737-100 from Scenery Creation released

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247

I do want an explanation at the next Dev Q&A how a developer can release a product, the number of reviews keeps going up the first so many days, but most of those votes occurred 30 days in the past, because the breakdown of Last 30 Days seems to be valid reviews after time of release, versus these mysterious reviews that come in and somehow are from 30 days or more prior to release. And these mysterious reviews are done dynamically because we see the number of votes increase dynamically.

This seems to be the result of some API call done. I think the community deserves to know if we are to trust the marketplace on how these mysterious greater than 30 days ago reviews are happening, and WHO is doing them. Is it the developer themselves, or is there someone from inside Microsoft who is using a test version of the API to manufacture reviews.

This is not a procedural thing where someone is getting reviews by cloning another product. If that was the case, the product would come into the marketplace with X reviews at the start. The number of reviews goes up throughout the N days after release. This is a direct manipulation of the review system. This is what we are being told to put our trust into. How can we trust a system that has obvious means of manipulation? A product is released. Over 3 days reviews increase, most of them glowing, but the breakdown shows the vast majority of those reviews happened supposedly more than 30 days ago.

This manipulation NEEDS to be explained to the community and the marketplace customers.

UPDATE: Yesterday, mscenery released 6 planes. Already those 5 planes have 143, 141, 130, 131, 45, and 30 votes. If you go into all 6 of those products, half the votes are “recent” and half the votes are greater than 30 days old. How is this possible for planes that were only released YESTERDAY. Black Square, I have been waiting and waiting for the Caravan Professional to release, and it finally did, and that has only 2 votes on it so far. How are these other developers able to release products, get hundreds of reviews in just hours, and have HALF of them be more than 30 days old when the product hasn’t even been out for 24 hours yet.

This does demand explanation, and it demands investigation. If your API is secure, and there is no way for developers to manufacture reviews for themselves, then it points to someone in Microsoft itself who is using testing tools or something to manufacture reviews. That is serious. Im not stating that is what happening, that is why an investigation needs to happen. But yes, this would be a worst case scenario that an employee is directly undermining the very system Microsoft is telling us to have faith in. This needs to be investigated.

The other reason WHY this needs to be investigated is, mscenery always released product at $9.99. The releases this week were all $19.99. I suspect that they may be raising prices to get what they can now before all this comes to a head. Which means that they may choose to suspend releasing product, and let this all blow over for a time. Whatever the vulnerability needs to be discovered now, while there are logs of activity and what happened.

248

Yep, I’m not wondering about the quality of the product, or the legality of them (that is up to the law firm employed by MS). I’m wondering about how they’re managing to abuse the rating system in the marketplace, and how MS allows this to continue happening.

249

I’m fairly certain the way the system works (intended or not, I’m not sure) is that if a product is a 2024 version with a 2020 counterpart, the reviews for the 2020 counterpart carry over to the 2024 product page. This would at least explain the quantity of reviews, though still leaving the major issue of quality of the reviews.

That can be double checked though in the Marketplace by looking at a product page in question and seeing if it contains the “This purchase includes the MSFS 2020 version” language. If it doesn’t, then this theory goes up in smoke. If it does, then maybe worth it to check the reviews for the 2020 product in MSFS (2020) to see if they are close/match.

250

I truthfully once thought that too. But as soon as the product goes into the 2024 Marketplace, it would have those reviews. They don’t. They increase over a 3 day period. For example, now the number of ratings is 143, 142, 143, 143, 52, 51 (just a few hours ago it was 143, 141, 130, 131, 45, and 30)

The numbers steadily go up over two days. In this case, there are PLENTY of planes in the $19.99 price range. Arantis Simulations Daedalus BS214 is $19.99. That was released 3 weeks ago. It has 15 reviews. Captain Sim C-130H-30 Hercules is $14.99 and has 5 reviews so far. Aerosachs Technam P-Mentor is $19.99 and has 16 reviews. How is it every single MScenery plane this week and last week get 143 reviews in just 2 days?

251

I’ve been following this topic for a while now and I just want to add a few thoughts for consideration:

  • I assume that there is some responsibility on the part of the company behind the market place (MS or otherwise) to ensure there is no illegalities going on. Beyond that, they aren’t really responsible for the quality of the content any more than your local mall is responsible for the rubbish the ‘As Seen On TV’ store within it sells. That goes for SimMarket as well. Mind you, misrepresentation could fall under illegality, but by no means count on them to screen for quality so…
  • If something looks suspect, it probably is. We’ve all probably taken a chance on an addon or even a whole game because we wanted it to be good. But if the screenshots exclude things or it looks like it’s probably a cockpit where half the switches are inop, it’s probably no good. Trust your instincts. And the worst case scenario is it’s actually good and you hear about it from trusted sources. Then you’re just late to the party because you waited before buying.
  • This has been going on for decades in the flight sim world. Overpriced, half baked addons that turn into abandonware, sketchy devs and misrepresented products are just a fact of life when there’s an open platform and money to be made unfortunately. AI is probably only going to make it worse too. See the previous point and be on guard.
  • With all the above points made, the market place needs to do something about the abuse of the rating system somehow. There is clearly something sketchy going on there. And while I don’t count on MP to weed out what I would consider mal-intended addons by nature, allowing abuse of the rating system does introduce some level of complicity on their part.

Just be careful friends, and when in doubt, just wait. Reserve impulse buys for trusted developers only and be suspicious of anything that doesn’t look right. The best way to weed these things out is to not reward them with sales.

252

Yes. I take full responsibility for buying Death Stranding :slight_smile:

253

Or it’d be nice if they came out and told us the reviews are legit if they are. I kind of think they probably are… Assuming there is either no rule, or it’s impossible to tell if it’s developer owned accounts putting in the initial reviews.

254

It’s most likely that they have a dedicated fanbase sat on some discord somewhere and the devs say ‘its out, go vote it up’. All devs do this to some degree, but some communities are tighter knit than others.

Where that discord is? I don’t know, it’s probably one of those things where you know if you’re in that circle, otherwise it’s too opaque to see.

255

It is kind of hard to get customers to actually rate products. You have to actually have purchased the product in order to rate it. That typically means a customer has to purchase the product, then actually make use of the product in the sim, and if they are so impressed, they then log back into the Marketplace, search for the item they purchased, and rate it. The liklihood of 143 people doing that in about 20 hours is seriously low. Especially considering they released 6 products on the same day, and 4 of their products are already sitting at 143 reviews in that 20 hours.

As for the suggestion it is probably based off some Discord for a large MScenery fantatic fans. IF those were all valid reviews, then the 30 day total would equal the total review total. For the 4 products that have 143 reviews, all 4 have 72 votes that occurred in the last 30 days, and the rest happened greater than 30 days ago. For a product released only 20 hours ago.

I appreciate people wanting to be fair. I’m not making statements about quality of the product. I’m making statements about patterns of review ratings that we see with this particular vendor, and how those patterns don’t match any other vendor.

256

With how easy it is to rig the ratings, apparently, this restriction is probably more important than it may seem.

257

A discord for Mscenery?? Heck you’re lucky if you can even find a company listing anywhere or a link to a website.

258

As I said previously,

this dev must have something to do with RU or UA but UA is not so expected. In case it is UA and it can be maybe set as UA donate officialy by MS (as An225 was), I would then maybe be satisfied with my donate, not to RU. Look at this dev historic portfolio - russian aircraft and helicopters that only this kind of user know best. I’m old Warshaw pact block people (also not army fighter pilot with no access from beginning due my health certification from that time) also from history so I know what I’m talking about. Is some one competent to say news finally???

How this perfect An225 lives now, you can only dream inside the FS2024, on other case. Who cares???

259

The thing is, even if they have 100 people or accounts, it only costs what ever percentage MP takes from each sale. If they ‘purchase’ their own product through the MP, most of the money goes right back to them, they only lose the MP cut. Who knows what’s really going on behind the scenes but, what it boils down to is that it only costs them a few $$$ for each 5 star review which is probably better money spend than on legit advertising to bump their products up to the top of the ‘highest rated’ list on MP.

260

hmmmmm

I think I have some good idea. Why this dev still didn’t sell very expected IL-76 variants, or An-124, or any other heli like MI-24??? Just a though… Something odd is here…

261

If they were doing that, it would not be something that needed investigation. But if a valid review is done, it shows as a review done in the last 30 days. In the past most the reviews for this vendor have been in the > 30 day review total (so a day or so after release, they have Total Review: N + 2, Reviews Last 30 Days: 2) which shows that most those review did NOT go through the game UI.

The only recent change is this vendor now has its total and the 30 days reviews total is generally half the total (So 143 total, 72 last 30 days).

This is not a case of the vendor having 143 MSFS accounts, purchasing it own product, then reviewing. Many of these reviews that come in, they are going into the > 30 days ago bucket. That CAN’T happen in the game Marketplace UI. It is happening some other way in order to be back dated somehow.

262

This is not a case of the vendor having 143 MSFS accounts, purchasing it own product, then reviewing. Many of these reviews that come in, they are going into the > 30 days ago bucket. That CAN’T happen in the game Marketplace UI. It is happening some other way in order to be back dated somehow.

These over 30 day reviews might just be a bug in the Marketplace review system, not like it would be the first bug in MSFS. The vendor having 100+ reviews within a day or two of release is a problem though, they’re clearly gaming the system.

263

hmmm

my bad I didn’t recognize this previously on MP, or at other addons, devs… :slight_smile: but good try…

264

Yeah, I don’t dabble in the MP much at all unless it’s to get something I can only get there so I honestly don’t know a lot about it. All I know is that it sounds like something sketchy is going on and it seems that it would be possible to artificially inflate your product’s rating.

From a strictly neutral stand point, even if this plane was legitimately great, IMHO it’s still underhanded to game the system like that even if it’s technically not against the rules and I hope it gets addressed. I don’t care that it’s being sold regardless of how terrible the plane might be, but if they’re abusing the review system to misrepresent the quality of the add on or boost it up the list of highest rated products, that’s just dirty.

Until then, as always, buyer beware.

265

But this is that most important here because description of this dev addons lie what exactly you buy…

266

I really hate to say it, but it doesn’t ‘lie’.

The only actual product description is:
“Highly detailed model, fully animated Detailed exterior and cockpit Realistic engine and flight behavior Frame rate friendly in single and multiplayer High resolution textures (8K, PBR materials)”

‘Highly detailed’ and ‘realistic’ is subjective. They don’t list ANY specific features. The rest of the AI slop text is just about the actual 737. It’s extremely vague, but they aren’t promising anything in terms of tangible features.

If you’re running a commerce platform like that, you can’t really not allow people not to sell something just because it’s not very good. My local grocery store would be half empty if that were the case.

Yes, we can all read between the lines and see that it’s somewhat misleading, but objectively, there’s no actual lie in that description. Your definition of detailed and realistic may and will vary from someone else’s.

I’m not defending the developer here, I’m just being realistic. That is why it is so important for us to vote with our wallets in this hobby. These guys are hardly the first people to take advantage of the voracity of flight sim hobbyists. The minute this stops paying off for these guys, they’ll go away.

Edit/Addition: I just jumped in this thread to offer my thoughts on looking out for this kind of garbage. I’ve been in the hobby for about 30 years now and devs like this have come and gone. You learn to spot this trash a mile away after a while which is why I just wanted to caution everyone. Fundamentally, there’s nothing stopping people from selling you garbage, it’s up to you not buy it.