The battle of the trolls in the Star Citizen community reached new lows this week as someone apparently impersonated a former dev on Glassdoor in an attempt to defame or at least hassle Cloud Imperium.
The fake review is plainly posted to look as if it were written by John Pritchett, a senior physics programmer at CIG who recently departed the company. But it is riddled with trainwreck grammar and spelling errors; it poorly communicates its central idea that an architecture change and micromanagement led to problems in the game’s development that are insurmountable by modern tech. “The scope of the project needs to be massively reigned in, and realistic expectations of what will actually be delivered in the next decade or two need to be communicated honestly and clearly to the community supporting the business,” it claims. It also includes plenty of positive praise for the ground-team, presumably in an attempt to make it look more realistic.
Pritchett is not amused. “It recently came to my attention that someone impersonating me has posted a fake review on Glassdoor about my time on Star Citizen,” he wrote on Facebook. “I did not write this review. I flagged it with the site, but felt that I should make a post to get the word out in case anyone saw it and thought it was legit.
Before you leap to the conclusion that everyone’s favorite Internet Warlord is responsible, know that that’s already been hashed out, and Derek Smart has already said he supports and believes Pritchett. “I stopped reporting on departing team members awhile back because it was drawing too much attention to them, which then tended to devolve into some of the toxic backers attacking them for abandoning the project,” he explains.
More on the drama:
