Hello gamers and GOG Team,

I have been following what people were saying about Surviving Mars since its release, and I've noticed that votes (upvotes or downvotes) on the various reviews were regularly "reset" with all votes disappearing and the reviews ranked chronologically over again. Look at it now: 20 days after release and three review votes...

Is this a database glitch or is there some "manipulation" here to avoid mixed reviews getting the top of the list early and impacting the sales?

Maybe I'm missing something obvious but I'm curious. To the random user like me, this may look like a lack of transparency.

Some other games also suffered this problem.
All votes for reviews are reset to zero.

Curious. What was the state of it before it was 'reset'? And how many reviews from how long?

I doubt they would be trying to hide specific reviews or low scores... And to avoid review bombing seems equally unlikely, as even heavily flaws games get fairly generous reviews here for their nostalgic state.

This means likely it's a Database issue. Most likely the ID of the game gets updated in the database and then detaches from the reviews from that point; maybe moving the old version to a 'classic' version or something. This seems the easiest and most plausible. If the reviews are recent and lost, that could be when they had to restore a portion of the DB due to corruption, but that seems fairly unlikely if reviews are say over a month old...

Another option might just be cleaning it up, games marked to be reset because say 90% of the reviews aren't from people who bought the game on GoG. Or maybe resetting certain games will give a more realistic and updated state of the game(s) from more recent reviews rather than older ones. I've seen some games where reviews are more notifications, like certain games 'phoning home' before the Dev got that removed... so if a majority of the reviews no longer possibly can cover the game after it has been fixed and updated, perhaps that is cause for a reset.

I planed to make a list for games that have this bug.
After some initial works, I think recently added new games all have this bug.

I did a quick review a short while ago. I've been keeping my eye on it, because I have nothing better to do. It started at "0 of 0 users found this helpful" of course. Then it went to "0 of 1". a while later it went back to "0 of 0". Then it went to "1 of 1". Now its back at "0 of 0". If this is intentional manipulation, then the person doing it really sucks at manipulation.

Indeed. I think this whole situation is very easily covered by the old saying: "Never ascribe to malice..."

I think what it actually is, is a glitch in the database.

Never blame incompetence or malice for what is more easily blamed on a software glitch.

Incompetence and this „error“ seem like they go along well.

How did the 'glitch' get into the software? ;)

Who says it's a glitch?

When databases grow beyond a certain size, they start taking a long time and might short circuit results early because it's taking too long. This is starting to sound more like a timeout issue, and if the database is rebuilt so it's more efficient, the problem may go away.

I didn't. See the post I quoted for your answer though.

I was just throwing out that it could be limitations of the software and size of the database.

Sure, but could as well be an error made during a change some programmer did.

We'll probably never know...

You areright. I think we can agree, that the correction of this „whateveritis“ is more important then what created it.