Lost Ark Gets Review-Bombed as Players Vent Their Frustration
Gamers looking to sink their teeth into Amazon Games' Lost Ark might be getting put off by the game's massive increase in negative reviews as a result of queue issues. The fate that Lost Ark is suffering from is known as review-bombing - a term used to describe the process of a group of players flooding one of a game's public review outlets with negative scores to discourage other gamers from purchasing the title. Recent victims of review bombing include Hitman 3 and the much-maligned Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition.
Lost Ark is a free-to-play MMORPG intended to bolster Amazon's growing catalog of video games. The first build of the game was released in South Korea back in 2019 before making its way to Russia and Japan and finally North America. Fans of the MMORPG genre have been anticipating Lost Ark's arrival in North American territories for quite some time now, and the game has managed to build a decent amount of hype for itself within various gaming communities. However, now that the game has made its way overseas, it would appear that many players are struggling with long queue times, which in turn is preventing them from enjoying the game to the fullest.
Some gamers are not happy with this development, and as a result are leaving negative reviews for the game on Steam. As pointed out by Reddit user inlovewithcindy and later picked up by Game Rant, the aggregate score of the game dropped from "overwhelmingly positive" to "mixed" in just two days. This essentially means that the average reviewer was leaving a positive comment when the game was released in North America on February 11, but the overall sentiment of the user reviews turned more negative as more people left feedback.
As evidenced by the comments on inlovewithcindy's post, plenty of players are still enjoying their time with Lost Ark. The game is still receiving generally positive reviews from critics as well, so it would appear that the practice of review-bombing is likely the cause of this lower score rather than genuine, fair criticism. Hopefully, conversation surrounding the game can remain civil and avoid becoming too vitriolic.
There very well may be persistent issues with queue times in Lost Ark, but that can often come with the territory with new or expanding live-service titles. Some frustration from interested players can certainly be warranted, but the fact that Lost Ark is a free game makes genuine anger a bit unjustified. The game is certainly getting a lot of attention, so Amazon will most likely put a good deal of effort into cutting down these queue issues.
Source: inlovewithcindy/Reddit (via Game Rant)