the store and your marketing text?

Ignore your worries and hurt pride, this is something you have to often suffer in the games industry. Even developers have to suck this up from colleagues in large game studios. Instead, listen and analyze what they are saying. Try to act on their feedback and remember... they actually cared enough about the game to voice their opinion so you did something right

People that enjoy the game is busy playing it Also, people tend to react more to negative stuff... lots of psychology behind that but anger and frustration etc is the first emotions your brain always go through if it has to learn new stuff as an example (even if it something you will love a second later).

My best tip is: take your game with you, make friends play it and sit down with those that do not understand it, have problems and so on. Work together with them to pinpoint the issues, then sit down and try to figure out how to solve things. Maybe you have to change a feature or maybe you only have to add or improve tutorials for certain target-groups.

 

The hardest part is controlling that anger.

My most successful games are the ones that are totally free but have paid add-ons. The core game is free and then if people want more content they buy it. I make PC games and have been using the free + IAP model for the past 5 years.

I can't tell you the number of times I've let my anger at "free" users get the better of me, stressing me out, raising my heart rate through the roof. Free users always seem to be the ones who complain loudest and most often, sometimes repeating the same complaints in the game's forum over and over again. Yet they never pay to help support the game. They never do anything except complain that the game isn't catered just for them. It's infuriating.

The people who buy the add-ons and support the game love it, and have great suggestions to move further, and offer excellent constructive criticism as well as lovely compliments. The people who use it for free for sometimes years (seriously) and have no intention of helping support it, those are the ones who sit in the forum and moan. I just had to deal with that this morning, actually. It's soooo frustrating, and my gut response is to tell them to f*ck right the hell off. But then I calm down and chill. And ignore them. And life goes on. And they can screw off and die, and ......

Ony... calm down... it's ok. Peace. Love. Serenity.

grumble grumble... I'll punch them in the face...

Ony. Breathe...

whew.

 

yep Android is a sesspool of devices, so who knows, maybe some of the complaints are valid. Ive done the best I can (testing on a high end device and a low end device). No crash reports, no problems generally, so I guess Ill just have to roll with the punches. Its not a complex game, I dont see how I can improve the code, etc, so I guess it is what it is!

The game is linked in my sig Deon (hardkour) JIC you have sig's turned off.

Im just going to not care about the low ratings any more... they can keep flowing. Maybe it will become infamous or something. ha.

@Xaron, how did you find take-up of your game having paid only version? I would prefer this approach, but well I like downloads. On iOS youre lucky to get any downloads if its paid, on free the downloads also dry up. On Android, at least you get a constant stream of downloads of free games daily (getting anywhere between 50-100/day), but I cant imagine its the same if paid.

 

I once did a test. I had a lite version and a paid version of my game. Conversion rate was about 1%, so 1000 downloads of the free version led to 10 sales of the full version. After a while I just dropped the lite version because I had tons of 1 star reviews anyway, some even said "What? This is not the full version?" LOL. So guess what? The sales didn't move! I still had my 10 sales like before even without the lite version. That was on Android.

I can imagine that it can make a difference to have a lite version to test. But obviously only when you are in the top charts. If you're not in the charts your app can only be found by a search and in my observation it doesn't make a difference then if you have a lite version or not!

My next game (submarine) will be paid only on all platforms.

 

To paraphrase Rambo, "To survive jerks, you gotta become a jerk."

On a slightly less relevant topic: Is releasing on Android worth the hassle these days?

 

Yes shaderop. I have more sales on Android than on iOS for all of my games.

 

So I downloaded your game...

I can sort of see how some people might complain about the controls. They're not bad, but it was confusing to figure them out. I initially assumed that the message on the menu screen was the tutorial, and from that and the screenshots I'd seen I had the wrong idea about how to play the game. I had assumed that I was only supposed to hit the key right before I hit the marked boxes, when really I could queue up. The demo video (I'd originally assumed to be info about the dev) sorted me out.

I think it might help a little if you expanded the tutorial (keeping it within the app, preferably) to prevent that kind of confusion it might help to deal with a few of those complains about the controls.