Have you ever seen a game's TapTap rating go from 9.1 to 5.4 in just five days? Ash Echoes did exactly that. Even more absurd: after the rating tanked, a flood of suspected bot accounts started swarming TapTap to artificially push the score back up to 5.8 — and one eagle-eyed player documented it all with screenshots.
According to the OP (original poster), in just two hours on the night of January 14 — between 11 PM and 1 AM — they caught over 50 bot accounts posting positive reviews. By January 15, they had screenshot evidence of over 150 suspected fake accounts giving 4-5 star ratings. By January 16, the count skyrocketed to over 300. On January 17, another 40-plus appeared.
The OP noted that "around 98% of these accounts were brand new — most registered on the very same day, and some hadn't even bothered to change their default usernames before posting reviews." In other words, bots were mass-creating accounts with no effort to disguise themselves, in what players mockingly called a "Myanmar scam-center-level operation" (缅北式操作, slang for brazen, low-effort fraud).
> As of January 17th, I've captured screenshots of 40+ suspected bot accounts giving 4-5 star ratings. 100% are brand-new accounts. TapTap customer service said they'd respond within 3 days.
The official compensation was equally baffling — the devs offered 50 weapon gacha pulls, split across five days. Players in the comments reacted with sarcasm: "I'm literally crying." Some even claimed the company was now "seeding" positive content with free 4-star characters to dilute the negative reviews.
The comment section was split on the matter. Some players offered a nuanced take: "The game is actually pretty fun, but the niche gameplay and mediocre visuals make it hard to resonate with most people. Tencent's aggressive, non-stop marketing backfired spectacularly — the rating implosion was inevitable."
Others pointed out that the bot problem wasn't limited to TapTap — NGA itself was also compromised: "Isn't NGA full of shills praising the gameplay? A game that's basically an ultimate mashup and they still hype it up. Meanwhile on social media outside NGA, bots and diehard fans keep posting about how fun it is. It's no wonder the devs cling to NGA so tightly — it's practically the only place left with any positive discussion."
Someone else bluntly stated: "Bot accounts? Which game launch DOESN'T buy bot reviews these days?" — implying that astroturfing is now an industry-wide dirty secret, and Ash Echoes just happened to get caught red-handed.
From the TapTap rating cliff-dive, to hundreds of suspected bot accounts flooding in to artificially prop up the score, to the laughable '50 pulls over 5 days' compensation package — Ash Echoes has delivered what may be the most absurd rating defense campaign in mobile gaming for early 2024. Whether TapTap's promised 'response within 3 days' will actually satisfy players remains to be seen. After all, amid the 'Myanmar scam-center mobile game' memes, this drama is far from over.
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