The only reason we flag reviews for is stating wrong information or personal information as per steam community guidelines. (And those must be severe) We do not flag reviews for disagreeing with your feelings for price, nor for nonsense reviews or offensive language. (Which there is a lot of reviews of this type that are all still there) I can't remember your name, hence i can't remember flagging your review either, i'm the only one flagging reviews, that happens maybe once every few months.

M0nzUn

Well, there are reviews basically saying "game is boring" and some calling it a "trash game" without explanation.

So if those weren't removed, I wouldn't think they are in the habit of removing negative reviews overall, although I have seen some censorship on this subreddit before as well.

There is a difference between censorship and removing posts that violate either our subreddits or reddits rules. Reddits rules do not allow stating personal or confidential information, this does apply for wrong information by specific ex-employees as well, if you were refering to them.

Overall, i moderate in a "EU style". I've noticed that especially a lot of americans seem to feel stuff is censoring while it's perfectly acceptable from our cultural view. In that case, i'm sorry, but i do not feel like freedom of speech doesn't have a limit.

AdmiralDino

Maybe not the most constructive, but still a review. Censoring it is bad, because it artificially inflates the impression the reviews give in total. Instead devs should have asked why and tried to defend their prices based on the responses. Then someone reading the reviews could decide for themselves if the review seems baseless and/or irrelevant to them. Removing it for no other reason than "we didn't like that review" is dishonest to new potential buyers.

What OP said never happened to my knowledge. He'd need to send me his name and his review to investigate what happened. All i would have said is that we're sorry and feel the price is reasonable based on playtime per buck. He might have said that there is so many other cool games out there he can get cheaper and i'd say that he is free to get those games, but they're not Eco and we need to pay our employees. He might have said that selling more copies at less price would be more beneficial for both of us and i would have said that this is not the case, given support and refunds cost money.

That's how such a "discussion" would look. It's actually how one looks in one of the steam threads. It's fine if you don't like our prices, it's no issue for us. But we won't change it either. It's calculated to work.

AdmiralDino

I get you. I don't personally think it's overpriced, I just think it's a valid thing for someone to think, in general. And I obviously don't know what was said or not, and would expect the kind of replies you are referring to. My reply was simply in regard to the (now mysteriously deleted) comment that the alleged review in question would have been worthless.

Just to make this clear: I did not remove that comment.

Nerodon

Well, at this point we can just speculate as to why the Devs did this because we don't know exactly what was written in the review.

We have to take the situation with a grain of salt.

However... I don't think that removing reviews is ever a good idea as it has a negative kickback on the community and projects doubt on the integrity of the developpers.

I just hope its not an attempt to skew reviews on the positive just before the new patch.

EDIT: Devs have stated that they can only flag reviews to then be inspected by steam staff to review if there was indeed a breach of review posting rules. I believe this strikes out any purposeful wrongdoing from the dev side if Steam goes through with deletion of the review. Again, none of us here has read the original review so we again can only speculate as to the reason why it breached the terms and was deleted.

No, we did not flag a price review. Also, please keep in mind we do not decide if a review is actually removed. We can only flag it, a team of Steam then investigates the report and decides on their own if the review was violating steam guidelines and has to be removed. And if they remove it, it did violate the guidelines, so the flag was correct. If they do not remove it, they simply don't. No way for us to overwrite that. We cannot simply delete reviews we don't like and that's good as is.

In any case, OP please send your steam name and content of the review to [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) for investigation about what happened. As long as this didn't happen and given your newly created account please refrain from further statements of what we allegedly did - further posts will be removed, we do not tolerate wrong, unproven information on our channels.

Nerodon

Thanks for the clarification on the removal process. It helps remove any doubt of wrongful deletion if indeed steam needs to review the flag prior to removal.

Looks like this, if you're interested: https://ibb.co/Cn2wShp

//EDIT:

You have the options to choose "Offensive", "Offtopic" and "Violates Steam Community Guidelines". We never use(d) the first two.

Maybe also interesting:
We have no way to contact this team, do not know who investigates the flag and do not even get notified if the review was removed or accepted. We just see that it's no longer flagged or gone if we search for it.

ColCrabs

I’m inclined to agree with you and I absolutely love this game. I’ve had the game for a few years now and never really gotten past the point of building stone buildings:

1) because I don’t have enough friends that play and don’t really like the idea of playing with strangers,

2) even if I did play with strangers I can’t dedicate that much time to a persistent server so I’d probably miss half the game,

3) when playing on low collab 1-3 players it’s a massive grind and the friends who do play tend to give up after 16 hours of mining and wood chopping.

I think if they just added in more options for customizing a game at the start it would be more enjoyable for the average, casual player. I’ve tried to change the settings but it usually ends up either being way too easy or back to the normal grind that turns off my friends.

The only other issue is that on low collab/with few people, the bonuses from leveling up don’t slow the grind. It’s not about how quickly I can cut down a tree or how quickly I can pick up the materials, it’s about moving it to where it needs to go.

It doesn’t matter if I’m level 1 or max level, I’ll still carry the same amount back with each trip. That’s the frustrating part of the grind, the logistics and storage simulation. I realize that as you level up you can build more tech to carry more but it doesn’t mean much if people get bored in the first 20 hours of gameplay and quit because they can only carry 10 dirt and store 5 dirt in stockpiles so you have to build more stockpiles and then spend 20 minutes moving materials back and forth.

Transportation is a major part of the game though. It's actually intended to be a hassle you have to solve as a community. We will offer larger vehicles for transport, but there are no changes planned to the carry amount of the existing ones in lower tech tiers.

We do have a multiplier for resource cost and crafting time in 9.0, though. So if our defaults are just too hard for you, you will be able to tune it down to whatever you like.

-SunGod-

Wow, so I just dropped by this subreddit for the first time in a couple months to see what’s up, after I’d invested a lot of time into Eco in the past and really enjoyed it.

But man, after reading the tone and content of the company’s responses to the OP, I gotta tell ya, as an uninvolved observer just passing through, I’d have a hard time believing that the OP’s claim is false. Whoever is representing the company here might want to work on their soft skills a bit, it’s a turnoff for prospective buyer and those seeking help. Just a suggestion. Fun game, but dudes... lighten up.

Kind of hard to pass off Eco as an educational tool for environmentalism and harmony when real world support is being provided by Ivan Von Banhammer.

Well, sorry, but such allegations that essentially are fake news at this moment (i still haven't received any proof from the OP, nor as anyone here, so i could at least investigate what happened) does hurt our sales and is usually done to actively damage us. That's simply inacceptable and where stuff is inacceptable i will react accordingly - be it with a ban hammer if required. Full transparency to you.

To be very clear: Stating such wrong allegations, especially if made on purpose, is a punishable crime in my country and sueable for damages. It may not be for yours, but that's irrelevant.

If this really happened it can easily be reviewed by sending me the name and content of the review, so i can talk with my colleagues if anyone by chance happened to flag a random review for no reason while retaining other similar ones (which they surely didn't) and ask steam. In any case, if the review actually got removed, steam has made that decision, we do not decide what reviews get removed. In the end there is ultimately no way, this could have been faulty even when the review did actually exist, which i highly doubt. But then i could at least apologize for a mistake or justify the flag, that has obviously been accepted by Steam. I'm not given that opportunity, though. Someone randomly just states something would have happened with zero proof and little likelyness as i've proven. What reaction would you prefer? Me saying that's nice and cool? Saying nothing and ignoring it? Sorry, not my style.

There is no way i can please every single person on earth and hence i'm not even trying. I prefer to be who i am and until now most people were happy with that.

So for the time being until proof has been given, this is a intentional attempt to damage the games reputation with fake news. I'll be Ivan Von Banhammer to stop that if required without any regret. You can simply call me Dennis, though.

(I may also make you aware that this topic still exists, despite it is violating our platform rules, i was refering to more messages.)

ColCrabs

Thanks for the reply!

I think the option to change resource cost and crafting time will definitely help low/no-collab play throughs.

I wish I could play the game as part of a larger community to experience that group problem solving but I just don’t have the ability.

Feel free to join in on the next cycle of White-Tiger, one of our official servers, very nice and helpful community :)