me and many other gay itch devs friens have been annoyed by people making accounts for the sole purpose of spamming 1 star reviews on lgbt projects, going through every single submission for a person and giving a bad review (like i had PAID projects that werent even purchased but still got 1 star reviews loll)
so if youre a dev: especially when youve JUST released a project and only have none or a few ratings one unlegimate 1 star review can really tank the visibility and if you happen to see the same person doing the same rating on all your projects something is obviously off
ive reported clear cases like this couple times in the past and probs since ive had proof of this same person doing it for other people at the same time ive gotten them removed
its not something you should obsess about, like its fine if someone hates your game and gives it a bad review but when that same happens for every single lgbt project of yours and your friends lgbt projects from the same account at the exact same time clearly this isnt done in good faith and you can appeal that!
for the gamers: rating games you like on itch io is really valuable. its why every youtuber tells you to like and subscribe and hit the bell icon, because it really does boost their video to more people and same applies with itch io.
i know not everyone even knows about the rating system so when youre playing gay games on itch io i think everyone should get in the habit of liberally rating the games they liked to support the devs whose work you enjoyed
I can speak from experience, it's really frustrating when this happens! I felt really bad when a demo of one of my projects got a 1-star rating... and then I noticed after googling that person's username that they literally were just giving 1-star reviews to any trans related games. I'm pretty sure the same person went and downvoted all the comments on the game's page too. I wish these losers would just leave us alone!
But I also learned because of this, how important it is to give other queer creators 5 star ratings. It's not only a great feeling to see someone give your game a good rating, but it helps boost its visibility, and it helps against troll reviews that target queer creators and their projects. I always leave 5 star ratings where I can now, and you should do the same if you liked that person's work!
