In a world where nuance is dead and dogpiling is the meta on twitter I think there's an actual takeaway here. You can never blame the consumer for not consuming, the product was just not worth consuming. Inversely, we have to stop pretending negative reviews don't harm the chances a game has to be successful. Highguard had thousands of overwhelmingly negative reviews from people who played it for under one hour. You can't call that fair no matter how you slice it. Take league of legends for example, in my first hour of ever playing that game I would've definitely given it like a 1.5 out of 10 because I didn't understand the systems in place like items/map/champions etc. But after playing LoL for thousands of hours, grinding nearly every champion and dedicating countless nights to solo queue I can say with my whole chest that League is actually like a 3 out of 10. Highguard deserved the same experience. People need to know it's ass before saying it </3