Description of the issue: Instantly on publish, the developer known for mass publishing super-low quality airplanes, instantly achieves 5.0 review scores from suspiciously exactly 40 accounts. One airplane has 4.7 (43), which i assume is the 3 real reviews already pulling down the fabricated score.
FREQUENCY OF ISSUE
How often does this occur for you (Example: Just once, every time on sim load, intermittently)?
Every time i visit the ms store.
REPRODUCTION STEPS
Please list clear steps you took in order to help our test team reproduce the same issue:
Airplane
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Find any MSCENERY developed newest airplane.
YOUR SETTINGS
Im on PC - Steam.
FIX?
Remove all reviews made by these accounts, which should be easily identified by these perfect scores.
AND: Add a negative filter on creator filter pane, allowing the user to filter out all of the MSCENERY developed content, as they mass-publishing content clogs up the store, not allowing me to find other higher quality content made by other developers.
So yes. 40 5 star reviews plus 3 1 star reviews would give a 4.7 star rating. That blows my mind how blatant the bot voting is here to try to push sales
There already is a developer filter. Turn them all on, then untick the ones you don’t want. It’s there in the SU5 beta at least, but I honestly don’t remember if we had that in SU4 as well or not.
Going by previous attempts at poking around, I had already found that Microsoft 100% know who is leaving reviews as the data that gets sent to the Marketplace includes your unique user ID or GUID. They know what, when, who, and how reviews were left. Correlate that with all the reviews for a just released product, and you have your 40 users. Scan the database for all their 5 star reviews for the developer in question, and cull them from the database.
Looking at that data again, the relevant fields there are:
"Id": "<HEX characters here>" - This is the who, hence I removed my unique ID from the post. "BuildID": "1.6.34.0" - Build of the sim "ItemID": "fs24-creativemesh-johnson-creek-3u2" - Product being reviewed, the “what”.
"PlayerSessionID": "6A26D6F0-4DD0-471B-92F1-3F8E543BFCB9" - This may be the “when”. This session ID probably gets logged in either the same database, and an authentication log somewhere.
"PlatformID": "6" - I don’t have anything to compare it to, but I suspect this might be something like PC,MS STORE, or the “how”. I’d be interested to see what the XBox or PC Steam users get for this.
So what MS could do is query the database for a newly released <INSERT SUSPECT DEVELOPER HERE> product, and look for all the five star reviews, and the “Id” that left them. They could then scan for all reviews left by those same “Id”'s. I’d bet a groat the vast majority of those will be for that same developer in question.
For the XBox, if you had MITM running on a PC, I’m assuming you can point the XBox at an HTTPS proxy, for Internet access behind such a thing. In that case this technique may work as well, though I’m not certain if you can install custom certificates on an XBox.
You assume Microsoft / Asobo wants to do anything with the entire MSCENERY situation.
As far as i can tell, they are fully aware of the entire MSCENERY, mass spam publishing situation clogging their entire marketplace up, yet they do not do anything about it.
It does surprise me how they allow this publisher to damage their entire brand, surely the sales cant be that good that they’d compromise the wider brand.
New people to the sim do not necessarily know the state of mscenery airplanes, and may buy them out of curiosity only to get an unpleasant surprise when they discover how low quality they are.
I assume they care just a little bit about their perceived integrity, yes. Naive, perhaps.
There is far more shovel ware on Valve’s Steam platform. They rarely step in to remove products unless there is a clear legal case to be made. I’ve seen that happen many times, but it is quite rare.
Yep, but Steam/Marketplace store inside the sim arent the same type of store (personal opinion), and i think people expect greater “vetting” of products etc on the microsoft 2024 marketplace.
Now, i suppose a couple low-quality jets wouldn’t grind my gears, im sure there are other LQ devs, but the mass-publishing and inability to filter them out that is irritating me.
Hopefully they’ll take action, also, the botting of reviews should warrant their removal entirely from the marketplace, as a clear TOS violation IMO.
In my background (drums), anything with the word “Professional” in the name is an immediate indication that it is basic entry level gear. So it’s presence here just makes me laugh
But at the end of the day, Microsoft takes a cut from marketplace sales. So if you’ve got developers churning out spam that sells, they are just going to let them continue. And I guess it benefits those that don’t buy them in terms of knowing that development of the sim will continue to be funded
There was mention in the stream about banning devs if they did not comply with certain criteria. However, what those are is unknown.
A question to those who know pc’s better, is it possible, feasably, for AI to “code and produce” an aircraft with tweaks from stolen work from other developers?
