Quick & Dirty | comments
Article
www.deepfreeze.it/article.php?a=quickdirty
Tagline
Low-effort and sensationalist journalism causing embarrassing mistakes and life-ruining consequences
Previous comment threads archive
None so far
Changes
Originally published as infograph on January 8, 2015 — is.gd/ggquick.
Republished as article on May 5th 2015, adding a new section about the Max Temkin accusations.
Secrets of GameJournoPros | comments
Article
www.deepfreeze.it/article.php?a=gjp
Tagline
Some of the most incriminating stories uncovered this far about the secret mailing list of the game journalism elite
Previous comment threads archive
None so far
Changes
Originally published as infograph on November 28, 2014 — is.gd/ggsecrets.
Republished as article on May 5th 2015, without large changes.
General concerns thread
Read this before posting here
Deepfreeze.it is a website that primarily concerns itself with the unethical practices of game journalists. This means that people like Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos, Ralph, The Honey Badgers, Hotwheels, game developers (unless they work/used to work in game journalism) and DiGRA academics will not be added to DeepFreeze. Threads which demand these people to be added to the website will likely be deleted. Other threads about concerns that have already been addressed will be deleted to prevent new/important concerns from being drowned out.
Read more about it here: http://deepfreeze.it/advanced_guidelines.php#entry-equal
Also:
SARAH NYBERG IS BANNED FROM THIS BOARD
FAQ:
>why aren't Ralph and Milo on DeepFreeze?
Neither of the two are game journalists.
>then why are there so many people listed as 'non-journalists'?
This either means that the information is incomplete, or that the person is no longer working in game journalism.
The label 'former journalist' or 'formerly in journalism' might replace the title in the future.
Also, a small number of journalists that were involved in the Max Temkin, Brad Wardell and 'gamers are dead' articles have been added for the sake of completion.
>how are conflicts of interest filed?
Patricia Hernandez writing six times about her friend Anna Antrophy counts as one conflict of interest.
Counting all six articles as individual entries would unnecessarily inflate the total amount of improprieties.
>how are members of the GJP filed?
Members proven to be active in the list will be filed under 'collusion', members not proven to be active in the list will be filed under 'trivia'
>why does the Wizardchan scandal not have an article?
Wizardchan is briefly mentioned in the 'monster to silence' article: http://deepfreeze.it/article.php?a=monster
Putting an article about them on the website would put the spotlight on them again, as the wizards have stated that they would rather be left alone.
>what about media outlet's ethics policies?
Policy changes that occured during GamerGate are listed in the 'monster to silence' article: http://deepfreeze.it/article.php?a=monster
In the future, ethics policies might be added to each outlet's DeepFreeze page, including a short critique of said policy.
The gifts of DoritosGate | comments
Article
www.deepfreeze.it/article.php?a=doritos
Tagline
The relationship on the brink of corruption between media and game industry exploded in the 2012 scandal
Previous comment threads archive
None so far
Changes
Originally published as infograph on November 8, 2014 — is.gd/ggdoritos.
Republished as article on May 5th 2015, without large changes.
Our enemy, the gamers | comments
Article
www.deepfreeze.it/article.php?a=enemy
Tagline
Gamers are entitled, Gamers are dead — Game journalists' unique contempt for their shrinking audience
Previous comment threads archive
None so far
Changes
Originally published as infograph on December 24, 2014 — is.gd/gghand.
Republished as article on May 5th 2015, with a changed title and otherwise minor adjustments.
Unfair advantage | comments
Article
www.deepfreeze.it/article.php?a=unfair
Tagline
Some journalists give privileged access to the gaming industry based on friendship rather than on merits
Previous comment threads archive
None so far
Changes
Originally published as two infographs
November 1, 2014 — is.gd/ggkotaku
November 1, 2014 — is.gd/ggunfair
Republished as article on May 5th 2015, merging the two infographs and adding several CoIs — among others:
- Kuchera with Zoe Quinn and SportsFriends
- Grayson with Diedra Kiai, Porpentine, Nick Chester
- Kirk Hamilton with Fullbright
- Cara Ellison with Anna Anthrophy, Nina Freeman, Fullbright
And several more.
Unreliable numbers | comments
Article
www.deepfreeze.it/article.php?a=numbers
Tagline
Altered game scores casting doubts on all reviewers’ sincerity
Previous comment threads archive
None so far
Changes
Originally published as three infographs
November 1, 2014 — is.gd/gggamespot
November 1, 2014 — is.gd/ggsimcity
November 15, 2014 — is.gd/ggnumber
Republished as article on May 5th 2015, merging the three infographs and adding an introduction paragraph.
Patrick Keplek has released an e-mail of someone he contacted as a quote without her consent on the whole Alison Rapp thing.
This is chronicled here:
He used it in this article:
This is his defense:
I believe this goes against the SPJ Code of ethics, in particular under the "Minimize Harm" section:
>Recognize that legal access to information differs from an ethical justification to publish or broadcast.
>Realize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than public figures and others who seek power, influence or attention. Weigh the consequences of publishing or broadcasting personal information.
And possibly goes against the section "Seek The Truth and Report it"
>Avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information unless traditional, open methods will not yield information vital to the public.
I believe this should warrant at the very least a trivia entry.
Pocket Tactics shilling their parent company Slitherine
Cross posting this from >>>/gamergatehq/315220
This is old news but I'm reposting it because it didn't get attention during the site problems. Pocket Tactics was bought by Slitherine in August and didn't bother to announce it until December 30th while shilling their games. A month ago they finally announced it and named their parent company "Creator of the Year 2015 Runner Up".
Original KIA post pointing this out:
red*dit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3ytah1/ethics_pocket_tactics_a_strategy_games_review/
Announcement:
Looks like there were 17 articles since August covering Slitherine without disclosure:
It also might be good to check if there's been any developments since then.
IGN Editor CoI
Sourced from /gghq/
So, There is an Associate Editor at IGN by the name of Brendan Graeber, who uses the Handle "RaggaFragga"
This is his Twitter Handle - https://twitter.com/Ragga_Fragga
Here you can see him touting "5 awesome Metroid Levels in Mario Maker" www.ign.com/videos/2015/09/17/5-awesome-metroid-levels-in-super-mario-maker-made-in-mario
and he's also done a 5 awesome Zelda videos.
Brendan is also responsible for most of the Wiki's on the website.
This all seems nice and innocent, but in these videos, The people that made the "awesome Zelda/Metroid" levels are all made from users of a streaming website that Brendan visits called "Vidya Shorts", where he is a well respected member of their Autismo community. Brendan doesn't hide this on his twitter page, but fails to mention that his friends made the levels. He's basically whoring out his friends streams and not disclosing it.
On top of that, if you spend a short amount of time on VidyaShorts you can see "RaggaFragga" offering early copies of games/press swag to users, if they write his wiki/faq's for him, and he does not disclose this either.
You can't spell IGN without Ignorant.
This fucking book
What can we do about this bullshit?
MetaCritic
Could we have a page explaining the power of MetaCritic? And through MetaCritic the power these journalists get? The page of Arthur Gies has me on the fense due to the fact he wrote his reviews based on his feminist pov which isn't unethical but unfortunately has way too much influence on the success of a game due to the MetaCritic score that aggregates his review just because its on a big site. In other words his review isn't really a problem but MetaCritic itself which gives powers to the professional reviewers instead of the consumers say Rotten Tomatoes. They both have a critic score and an audience score. MC holds the critic score higher RT holds the audience score mainly. In the end we want DeepFreeze to be neutral as it can be. We don't want to be thought police. They can have their feminism but in the end want our informed choices.
Thank you for reading.
I propose adding another entry on Stephen Totilo's profile.
As the EiC of Kotaku, he has the duty of maintaining the ethical standards on his website - and this goes in double since he has an actual journalism degree.
However, Kotaku has no published ethics policy to be held accountable by, which makes it easy to bend the unseen rules whenever its convenient.
Totilo has defended this stance on more than one occasion, such as here:
I also remember him mentioning before that he wanted to avoid people looking for "gotchas", but I forgot where he said that (perhaps it was at the TB interview - hopefully anons can help).
I'm unsure on the emblem this should be featured at, but at the very least, I'd say it is worth including it as a Trivia if nothing else.
MGSV Review Bootcamp
An introduction to the situation: http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2015/08/24/something-you-need-to-know-about-those-metal-gear-solid-5-the-phantom-pain-reviews/
A starting list of reviewers: >>>/gamergatehq/259390
Some of the relevant info can be dug, but like an anon suggested in that thread, we might be able to contact some reviewers and compile any info they're comfortable giving anonymously.
submission for deepfreze
Anne Thériault
Writer for Canada Land
Wrote a hit piece about Christie Blatchford, another journo who is reporting on the Canadian twitter trial.
Thériault admits in the article that she is personally friends with Guthrie, the subject of Blatchford's story.
https://archive.is/akQg7#selection-124.1-139.14
However if you look at the following youtube video you can see that Guthrie, the subject of blachford's story is herself has has been brought on to Canadaland as an "expert"
Typos, Dead Links and other minor things
Asked on the GGHQ thread about where to report these. After being directed here, it seems there is no thread dedicated to nitpicking.
So here goes.
THIS IS A THREAD FOR GRAMMAR NAZIS AND AUTISTS
If you see a dead or mistaken link, a grammatical error or various other things that may be in need of fixing. This is the place for it.
You can leave suggestions, but please keep in mind the goal is improving articles already existing.
small issue, but your CSS breaks on portrait displays
You should put DF on bitbucket or something also fixes thread
I've been looking at the site and there are some improvements to be made, I could make them too, if I was in the source.
It would be cool if you could put deepfreeze on bitbucket or on something else where I could get at and improve it.
Not on github though because they took down another gg-related project in the past and it'd just be a countown to takedown at their whim.
Anyways, now I'll start with CSS fixes, and here's like probably 1/2 of it:
Your mobile view sucks, but it's not hard to fix.
FRONT / INDEX PAGE:
The fucking deepfreeze title is making the entire page too wide and this fucks with scrolling a lot. As a kludge, let's make the
body {
width: 100%;
overflow-x: hidden;
}
on mobile, so that we'll avoid this for now and for later, it's not just the title that overflows, certain writers' names are too long and escape their article boxes.
On mobile you'd also use an svg as the banner, I propose having a banner that's an SVG with the title DeepFreeze on it, and setting it to be 100% wide. It's lighter and neater but this isn't really required.
When we get to mobile device width, and even before, the article boxes start fucking around, they're going from an all-right somewhat-centered list to a bunch of off-center shits.
I propose using the following (once again, only for mobile devices):
.flowbox {
width: 285px;
box-sizing: border-box;
position: relative;
min-height: 1px;
padding: 0 15px; // why use padding left and right when you can use this.
float:none; // we can't center properly when floating
margin: 0 auto; // We're actually centered now.
}
the menu:
When you're in a mobile view and you get the hamburger, there's a nested menu inside.
For some reason, the text in that menu is grey, and hard to read.
If you want it fixed fast do:
navbar-default .navbar-nav .open .dropdown-menu li a {
color:#fff;
}
VIEW A JOURNALIST PAGE:
This is where you have your long names skipping out of their boxes. Fuck, there's extra scrolling to be done. You need to make them smaller or something because with the fix to the body we made earlier, you can't see the entire name anymore.
I'll find more shit to fix as I go along later.
Also if you want to make your site load a bit faster, you can throw your entire css into a minifier, I used on on my site for a long time and never had problems.
Btw, good job & hit me up in this thread if you need PHP help.
Did Jonathan Holmes of Dtoid break Code of Ethics of the National Association of Social Workers?
We all know Jonathan Holmes, mental health social worker and still writer for Destructoid (recently retired as Editor in Chief) has been in a spiral this year with all his aGG crap, but I never thought he would be this unethical. On Twitter, Jonathan Holmes went from arguing with a friend about game violence to publicly claiming the friend had psychosis.
It went from this:
"Crying at a non-gaming day job about Iwata's passing reminds me of how most adults still don't get how much video games can affect your life" -@TronKnotts
"@TronKnotts We mean games don't cause violence or sexism, not that we aren't effected by the art or the artists.Thought of you when I heard." - Friend
to this:
"You really think this is professional behavior as a social worker? Saying your friends have been psychotic before?" - Friend
"thanks for the concern. I didn't diagnosis you though. I just know you've been psychotic before. No big deal." - @TronKnotts
(Some of the tweets appear to have been deleted, but he left some of the accusations.)
"Jon, I have never been to a psychiatrist and you are not my doctor. Whatever you think is psychotic, qi gong, anger, is not." - Friend
"I know you think that." - @TronKnotts
(Apparently Jonathan thinks qi gong meditation and anger are psychotic? I have friends who do qi gong. Mantak Chia is pretty neat. It's part of traditional Chinese medicine.)
"Jon, I don't have a psychiatrist. Never have. You can't identify psychosis just by judging your friends.This is why we are done." - Friend
So apparently, Jonathan Holmes thought he could win the argument by claiming on twitter that his friend is psychotic, even though he had never been diagnosed as such. Convoluted. I don't know, but it seems pretty fucking unethical not just from a journalist, but from a mental health professional, if you ask me. It's pretty despicable to argue about gamergate as a mental health professional and use accusations of psychosis.
It's against the Code of Ethics of the National Association of Social Workers to break confidentiality with clients. I assume it's also frowned upon, if not just as unethical, when a social worker publicly claims someone who's never been diagnosed with psychosis, and has never been his client, has been psychotic. It could ruin someone's life for a mental health professional to claim on twitter that he knows a person is or has been psychotic, just to win a debate about game violence.
Check out the whole argument starting here.
https://twitter.com/TronKnotts/status/620930014247317505
Maybe he should be reported to his employer, which is easy to find with a google search of Jonathan Holmes Social Worker.
Here is the Code of Ethics of the National Association of Social Workers.
https://www.socialworkers.org/pubs/code/code.asp
Imagine being one of this guy's patients. If he can do that, then obviously he shouldn't be trusted to report symptoms at his job. Does this guy have any ethics at all?
Addition to Mary Sue Article
I think it's worth pointing out the absurd, monumentally stupid commenting policy.
If you disagree too many times you're banned.
If your first post disagrees with what they write: banned.
They call it "Hate reading." lol
I find it their policy so absurd to the point it broaches unethical behavior. They literally only allow comments that agree as part of policy.
Sites Not on the DeepFreeze
Any reason why Lewd Gamer and Ship2Block20 aren't listed on the DeepFreeze?
DeepFreeze-tan
Would this be an appropriate place to discuss and work towards designing DeepFreeze -tan?
We do it in the /v/ threads often, but we can't be discussing tans whenever something is HAPPENING
I'd post it on the /gghq/, but ayyteam and other shitposters and shills lurk there too often, and I don't want this going anywhere outside of 8chan for the time being
Some anons got some designs going. There were more but I can't find them right now
Possible change to rules submitted for peer review — emblem modifiers
Good morning /deepfreeze/.
I've got a weirdo idea, as usual I'd appreciate some peer-review, if you can, before I make an ass of myself.
Basically, based on both suggestions of "dealing with apologies" etc and on my thoughts, I've cooked up some possible ways to deal — emblem modifiers.
Assume the graphical look is similar to the one seen here.
Not
Score: 0.
Prefix: Not.
It's the stuff I already file as Trivia, basically just putting it as, e.g., "non collusion" to be more informative.
Examples:
False information worth debunking
http://deepfreeze.it/journo.php?j=nathan_grayson
Often accused of plagiarism because one article of his directly copies text from a French one. However, the original plagiarism was by the author of the Imgur post that Grayson quoted as source.
Deemed fully solved
http://deepfreeze.it/journo.php?j=james_fudge
Published an article on the false Brad Wardell accusations, although he offered a thorough apology after new information surfaced.
Deemed (at least probably) not an issue
http://deepfreeze.it/journo.php?j=alexa_ray_corriea
Member of GameJournoPros. Not proven to have been active in the list.
Patched
Score: 1.
Prefix: Partially solved.
Disclosure added later, or an apology at least partially admitting guilt (key element, so no "I was misunderstood" shit) was issued by emblem subject or responsible. Basically, still notable, but should be distinguished from the people who didn't apologize or do anything.
I have agency to decide an apology is not worth labeling this way (e.g. issued much too late), although it'll still be noting it in the emblem none the less.
This emblems are still scored, though they may be used in the future to add, e.g., a label to journalists that have solved all issues.
While the site would only show "patched" or "unpatched", but emblems would have a third status — "not appliable" — for stuff that wouldn't be possible to apologize for.
Examples:
Disclosure
http://deepfreeze.it/journo.php?j=laura_kate_dale
Gave coverage, on Indiehaven, to Louise James without disclosing that James was financially supporting both her and Indiehaven on Patreon.
(Haven't updated this entry yet, but Dale added disclosure and explained to me why she didn't do it originally)
Apology
http://deepfreeze.it/journo.php?j=patricia_hernandez
Wrote the perhaps most famous article on the Max Temkin accusations, where she claimed Temkin ”spent too much time defending himself, and not enough time contemplating the idea that he might‘ve messed up“. Article was later amended, and Kotaku admitted it was a misfire.
Subjective
Score: 1.
Prefix: Possible (as opposed to a normal emblem's "probable").
Either assigned for a stance (anti-consumer, pro-censorship etc.) rather than for proven misbehavior or more subjective than other emblems. Still scored as normal, but would (pending technical implementation) allow filtering, so one can see a separate score without counting these. Can coexist with Patched.
Would be assigned to GJP emblems as well.
Examples:
http://deepfreeze.it/journo.php?j=kirk_hamilton
Wrote an article of praise for Diablo 3's contested DRM while his site was running a massive Diablo 3 ad campaign. He did backtrack two years later, after Diablo 3's developers had dropped the DRM themselves.
http://deepfreeze.it/journo.php?j=arthur_gies
Spends a large chunk of his Witcher 3 review complaining about its "oppressively misogynist" world and lack of "a single non-white humanoid". The large amount of controversy incited by this review has an appearence of being manufactured and being incited for clicks.
Eager to hear your thoughs, both on the idea and on the implementation.
Remember that DeepFreeze applies to all journalists, not just shitheads. I'm about to file Nosh's EiC for plagiarism, for example — would be nice to have the "Patched" label there.
API or database?
Amazon just opened up Echo development and I wanted to make an app out of DeepFreeze, so I could say things like:
"Alexa, ask DeepFreeze about Kotaku"
"Alexa, ask DeepFreeze about Ben Kuchera"
and she could reply with information like
"Kotaku is currently boycotted by gamergate. It is the most corrupt site according to DeepFreeze, with 53 entries on current employees."
"Ben Kuchera, currently employed by Polygon, is the 2nd most corrupt journalist according to DeepFreeze, with 11 entries."
If I can get that working, I'd like to do things like:
"Alexa, ask DeepFreeze about Leigh Alexander's collusion"
"Leigh Alexander was a member of GameJournoPros. Proven to have been active on the list. They Spearheaded the “Gamers are dead” media blitz with an often-quoted inflammatory piece."
I can scrape the HTML but I don't really want to maintain that. An API would probably be the easiest thing (for me) but probably not for you.
Any chance we could get periodic dumps of the database?
Adam Sessler
I'm shocked that Adam's not on the site, despite his gross misconduct.
So let's change that.
He's supports DOXing (Harrassment)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFlYNsGeWdg (GDC '13)
Corroborated with scandal-mongraling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E47-FMmMLy0 (25 Invisible Benefits of Gaming While Male)
There is also this dig thread that was done on him ages ago that he told me about.
I'm not giving him 5 month, let alone 7. like I promised TheoryHead will die with the RoTo, and Adam's GOING to crawl back to press work. Please deepfreeze him.
Destructoid's Editor in Chief wrote about donors to his Kickstarter without full discosure
Cross posting from /gamergatehq/:
Jonathan Holmes, Destructoid's Editor in Chief, has written three articles about two individuals and one organization who have donated to a Kickstarter project of his. None of the articles in question included disclosure regarding the donations in question. While the exact sums of the donations is clear only in one case (120 dollars), it can be said for certein that in the two other cases the donors provided Holmes with a donation of at least 120 dollars if not more. For more details, here's the GamerGateWiki artice:
(since GamerGateWiki has tendency to go offline too often, I'm also providing an archived version: https://archive.is/ETbMQ#selection-609.0-613.12 )
BTW, this is not the end of my investigation. I have found often other cases of Holmes writing about his Kickstarter donors without providing disclosure, but due to time constraints I only wrote about the three most blatant ethical violations I've found i.e Holmes writing about people who donated him with 120 dollars r more. In the other cases of Holmes writing about his Kickstarter donors I could not determine much about the donations other than their existence. I'll be adding this info to GG wiki later on.
Liana K
https://youtu.be/UGxtAvzQt2s?t=43m10s
If Georgina is on why the fuck is she not on?
New Entry for Arthur Gies
Arthur Gies exploited press status to compete in paid tournament for free, then kept the winnings (going against polygon's own ethics policy)
evidence here:
Which category would this fall under? Corruption?
N'Gai Croal
He's mentioned very briefly as a member of GameJournoPros, but since there's a section for sensationalism, should we mention him kickstarting hysteria over Resident Evil 5? As a Newsweek editor, he wrote an article complaining about the fact that most of the zombies were black (the game is set in Africa, after all). Dan Whitehead of Eurogamer was involved in that debacle, too. It's kind of an inverse of the "Medieval PoC" incident.
SEO optimization
Ex-SEO guy here. It has been a while since I made a SEO analysis of a website, but I still know a lot of the tricks of the trade (and of course Google is your friend).
Now, let's get to work. The website is online, now to make it SEO friendly, aka get a good position within Google. I'll be looking at Google primarily, because that is simply the dominant search engine and our main audience will find stuff through it.
First some basic things: this is all white hat SEO, so clean and proper. Black hat SEO should be avoided at all cost. Not only because it is quite unethical, but also when Google finds out (and they often will), the website will be given a severe penalty or will be blacklisted. My recommendations will be primarily be for on-site optimizations, off site optimizations are for another time. As for the no-no's in SEO optimizations, you can Google them, but this very simple rule can be used to decide as well: When you think that something is shady, not right or not 'beautiful', it is probably either Black hat SEO or otherwise harming the SEO optimization of a website.
Also do take into account that web crawlers belonging to search engines look radically different to websites than we do. They mostly don't care about styling, and the only thing they see is the html: the tags and the content of those tags. So do take that into account. A good website for a human being doesn't mean it is also a good website for web crawlers and the latter have initially the most influence on the page ranking of your websites. The reverse is also true, so both need to be taken into account. A good SEO optimized website is both a good website for human beings, and a good website for web crawlers.
Due to the limit of the post length the points are as follows:
Add Cubed3 reviewer Albert Lichi to the site, dishonest and misleading behavior
More information can be found about his actions here
And here
http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/213-nonstop-gaming-general/71423315
Essentially, Albert Lichi went under the guise of a Gamefaqs username called Gigersupreme. However, he operated under this Gamefaqs account without disclosure that he was a reviewer at Cubed3 and was subsequently caught shilling for his reviews in the past on several different game boards, along with trying to bring down other reviews for the opportunity to tell everyone his own review for the game was better.
After being found out, Lichi proceeded to damage control on top of damage control in a thread on the Nonstop Gaming - General board as well as a Devil May Cry thread (something he did a review for). In the Nonstop Gaming - General thread (or NGG for short) he made more than a few posts where he believed he wasn't doing anything wrong or didn't see the issue with what he was doing, even going so far as to claiming he wasn't a games journalist therefore there wasn't an issue with the shilling they did (kinda like an opposite deflection attempt of Jason Schreier saying the writers at Kotaku are journalists and not bloggers).
The Gamefaqs thread speaks for itself if the people running DeepFreeze have a level 15 account or higher on Gamefaqs they can view the thread in full and read all the deflection and damage controlling done by Lichi to try downplaying the issue. Will post a few screencaps relevant for the people on here to see.
Here's a link to his Cubed3 profile.
Content to contribute, Cheat Code Central and Sean Engemann's dishonest Divinity Original Sin review
Hey there guys, checked out the DeepFreeze site and wasn't sure the best way to add a contribution to consider for the site so I just thought I'd make a thread here about it.
So back in July, a reviewer for the gaming site Cheat Code Central named Sean Engemann posted a review for the game Divinity: Original Sin. As you can see from the attached picture, the review was full of plenty of inaccuracies, lies, gets basic info about the game such as its release date wrong, and an insulting attempt to get away with posting a review of an unfinished product acting like it's reviewing the release version of the game. Literally the entire comments section of the review called the reviewer out for their blatant dishonesty and how it was very disingenuous to post a review like that regardless of the review's score or how they rated the game. Another thing that pissed many off was the fact that Cheat Code Central's review counts toward the combined aggregate score of sites such as Metacritic and Gamerankings, therefore appearing like a dishonest and unethical review of the game was dragging down the game's overall score on sites like those.
Just as a reminder why something like that may be relevant aside from Cheat Code Central's reviews qualifying to count at those sites, remember when Obsidian missed out on a Metacritic bonus from their publisher because Fallout New Vegas missed the target score for their bonus by a single point. New Vegas scored an 84 on Metacritic, while the target goal for their bonus was an 85. Also whether we like it or not, combined scores on places like Metacritic or Gamerankings definitely help play a role in the purchasing decisions of more than a fair number of people, so not only was it disingenuous to host such a dishonest review in the first place, but it may have had an effect on the perception of a legitimately good game, potentially effecting the game's sales due to the review score being a good deal lower than the averages of scores it got elsewhere.
I posted a thread on the Kotaku in Action subreddit here, where you can read the comments section to also read about other issues of corruption and dishonesty with the Cheat Code Central site itself in the past.
http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2ydjng/review_content_ethics_remember_cheat_code/
I also noticed that Cheat Code Central wasn't on the list of sites featured in the Outlets section for DeepFreeze. I'd recommend putting them on there and having them listed as Boycotted for allowing a review like Sean's to stay up, editing the review based on user comments to make it look like their tracks were covered (and not even acknowledging their mistakes made in the review), and also for all of their previously shady behavior as talked about in the linked Reddit thread.
tl;dr version: Reviewer from Cheat Code Central basically wrote a review of an old Alpha Version for Divinity: Original Sin, likely from a while back and decided to be lazy and dishonest by posting the review like he was reviewing the final product so the site he worked at could get on Metacritic sooner and get their site clicks faster. Commenters of the review weren't having any of the B.S. and tore him a new one, the reviewer having basically tainted the reputation of the entire site for anyone who didn't already know their shady history.
As a final note, I'm not quite sure if anything ever happened with people in the comments saying they reported the review to Metacritic. I don't know what authority it takes to have an individual review omitted from counting towards an aggregate score on a place like that, or what guidelines there are for what constitutes violating a rule of some sort for removal.
Share your OC, shitlords
Share your DeepFreeze related content: pictures, screencaps or videos.
Not sure if this is actually corruption
http://deepfreeze.it/journo.php?j=colin_moriarty
While I'm surprised that such faggotry was coming from Colin, and not the actual tumors ruining ign. How exactly does this fall under corruption? Just because ign was heavily advertising Mass Effect.
Journalist List
Some feedback
You should remove non-journalists from the list. Maybe make a second list "gamedevs and related people" or whatever.
Sort the journalists by "number of entries" by default, so the worst cunts like Leigh Alexander show up on top.
You should count "is a member of gamejournopro" differently than normal entries. All of the guys on the mailing list are bunched together with one-entry people who actually did something worth reading about. Maybe add a little symbol next to the name or thumbnail or something.
Tom Mc Shea
I looked on Deepfreeze.it and noticed there was a name missing. I don't know for sure if he qualifies but here is why I think he might.
Yellow journalism:
BioShock Infinite - A Fan Scorned by Tom Mc Shea
This was a second opinion review as Gamespot had already given a score of 9 on Metacritic. Tom Mc Shea then proceeded to give a review score of 4 to a game with a Metacritic score of 94 as rated by around 68 critics. The lowest score on PC was 80. Tom Mc Shea's score would have been the lowest score on Metacritic for Bioshock Infinite on any platform. The intention appears to be a sensational article to bait both fans and detractors of the highly lauded game. It's clear in the comments that many readers agree the game has flaws but most agree the score is too low and at least one actually calls it click-bait.
Additional info(Not journalism):
Twitter:
Youtube:
Sargon of Akkad: Social Justice Weasels
https://youtu.be/WhmOx0zThGg?t=4m24s
This is is just one reason I believe Tom Mc Shea belongs on Deepfreeze.it and I know he has written many other sensational reviews.
The monster to silence | comments
Article
www.deepfreeze.it/article.php?a=monster
Tagline
Media's dehumanizing portrayal of those calling them out for their corruption may be that corruption's most irrefutable proof
Previous comment threads archive
None so far
Changes
Originally published as infograph on February 12, 2015 — is.gd/ggsilence.
Republished as article on May 5th 2015, with several significant rewrites.
Website Security
/tech/ here.
I want to help with your infrastructure. deepfreeze.it is politically sensitive and the security of the users should be taken seriously. Currently, you don't have a certificate for the website (nice job btw) for https. Is there an IRC I can join to help fix this? A .onion address would be nice too, but that might open you up to spam a bit more.