I don’t want to name and shame. I’m sorry 
I have been following this game from the start on Steam. It has bad reviews for the following reasons:
- Paying gold to play matches. This was seen as just another Facebook energy system cash grab. This cut the playerbase on PC by at least half. If GoW started initially with the 0 gold cost per match, it would have performed much higher in reviews. This has of course been fixed since.
- Magic keys are a waist of cash. Many people who initially got into GoW basically only had the option to buy magic keys with gems. This caused a lot of people to pay a small amount for near worthless turnout, causing many of them to instantly leave a bad review. This was prior to armors, the $5 daily pack, and $5 daily gems.
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AI cheats or AI is dumb. Many players who looked at GoW initially found the single difficulty AI to either be too easy or cheating. Many would quit and leave a bad review about how bad the AI is before 1 hour, or after several, all of which was before the AI gets harder. There then were those that would complain that the AI got harder all of a sudden, which is indeed true. There were also those that just outright think the AI cheats, known properly as “noobs”.
- P2W. Because people hate waiting. This came up the most when troop levels were raised from a max of 10 to a max of 15 only 1 month after launch.
- No real PvP. This is something that pretty much everyone would want from a game like this. Many people get into GoW thinking it will be primarily real PvP, when in reality it is a community based single player game.
- My OP card/build got nerfed. Instant negative review.
- Puzzle Quest was better and is a full game. GoW was my first match 3 game, so I don’t know how valid that statement is. Many people in this comparison criticized GoW for not being a one time purchase game, making Puzzle Quest superior and GoW inferior leading to a negative review.
- Every update ruins more than it fixes. Some extremely casual players don’t like the complexity and direction that GoW is going in. They find it heading heavily P2W since their rate of resources is miles away from the growing economy of GoW.
- 100% Online. Given that GoW is mostly single player, many criticized the game for requiring a connection to do absolutely everything. There isn’t a single function that can be done without a connection.
- Endless extra turns. Similar to AI “cheating”, many would complain about the amount of extra turns that can be racked up. Early on in the game, this was mostly attributed to explosion teams; more recently, the goblins of gobbly gobling.
Those are just some. There were likely more, but I tried focusing primairly on the first month of launch. Any game on Steam, especially one that is F2P and has no way to have a sale (F2P with no dlc), either lives or dies their first month. GoW technically died on its Steam launch. If GoW started in its current state, it would be 90% approval easily. The gold cost for playing matches easily lost over 10,000 players and generated the focus of 100s upon 100s of negative reviews. Unfortunately, non of that is undoable, even with the change.
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Wow, nice summary! Hearing about the early stumbles makes me really sad since I’ve only been playing since 106 so have only known it in a pretty good state. This made me go back and look and you’re right: it’s a LOT of negative reviews from Nov '14 to Jan '15.
It is interesting to me how many people on PC are looking for a casual game and complain when it skews more core. It’s like they’re looking for Candy Crush on PC, which seems super weird to me.
I also don’t get the “always online” complaint. You’re on a computer…
There are a couple reasons for this:
- Some people constantly have a bad connection.
- A person looking for a single player experience has less necessity for online features.
- Hardcore achievement hunters will sometimes play single player games that have achievements offline in order to manipulate “time played”.
- Losing connection just gives reason to complain and they can write the negative review as they wait for the connection to reestablish.
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There also tends to be a lot of dogpiling with Steam reviews, especially for free games. Sometimes it’s just trendy to like or hate particular games or particular types of games. And it’s not just reviews, but also the ratings of the reviews, as users will mass-downvote the helpfulness of those that don’t fall in line with the trend.
Some people who play this game on steam and give it bad reviews tend to think this is a normal maych 3 with an ok esthetic but then when they have no idea how to play they give it bad review or at least that is my opinion
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I think if I only played it on steam I would give it a negative review as well. Its not that the client is bad, in fact, I think it runs better on PC than my phone. But, at least for me, match-3 is best played with a touch screen. I don’t know what it is, but it loses its appeal when I fire up the PC version.
Ah but the thing is once you get past the match 3 aspect this is more of a card battle game if anything.
I totally agree. I also think of them as very different gaming devices where Inplay very different kinds of games.
But I also don’t recall seeing complaints about the controls. It’s a lot of “get this F2P mobile garbage out of my Steam!!!” Makes me wonder if it’s also an age thing? Seems like there are more mature players here and I’m guessing the F2P PC crowd skews young.
I don’t see how this is a problem. last time I checked, the game works just fine even in Steam’s ‘Offline Mode’.
Offline as in no connection, not offline setting. This allows people to get legit achievements in 0 seconds, rather than unlegit achievements in 0 seconds. The time of achivements only start counting when they go back online if you play with no connection.
If Steam is in Offline Mode, It doesn’t even check for internet connection. That’s the whole idea. I see no advantage in actually disconnecting from internet over just starting in Offline Mode.
I am not referring to offline mode, I am talking about no connection and calling it offline mode. Actual offline mode has no effect on anything, but no connection does. Playing games on steam while you have no connection freezes the achievement timer. This is impossible to do in GoW for GoW requires a connection. Players can still play GoW when in offline mode, I do it all the time, but this doesn’t freeze achievement time.
That’s obviously untrue, I checked many times, being in Offline Mode while online does not increase your game time. Steam behave is this mode exactly the same as if you are actually disconnected from internet.
I’m not talking about game time played… I am talking about achievement time. Time played counts regardless of connection, but achievements don’t trigger until you go back online. Back online meaning having a connection.
i personally have found that the updates and other big news are not ever mentioned on steam… like we even got an entire update (i think it was 1.07 or 08) so as far as the steam community knows, devs are not really active because this is not on the steam forums. the first time i played i didnt know about these forums or website or anything and it was annoying to see people posting for help and getting none
Andrew use to always check the bugs there the first few months, but then that stopped. Someone of the dev team would post the news, then it stopped some, then it was given to Crowded Worlds to do, but then he stopped and has recently left the dev team, so now there is nothing. I brought up the no news thing quite a bit near the end of last year, but the only news they did since was the free matches. New players see how few there are and think the game isn’t being updated.
I use to answer everyone on there a lot, but it started to become quite a hassle. Since it has been so inactive, basically no one uses the GoW Steam forums now. This looks bad for new players coming in since the game is in the red for reviews and has no obvious signs of activity.
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vote Tacet for steam forum mod 
There is a good way to change that. I use steam and wouldn’t be opposed if we could organize a collective group effort to start leaving some feedback about GOW. It wouldn’t take very many people to make a start, then who knows, others may join in as well. 
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Haha, I would be willing to discuss that with the devs.
Wouldn’t take too many people. Player base would come out just from having several.