Once Human’s post-launch rollercoaster ride continues apace after a new update broke certain items and bases in the game. While frustrating for players and another headache for the developers, the funniest part is that the fresh problems arose just as the developers were asking fans to boost the survival MMO’s rating on Steam by leaving positive reviews.
The post-apocalyptic crafting game has been battling various dramas and controversies since it launched, which plunged its Steam rating into “mixed” territory, despites massive peak concurrent player numbers and hitting the top five best-selling games on the Valve-owned platform. As a result, yesterday representatives of publisher NetEase and its subsidiary, Starry Studio, posted on the massively popular 500,000-person Once Human Discord, begging fans to go to the game’s Steam review section to boost the rating to “positive” or higher.
But the game’s July 18 patch, which was full of bug fixes, caused some unexpected problems. It has been essentially eating some players’ items when they tried to deposit them, and ruining some bases people had spent decent chunks of time building. This all came after extended server maintenance to complete the update in the first place. Players have since shared images of busted homes on the Once Human subreddit and Steam Page, asking one another for help getting them restored. “Been walking around tonight thinking why do people build half bases without walls,” joked one player. “Now I know why.”
“We apologize for the inconvenience,” representatives for the game posted on the Discord today under the title, “Fixes for ‘Deposit Function Causing Item Loss’ and ‘Territory Module Loss’ Issues.” The developers added, “Both problems have been identified and are currently being resolved as quickly as possible.” Once Human’s developers said players who lost items will get them replaced through the in-game mail and all players impacted negatively by the patch will get “extra compensation.”
Amid this latest mess, the original post asking players for positive reviews was deleted (I only saw it initially because of the auto-ping notification from the Discord server). It’s unclear if there will be a new call-to-action once the mini-crisis has fully-passed, or if NetEase has thought better of asking players to juice the Steam rating—a not altogether unreasonable ask given how many players do like the game, and the fact that it’s still being held down by unsubstantiated criticisms of Once Human’s data collection policies.
“Bad reviews like that can do so much harm to the game and might be the reason that it may die which I hope from the bottom of my heart that this will not happen,” wrote one fan on the subreddit last week. And the tide does seem to be turning. Despite plenty of complaints about the latest patch issues, most of the negative Steam reviews have begun tapering off. We’ll see how that holds up after Once Human reaches its first map and character reset at the end of August.
