Internet critics... oy!

I am sitting here playing the third installment of Mass Effect while at the same time reading up on a forum about the game - I found a peculiar bug and wanted to see if anyone else had it. While checking the forum topics it struck me how many haters there are on the net. People spewing to the left and right how bad things are. With Mass Effect there were lots of people saying the game sucks because they dislike the ending. So the entire game sucks. Heck, all three games sucks because of the ending. And don't get me started on that particular bug, people were ranting about how crappy the game developers are for not fixing it in the first place, or how bad the studio is for not churning out a fix the second the bug was discovered. The fact that it was one glitch among tens of thousands - perhaps hundreds of thousands pieces of decisions made in the game didn't make any difference. All of a sudden they were experts and professional critics. Their word was the law and anyone not agreeing with them were lame, pathetic or just trolling (trust me, I've seen these responses too).

(For any of you that still plays Mass Effect and don't want to know anything about it other than what you've played then skip the next part)

The best part however was about the ending. People were complaining why the developers didn't cover the "proper" ending for some races. For you that are familiar with the Mass Effect universe, I am talking about the Krogans, Quarians, Turians and so on. The complaint was that the ending didn't say much about these races, what happened to them, what happened to the important characters etc etc. The fact that Mass Effect covers the role of Commander Shepard and NOT the whole freaking universe escapes these "professional" critics. And the ending does indeed focus on Commander Shepard. As it should be. But people critisize the entire game and the entire series based on a single issue or event. And it goes on and on not only with this particular game, but with basically every product on the net.

(Continue reading here if you avoided the above spoilers)

i would dare anyone to go to Bioware, gather all the developers in a room and tell them that their game sucks, that it's ugly, buggy and worthless. I dare you! But you wouldn't do it. If you did you would have 500 people staring at you, judging you and thinking you're a complete idiot. And at the same time you don't need to face them, you don't need to face their expressions and perhaps discover that you hurt them by your slander. It's far more comfortable sitting behind your screen where no one can see you, where no one can judge you and spit out one obscenity after another.

As someone so elegantly put it::


Keyboard warriors


People too afraid to stand up for themselves in real life, but where they are protected they fully act out and act as they please. No need to face the consequences, no need to face the people they accuse.

While in the middle of this line of thought I realised that I see plenty of this on BetaArchive as well, especially with the emerging release of Windows 8. We have people on the forum (and on the net overall) teen-raging about how bad Windows 8 is, that it will be the doom of Microsoft and so on and so forth. Out of 10000 of these "experts" I can say only ONE is qualified enough to even express an opinion about the future of Microsoft. The rest think they know anything because they accomplished the glorious task of downloading the CTP, install it on some outdated PC and clicked around in the various menus. All of a sudden they are experts and qualified to judge the product overall. It's like you sit your rear end into a car and can instantly know how well it drives, how comfortable it is, the quality of the car and on top of that, the future of the company that made it. If all of us were like that we would had solved all the problems in the world by now.

Then we got the issue of some calling themselves "beta testers". I've seen plenty of this on this forum. And I can tell you that the absolute majority of you are NOT testers. You don't even have a fraction of the qualifications needed to be a tester, nor do you know what's involved of testing software. The proper title if you are evaluator. You download and evaluate the software, test it and see if it fits with your hardware, software and the method of how you use your computer. You're not a tester. You don't report any bugs, you don't do extensive testing of the components of the operating system, you don't submit fixes and changes and you don't have the tools or knowledge to do deep level debugging.

You're evaluating the software.

Nothing wrong with that, but you're not a beta tester. You're not a doctor or medic because you know how to apply a bandage or splinter a broken arm.

But all these self proclaimed so called "testers" say that Windows 8 will fail because it uses the new Metro design. They say it's clumsy, that it's useless with keyboard and mouse and that people will hate it. But has any of these people realised that Metro is for tablet use? Microsoft has already shown that the regular start button, tiny windows buttons and small objects are quite useless for your fingers, so they go with the market and develop Windows for use with tablets. Apple has already done it with iOS and Google with Android. Do you think Apple intended iOS to be used with mouse and keyboard? Granted, Microsoft may push Metro a bit too hard from the start considering that people got used to a start button since Windows 95, but consider this:

You don't need to upgrade. Microsoft may very well have intended Windows 8 to be used mainly on tablets and touchscreen desktops. You can still use Windows 7 for your touch-less desktop or laptop. Looking at the new features in Windows 8 there's little that benefits you directly unless you got a tablet or touchscreen monitor. So Microsoft may have intended Windows 8 to be for new and emerging tablet users while the rest keep using Windows 7. As with all new technology it's hard to adapt to new ideas and methods so there will naturally be a lot of resistance.

Let's roll back to some time in 1994. Microsoft are announcing that they are working on a spanking brand new operating system. One that will make it easier to use computers, one that will bring a computer into every home and make it fun to use. Be gone all old computers with ASCII menus and speaker sounds. Be gone with the basic requirement of a Ph.D to start a word processor. The main feature in this revolutionary OS would be the new Start Menu. A centralised way of keeping tabs of all your applications and give you easy access to every corner of your computer. Now, at the same time as this info is rolled out all over the news (for you young people of the Xbox generation here: Internet wasn't as common as it is today. It existed but not a lot of people used it) there was a great moan. This moan shook the trees, made the earth rumble and poked several holes in the ozone layer. The moan was about the new Start Menu. People wondered what it was good for, the current use of DOS was good enough and that it was too odd with the new design. It would be the ending of Microsoft they said! Now I remember all this, it was all the way back in 1994 and I was only 15 years old, but I had already some 10 or so years of computer use under the belt so I knew how to use a computer. Sure, the start menu wasn't for me but I guessed that it would be a lot simpler for new users. No need to edit their config.sys anymore.

So, warp back to 2012 and we got Windows 8 standing on the track ready to take off. Once again the mountains cracked, trees fell and the moon was ready to be knocked out of its trajectory. Oh noes, Metro is here! A new way to use your Windows operating system. Now we got tiles! What are we going to do!? Gone is the start menu and Microsoft directs you to use Metro as much as possible for all your application needs. Again we stand in front of a major design change which will alter the way we manage our systems. But one major difference between Windows 95 and Windows 8 is that we don't have so many technological changes at the core. We're not shifting to a brand new 128bit core, or radically changing the underlying foundation of Windows. What we basically have is a freshly updated Windows 7 with a brand new user interface and some overall UI changes throughout the system. Unlike with Windows 95 there won't be any major issues running all our Windows 7 software, nor will it be any issues with hardware drivers etc since it's all more or less the same. And on top of that comes the fact that people don't need to upgrade since most of the major changes are for tablet users.

But people still need to moan, all these "experts" need to say that it will be the undoing of Microsoft and that Linux will rise and dominate (haven't we heard that every year for what, 20 years now?) etc etc. The same happens with every new version apparently. People said Windows 95 would kill Microsoft and it ended up being the most sold and popular operating system EVER, boosting Microsoft to never before seen heights. They said Microsoft would go away when they released Windows Me (which to me was a distaster - I couldn't even get the thing installed, but I've helped countless of people install it and use it without any issues), but Windows Me was basically just a quick fix between Windows 98 (SE) and Windows XP (Windows 2000 was mainly aimed at business use). Windows Vista is an another example of a loathed OS - an OS that wasn't so bad really, but people expected it to run well on their 5+ year old hardware, hardware designed for Windows XP! Sure Windows Vista used a lot of RAM etc, but it was a major step in development and with the proper modern hardware it ran like a train on speed. New operating systems are designed to run on modern hardware, not on your old pre-owned hardware that was initially designed for the previous generation. I remember people complaining about Windows 2000 running slow on their Pentium 100Mhz machines, and that Windows 95 ran slow on the 486 machines. Nothing new here folks, move along!

So, back to these so called "critics". There are plenty of them, but more or less none of them know what they are talking about. All they have is an opinion - an opinion based on their very limited use of the product they critizise. But they think their opinion is worth more than anyone elses, and their voice their opinion in a way they would never do in real life - without any regards or respect for the vast amount of development time, without any regards of respect for the people behind it, and especially without any regards or respect for other people with different opinions.

If you don't like it then fine, we can all go along with our lives with that knowledge without the need to hang ourselves from the nearest tree stump. But factor in that the main basis of your negative views are done without the consideration of what the developers wanted and intended and that they may differ from what you expected (i.e hyped up). And if you want to say it sucks then you better have a good solid box of arguments to back it up with. We can all agree that some games should have taken better care of (more bugtesting, more development etc) but in the Real World (tm) there's something called Money. And those comes in amounts you will never see. Those piles of money usually dictates when it's ready for a release or not. Then factor in release schedules, seasons, international releases, advertisements etc and you'll quickly understand that in some cases it's better to release it 99.8% finished than hold on to it and see it scrapped completely. Because in the end you may lose a lot more by missing a particular release season just so you could fix some bugs that perhaps 1% of your potential customers may experience. A bug that can easily be fixed in a quick patch anyway. You still get your product sold and you can release a patch that fixes or adds some more stuff.

I've gone a bit off the trail of what I intended to write about, but the main thread here was that most critics on the net should shut up and be happy that they even have a game or application to use. In my first example people should be happy that they have Mass Effect 3, it could have very well been scrapped during development (Sin Episodes anyone?) and then no one would have seen anything. Granted it may have bugs etc but the game or application doesn't "suck" because of it. Considering the vast resources needed to make a game today (resources exceeding even the most costly Hollywood productions) there are bound to be problems along the way - even severe ones. But in the end they made the product and released it. They created something unique and released it upon the world. After that they may learn from their mistakes and perhaps get the chance to make a new better product, fix things that were problematic in the previous product (Vista > Windows 7 for example). Or they may go the easy route and dumb it down and make it worse (Windows 98 to Me).

Either way, don't judge the book by its cover, don't judge the girl by her face (or body), and definately don't judge the product before you've tried it. And respect the amount of time and resources put into it. Be constructive, email the company and give them your opinion. Enroll in beta programs and make PROPER tests and feedback to make the product better. And you're not some Nostadamus - you have no idea if something will fall or not based on a single product or your (limited) opinions about it. The Internet is not an excuse for you to act like an a-hole and any developer or tester reading your flames will be a little bit less enthusiastic into making the next version. Think about that.

Gamers are the worst kind and least appreciative bunch of people I've met. Self proclaimed beta "experts" sitting around on a forum making prophecies about a product they have barely seen is the second kind of worst. Be respectful to yourself and others, and try to help instead of just sitting behind your screen screaming out profanities about something you tried.

If you want to be a good critic then make a blog, write down extensive facts about the product you tested. Tell us not only about the bad things but also about the good things. Give us examples by screenshots or videos. Then people will respect your opinions and facts. Don't hype up things - raising peoples expectations above what the product could ever deliver only breed more hate and bad critisism.

Now I am going back for my second round of Mass Effect. I didn't buy and spend 50+ hours on the game for the ending, I spent it for the experience of the game. The environments, characters, choices. If all I wanted was to see the ending then I can dig up the nearest crappy Youtube-video or just rent a movie and fast-forward to the end.

Enjoy your product. And don't bash it unless you really know what you're doing.

--------
I reserve the right to have speeling errurs and drift off... mmm, chocolates! ... a bit since I wrote this while watching an episode of The Game of Thrones.

Bravissimo. I'm also tired of self-proclaimed "experts" deriding anything they don't like. With regards to your example of Mass Effect 3, I've noticed a few small errors (and one show-stopper in the "From Ashes" DLC), but nowhere NEAR enough to make me feel the game was unfinished. Show me a single product in the history of software development that has been bug-free from Day One. I've tried to defend ME3 to friends of mine who bought it and started trashing it before they'd even finished the second mission, and they just WILL NOT LISTEN. Same goes for Win8 haters and self-proclaimed experts on BetaArchive. I'm not a computer expert. I know this. But I know a fair amount, and I expect my views to be respected, not dismissed or derided simply because somebody else's ego is overinflated. It's just the GIFT at work, I know, but it's still incredibly frustrating and makes it impossible to have a rational discussion about any controversial product.

PS: If you're playing the PC version of ME3, the Appcrash glitch in "From Ashes" can be fixed by activating the command HUD and keeping it open for a few seconds after the first flashback video ends.

I applaud you for saying this, you are a scholar and a gentleman. I've been saying this since Metro was released, and noone's given two [censored]. I only hope that some of the whiny drama-queens that enjoy bashing Metro see this and maybe decide to spend more than 10 minutes with the operating system and take a critical look at who Microsoft is aiming it at.

News flash: If you've downloaded WinCP and installed it, you're not its target audience! The target audience, rather, is people who cannot into computer. People who have been traditionally fodder for Apple conversions because it 'just works' and it's "easy to use." This is the (obscenely large) market that Microsoft is attempting to break into by reimagining Windows and the way it works from the ground up. It's not for power users. It's not for businesses (mostly), and it's not for retards who think they're hot [censored] for making a 3fps FRAPS video of WinCP in a virtual machine and complaining they can't run Crysis, or complaining that the Start Button is gone (which is a lie). The Consumer Preview is still unfinished. You cannot pass judgement based on an unfinished product. If you do, you are a tool and all your validity is straight down the [censored].

End rant.

In addition, Tandyman, I would note that the tools for power users are still THERE. You simply need to learn a new way of ACCESSING them. The fact that the complainers aren't willing to make that effort doesn't speak well of their quality as reviewers.

I just need to say about them one thing: OH MY GOD!!

Seriously, thanks for posting this. This stuff has been frustrating me for some time now.

I agree with this 100%.

I remember when Vista came out some people were complaining about the fact that the Start button lacked text......then they complanined about how it didn't work on their old P4 with a small amount of RAM.

I'm prob going to get Win8, it looks epic, especially on tablets.

And this is why it failed. OEMs were lazy and made crappy drivers, and retards who complained it wouldn't run on their Pentium III/900 (I've run vista on a 900mhz PIII. It was usable, but not exactly quick).

Fun fact 1: The Vista install image was prepared on a Pentium 4.
Fun fact 2: Vista works on a Cyrix 6x86 (that’s a Pentium1-class cpu).

Fun fact 3: I know the guy who made that video

Don't have enough time to read the entire post but complaining about a game, for any reason is something I support entirely because it puts pressure on the developer to make a better game. The last thing we need is more lazy content creators like Infinity Ward who just recycle material and leave loads of bugs and problems with the game engine. If you and thousands of other people make a big deal of something and say "This is awful, I'm not going to buy your games anymore." then, at least the smaller groups (Since they're not expecting millions to just buy it anyway) will wake up and issue a patch or make improvements for the next game.

Some quick examples of how complaining gets you what you want:
Left 4 Dead - Everyone protested when the sequel was announced so Valve made and released free DLC.
Crysis 2 - Didn't include DirectX 11 or any PC features so everyone moaned and called it ugly for months, they then released an update with high-resolution textures and DirectX 11 support.
Call of Duty - When Modern Warfare 2 was released without dedicated servers everyone went apesh*t. Every game since Modern Warfare 2 has had dedicated servers.
Every game where people complain about bugs generally gets a patch fixing it, I don't need to list specific games because there are far too many.

My point being that even though some of these issues weren't even significant, like there wasn't a single problem with Left 4 Dead at all, if you group together and complain about something the developers are going to respond. And who can argue against getting free patches and updates, or better games in the future because of it?

+ 100% , every day i see this kinda [censored]

Edit: wow there is abit of a "hard man " attitude in this thread

*sees fighting*
*watches fighting*
*gets bored of fighting*
*deletes it*
*tells everyone to continue fighting via PM instead of publicly on the boards*

If you want to fight, do it via PM instead of publicly on the boards.

*leaves thread*

really? All this time I spent writing walls of beauty? Gone? That's mean, I didn't backup anything.

I agree with you here linuxlove. I wrote my piece just because I was disappointed at how people behave online, and I am not going against gamers to describe BetaArchives situation. I didn't intend it to become some kind of bashfest against me or others. But fine, at this point it's pointless to discuss this since my message clearly wasn't interpreted the way I intended, and that some people reacted agressively and instead started with insults rather than constructive critisism in a decent manner. Sorry for expressing myself on Andy's and my BA blog.

Also, rootbeerblue45, you never told me your age no. Your profile did that for me. And experience does come with age, ask your parents or anyone significantly older than you. But don't worry, I don't have anything against you, nor any bad opinions about you. You seem to have a few unpicked bones with me tho. That's fine, I don't hold any grudges. We're all just members on a forum here, no need to make it childish.

I am going to leave the this topic now. If anyone wants a decent discussion about this and hear out my point of view, and at the same time let me hear out yours then contact me in private as it seems impossible to do it here on the forum.

Well met!

Rootbeer ill send you the posts that got removed if you PM me.

It was a joke, I don't give a damn.

Agreed. Every time something changes, people complain.
In regards to Mass Effect 3, yes the ending was a little bit crap, and I couldn't get it to connect to the EA
servers at one point but the game was great.

All these complainers are annoying.

There will always be people who will say they are experts in one area when in fact they are not.

To be blunt my opinion is that there are no experts as its just funny to watch the arguing so I agree with LinuxLove because its the same thing over n over. Windows 8 will not be the end of Microsoft there will always be another Microsoft product and as of now Windows 9 is very much in development (am I joking no I was actually being serious). I presently find myself in a quandary because I like checking out new products and Windows 8 is appealing because im on a rather old tx2z-1000 laptop and my desktop is the testing machine.