Hey all!

Some of you might know that my role here is to put the reviews you share in the “Share your Steam Reviews” thread into the Guild's curator; thus, I browse through it every now and then, as well as taking my time to read most of them and give a comment or an upvote, which some of the active members can confirm. Due to this, I am well aware of what content is allowed and shared here and whether it was written by a newcomer, hobby reviewer or a professional one. The Guild aims to promote and support reviewers of all kinds after all, but that should be under some conditions, and that would be being honest with your thoughts.

However, I have noticed (plus was informed by other regular members of the Guild) that two members might not share that idea, and that would be BiteMexD and Piston Smashed. Both of them write for the same curator The_Cpt_FROGGY CLUB and website Zeepond[www.zeepond.com] to which the curator is associated. They receive many review copies directly from the publishers or developers through their curator/website, just like many of us, me included. Groups like Devils in the Detail, Save or Quit[saveorquit.com], IndieGems and so on are ones that come to my mind.

The problem is, however, that the said “reviewers” do not care about delivering an honest opinion like the abovementioned groups or perhaps even you. How so? Let me show you an example of BiteMexD first.

BiteMexD clearly fakes their playtime via idling and achievements via SAM (Steam Achievement Manager that allows you to unlock any achievement). Let us check out some proofs (everything highlighted in bold links to the said reviews/achievements):

Here is their Dust to the End review and their achievements.
As you can see, BiteMexD unlocked 42 out of 47 achievements in the same day, hour and minute. Moreover, they are not even smart about it, as they somehow unlocked “1000 KM” achievement, but on their “100, 000KM” achievement it clearly shows they have 0 kilometres. These are not counted individually but are a continuation of the previous, so it's evident they didn't even take the time to properly look over their cheating. Or you can see that they reached all of the endings at once (four, to be precise).

Let us move to another review, which would be Life is Strange: True Colours. BiteMexD has about 20.4 hours despite the game being about 10 hours long, which, in and of itself, is pretty questionable in a linear, narrative-driven adventure but might be explained by them being away from keyboard for a time. However, they only have two achievements. As you can see, those are collectables from different chapters (1 and 2) unlocked within two minutes from each other. ”Amateur Archaeophile” requires you to unlock all memories for the achievement, yet they haven’t obtained achievements for the single memories, such as “Pro Tip” or “Team Chomp-Bot”. What’s even worse, though, is that the chapter 2 achievement was unlocked while the one for finishing chapter 1 was not.

Here is another example, which is a Patron review. You can see that most of their achievements are unlocked at the very same time, with the exceptions of “Camping”, “Moar berries!” and “The know-how”.

And I could go on and on. BiteMexD even uses SAM on games they haven’t reviewed, such as King’s Bounty II, which only underlines my point about them being dishonest and not caring about playing the games they receive for free.

What about the abovementioned Piston Smashed, though? It is harder to tell whether they use SAM like BiteMexD, as they have more reasonable unlock times. However, Piston Smashed does not seem to be interested in finishing the games either, proven both by their low number of achievements and the low amount of playtime (and confirmed multiple times by Piston Smashed themselves in their comments, as others found that questionable already).

You can check out their Tales of Arise review along with their achievements or King’s Bounty II review and the corresponding achievements as an example.

Even though the achievements have been unlocked at different times, it clearly shows that they barely played the game, as the average playtime for both titles is about 40 hours while they have 6.3 hours for Tales of Arise and 8.4 hours for King’s Bounty II. The problem is that writing a positive review for a game you barely touched will not provide me much information about its qualities, as the said reviewer simply hasn’t experienced the game and can’t tell me, for example, if the final act is subpar like in Final Fantasy XV, Mass Effect 3 or Fallout 3 - which in some cases might be enough to ruin a game, which Piston Smashed wouldn’t know. Moreover, most of the information they write is similar to what is already mentioned on the store page or they even waste space by mentioning all the available languages and in-game options instead of actually reviewing it.

Why is that problematic? Because both write for the same curator/website, as I mentioned above, and they write only positive reviews, as you can check here on their curator. They have only 8 “informational” ones for games that haven’t been released yet or they haven’t obtained a copy of. Keep in mind that this is the curator that belongs to The_Cpt_FROGGY who has been banned from this group’s discussions because he attacked other members when he was confronted about similarly sketchy behaviour.

Simply put, they do not care about delivering an honest opinion, they only care about writing a positive text as soon as possible, so they could get more free copies in the future. That is not reviewing, as that is basically free promotion for both publishers and developers.

Personally, I think that both of them shouldn’t be a part of this Guild if all they wish to do is simply promote games they got for free instead of writing an honest review without resorting to cheating the playtime and achievements, or simply playing the tutorial and judging the whole game based on it. It misleads the Guild members, followers and any Steam user that might stumble upon their review. I feel that their presence is insulting to others, who actually put their time and effort into writing informative and honest reviews while finishing the game and not faking their overall playtime and/or achievements.

Well, I am posting it here to hear your opinions, as well as theirs if they would somehow care to explain themselves, especially BiteMexD.