So i have heard about something interesting...
Xeroshi
Member Posts: 182
Apparently there is a controversy about the diverse characters in SoD. Personally i dont mind they are written well enough and fit well enough in the world, besides no one gave a crap about Dorn being gay. and heres the thing, if you've played a single BG game you would know you aren't required to have these characters in your party. So can someone please explain to me what the big deal is?
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Horribly public relations work by Beamdog. During development one writer gave an interview where she put forth some very questionable views, which have been interpreted as bad signs for the game.
Then SoD was released. The game has its faults, the writing has been criticized regularly. So it's no surprise that NPCs were found which seemingly fit the perceived warning signs.
That and the volatile nature of the NPCs (lgbt content) prompted serious valid and lots of immature critiques.
Two days in or so a lead developer made a post on this forum asking for good reviews to cover up the bad.
People will tell you that wasn't the intention, but it would be the effect in any case.
That post fanned the flames and made the immature people stick around for a few days longer.
Which drew the ire of the other side. So a nasty flame war was the result.
A shame. It made many of those with valid critiques loose interest as well. Because their posts were often lumbed in with trolls and viciously attacked.
Beamdog should have stuck to the golden rule when dealing with "twitter outrage". Those peole are too lazy to put on pants and protest outside.
Ignore them.
We also left out a certain tweet directed at feminists to come to the aid of the developers and interviews that reinforced the whole thing. All of it added fuel to the fire.
When attacked by far right trolls, I don't think it is unreasonable to ask for reasonable people to assist.
Sure, some people angry about the fake zeros gave fake 10s to try balance things out. They want BG3 after all. Anything between 4 and 8 would be a genuine review.
It doesn't matter about numbers, ANY review from someone who had actually played the game would be "positive" in comparison to the vitriolic fake reviews that where appearing.
The Lord of the Rings text adventure from 1985 was a particularly nasty early example of a game that had bugs.
1) He asked if you played the game and enjoyed it to consider leaving a review. He did not just ask for "positive reviews". Unlike the people leaving negative reviews, he wanted reviews from people that played the game.
2) It is amazing that certain people care so much for who might have "put fuel on the fire", and care so very little about who started the fire in the first place. By dint of curious coincidence, they also can be reliably counted on to bring up an inoffensive line in an interview. And to downplay how much of the backlash was due entirely to the existence of a transgender character.
To answer OP's question:
The game was controversial because there was a transgendered character, and because one of Minsc's joke selection quotes referenced Gamergate. This enraged a mysterious group of internet people who talk about "SJWs" a lot, which led to them discovering a months-old interview that wasn't even about SoD and an older thread on this forum (neither of which had caused any controversy at the time), and deciding that evil SJWs (embodied by one of Beamdog's writers, Amber Scott) were ruining games forever.
Like every other time that a woman is ruining games forever, this mysterious group responded by harassment and threats towards her, as well as a coordinated campaign of spamming multitudes of angry 1-or-0-star (depending on the format) reviews on Metacritic and GOG. On Steam, where you have to actually own the game to leave a review, their efforts were far less successful, though they did downvote good reviews en masse to make negative ones appear first.
It is due to this deceitful campaign that Trent asked that if people played SoD and really liked it, it would be great if they could leave a review, both to counter the many obviously fradulent reviews (most of which just screech about SJWs) and to lift the spirits of the team. This garnered an immediate backlash from people with opinions like those expressed earlier in the thread (because obviously the people to be upset at here are Beamdog), so he deleted the tweet.
It is worth noting that SoD's reviews have been good overall, hovering in the 70-80% positive on both professional Metacritic and on the less susceptible to fraud Steam reviews.
This all has been covered to death through a multitude of mostly closed threads on the forum. I'd recommend checking up on the "Beamdog statement on Siege of Dragonspear", which is stickied at the top of the forum. Beyond that, read at your own risk - many threads got into dozens of pages of argument.
Then you state that the purpose of said reviews should come from people who liked the game and is to counter others (not mitigate, but straight up speaking in opposition of) as well as lift the spirits. Meaning it needs to be positive else it doesn't have the desired effect.
Seems to me you've just proven my point there.
Before it goes out of control, @Xeroshi, have you gotten an answer you've been seeking?