Manga Drone

Genshin Impact is being review bombed following growing frustrations from the community over the game's treatment. It's been a rough few months for the gacha game, with increasing criticisms coming from fans regarding updates and events. The release of 5-star character Yoimiya was poorly received, with complaints of broken abilities and a feeling that minimal thought had been put into her overall gameplay design. Similar problems then arose with the game's next 5-star character, Baal.

An anniversary livestream in August didn't make things much better. Apart from the English stream being over an hour late, the revealed rewards for its anniversary event were slammed for being pretty stingy. Gacha game fans will know anniversaries are often pretty sweet deals developers tend to throw a ton of rewards at you, usually premium currency that could take a good month or two to grind out for. Players aren't pleased with the rewards being dished out though and, coupled with miHoYo's ongoing silence surrounding the recent problems, it's caused tensions to swell. Things seem to have finally come to a head, with angry fans taking to the game's mobile store pages in droves to leave 1-star reviews. It's not done much to the game's rating on the Apple Store, which is currently sat at a 4.5. For the Google Play Store though, it's seen the rating dip just below three stars. According to GamesRadar, it was even worse just a few hours ago, but things seem to have evened out somewhat.

That might be due to the fact that, according to one reddit post, the 1-star reviews are being reported to Google as bot reviews and removed. Google does have a policy that doesn't allow "spam or fake reviews," which explicitly prohibits manipulating app ratings. While it's not exactly the same as Steam's review bomb detection, something similar is likely happening to stop the rating from dipping too low. It hasn't stopped the anger though, with players also taking to Genshin's two official Discord servers, spamming its channels with a character emote that's become synonymous with community disappointment. Both servers currently sit on a pretty lengthy half-hour slow mode, up from the initially reported ten minutes. There's been no response from miHoYo yet. With how long the silence has already been, it's uncertain whether we'll be seeing an acknowledgement from the developer anytime soon. It's a shame because Genshin is a surprisingly fantastic experience, but poor practices will undoubtedly continue to drive players away.