Update: We've received a response from the group's owners on the matter.
Original: A few users (supertoaster and killz2much) on the Facepunch forums have kindly alerted CS-Nation to a little interesting detail concerning the Left 4 Dead 2 Boycott group.
The group, angry with the prospect of a Left 4 Dead sequel, now sports well over 22,900 members. The problem is, quite a few of those members have not been on Steam for days, weeks, or even months. For a group that was created on June 1, just ten days ago, it begins to raise more than a few eyebrows.
Compounding the apparent issue is the fact that many of these users do not have Community profiles fully set up, own no games, and are only in one group, the Left 4 Dead 2 Boycott group. We have an e-mail sent in to the group's contact link to see if a response or clarification will be provided.
Our personal take is that there are a good number of users who are outraged at the announcement of Left 4 Dead 2. This is understandable and expected at the announcement of any sequel, especially one coming fairly soon after the release of the previous title in the series. However, for a group to have grown so rapidly over such a short amount of time with these "odd" users and accounts, something amiss does seem to be going on. Whether the fake users and alternate Steam accounts are the work of the group's creators or the work of a few individuals is not really known.
We hope to hear back from the group leaders for some sort of official response. As with any online community, take the information presented with a grain of salt as things may not always be as they seem.
We would like to thank community members supertoaser and killz2much for bringing this to our attention. Remember, this is currently a rumor and may end up being nothing at all.
We, as the staff, are not inflating any numbers. To our knowledge there are user accounts that are on our service that own no steam games. XBox 360 users, some of whom have signed up for steam accounts in order to join the steam group, may account for some of these since they are new users. These users may not have downloaded the Steam application and logged in, but have joined our Steam group through the steam community website. (This would mean they have not logged into Steam application ever, and Steam still has the default "last time" for login.) In fact, many of our users are online currently, in the many of thousands of users. It isn't uncommon to see 5,000-6,000 users on at any one given point in time. Therefore, we do not think that our numbers are artificially inflated--and if at all, not to any significant extent.
Original: A few users (supertoaster and killz2much) on the Facepunch forums have kindly alerted CS-Nation to a little interesting detail concerning the Left 4 Dead 2 Boycott group.
The group, angry with the prospect of a Left 4 Dead sequel, now sports well over 22,900 members. The problem is, quite a few of those members have not been on Steam for days, weeks, or even months. For a group that was created on June 1, just ten days ago, it begins to raise more than a few eyebrows.
Compounding the apparent issue is the fact that many of these users do not have Community profiles fully set up, own no games, and are only in one group, the Left 4 Dead 2 Boycott group. We have an e-mail sent in to the group's contact link to see if a response or clarification will be provided.
Our personal take is that there are a good number of users who are outraged at the announcement of Left 4 Dead 2. This is understandable and expected at the announcement of any sequel, especially one coming fairly soon after the release of the previous title in the series. However, for a group to have grown so rapidly over such a short amount of time with these "odd" users and accounts, something amiss does seem to be going on. Whether the fake users and alternate Steam accounts are the work of the group's creators or the work of a few individuals is not really known.
We hope to hear back from the group leaders for some sort of official response. As with any online community, take the information presented with a grain of salt as things may not always be as they seem.
We would like to thank community members supertoaser and killz2much for bringing this to our attention. Remember, this is currently a rumor and may end up being nothing at all.
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