EA's Dungeon Keeper Ratings Below a 5 Go To Email Black Hole

fplatten writes "I would definitely call this unethical manipulation of the ratings system: the Worst Company in America, EA is routing all ratings made in game of 1 to 4 stars as an email that is sent to EA, but all 5 star ratings are routed to the Google Play store, where its rating is currently 4.3 out of 5."

Comments

No rating API

[tepples]

Why on earth is google allowing anyone to submit ratings via any API

It's not. From the article:

Thus the only way to give the game something other than full marks is to say you'll award it five stars, then actually rate it less when taken to the marketplace.

In other words, the 5 Stars button goes to the app's page in Google Play Store, and the 1-4 Stars button goes to the "leave feedback" screen. A player can leave a lower rating by tapping 5 Stars, waiting for the Play page to open, and tapping a lower star rating.

Re:Right: Beat them @ their OWN game

[fisted]

You are kidding right? "Solving" this by abusing the hosts file is the most crude solution one could possibly come up with, and, btw, renders /. entirely inoperable (what a loss...).

Guess either you aren't the real apk, or you indeed have the poor technical understanding you seem infamous for.

for the record, slashdot sets a cookie. it's called betagroup. It appears to contain an integer value between 0 and 99. The poor souls where this number is sufficiently small (ATM <20) get redirected to beta. The others do not.
In case the solution has not become obvious yet modify that cookie.

-- "But I use chrome, you insensitive clod!"