Actually, many reviews consider Warframe to be one of the best current games. However, there has recently been a review bombing on Steam that has significantly affected the ratings. What is behind this?
The ratings are suffering severely: Currently, the recent reviews for Warframe on Steam stand at 57% positive ratings, resulting in a “mixed” status (as of September 15 at 6:15 PM). This is a significant decline, as just in July the ratings were still at the best possible ‘overwhelmingly positive’ at 96%.
Who is rating so poorly? Most of the negative reviews come from the Chinese community. The main concern is about translation issues that bother the Chinese players.
There are even accusations of racism from fans against the Canadian developers, whom they label as an “anti-Chinese front” and creatively using punctuation to turn it into a middle finger.
A particularly large issue is the perceived poor treatment of a volunteer translator, from whom the developers at Digital Extremes previously parted ways.
Translator Fired, Players Outrage
What happened? The volunteer translator Ji, who has only referred to himself as “the translator” for quite some time, was working for the Steam department of Warframe and translated content into simplified Chinese.
The position was offered to him after he had often translated patch notes into Chinese. This also earned him a good reputation and popularity in the community.
However, at the beginning of September, he was dismissed by the developers. The reason given was a violation of a non-disclosure agreement (“NDA”) and disrespect towards the development team.
This is how the translator sees the situation: From the translator’s perspective, however, he bears no blame. He claims that after signing the agreement, he never spoke about internal matters. It happened that he shared internal chat conversations with the community, but he was not aware of an NDA at that time.
He also admits to having spoken poorly about the work of the official translators. He called them poor and said it sounded like a machine translation. While he did apologize for this, it seems that was not enough.
Furthermore, the translators allegedly treated the volunteers like “tools” and paid little attention to their opinions, resulting in translations that he felt could have been done better. You can find his statement in a short post on reddit, with comments and reactions in a second.
This is how fans feel about it: Although the review bombing already shows a clear sign, many players have mixed feelings about the whole matter.
On one hand, fans agree with him that the translation is not good in places or even consistently poor, so they cannot understand why a good and community-respected developer is being fired.
On the other hand, they also see the fault with the translator himself. The user sloppylotuspussy writes:
It seems that volunteers never see their jobs as real jobs. If you have gained more experience in real life, you might notice that it doesn’t mean you can be unprofessional just because it says “voluntary”.
You should never talk about internal matters and never insult your employers, no matter how trivial. You take concerns to your supervisors and address them discreetly. You don’t put that on social media to complain, voluntarily or not.
What MeinMMO readers say: There are also voices within our community that view all of this rather critically. The user Feynrath wrote to us via Discord:
No, I don’t understand where the fuss is coming from. I think it’s not okay to form a judgment without information on what exactly happened.
Maybe I’m being too objective or logical about it, I have no idea, but personally, I don’t like it when people don’t just research or inform themselves first.
She also finds review bombing in general inappropriate. She feels there is a lack of objectivity in viewing this from all sides: “It resembles torches and pitchforks to me.”
What does this mean for German players? The sudden negative reviews do not mean that Warframe has suddenly become a bad game. After all, Warframe still ranks among the 10 most popular MMOs on Steam.
The reviews are primarily based on players being dissatisfied with the developers, not the game itself. So if you’re not playing in Chinese, you will not notice any decline related to these reviews.
Overall, the frustration seems to primarily take place on the Chinese side. Fans elsewhere are still quite satisfied:
