Digital Extremes, the developer of looter-shooter Warframe, has responded to the recent review bombing sparked by a disagreement with a volunteer translator and the game’s definition of Hong Kong and Taiwan as independent countries (via USGamer.net).

Ji, a volunteer working on the Chinese translation of Warframe, was dismissed from their post by Digital Extremes. They posted their letter of termination onto Reddit and other forums; it claimed Ji had publicly shared internal information about the localisation process, private conversations with Digital Extremes developers, and information about unreleased content. It also said that Ji had fallen out with Digital Extremes staff.

Ji’s account stated that they had a problem with Digital Extremes ‘awful’ Chinese translation, and compared it to a machine translation. They admitted that they were talking to the Chinese Warframe community about their work, but did not specify what topics had come up in conversation. ‘So many players come the Global build. And I am kind of like the bridge between the players and the DE members. With the volunteer tag they can trust me on really fix the translation,’ Ji said.

Digital Extremes posted a public statement earlier this week, which explained the reasons why a volunteer would be dismissed. ‘We do not remove people from our volunteer programs lightly, and such removals are made after great consideration,’ it read. ‘Our volunteers are provided with a list of program guidelines and a (recently-added) volunteer agreement that allow us to share unreleased information with them - sometimes a violation of these guidelines occurs, which prompts us to remind Tenno of them.’ If a volunteer repeatedly transgresses the agreement, ‘removal from our volunteer programs is necessary’, it said.

Speaking to USGamer.net, the Warframe developer addressed the fact that Hong Kong and Taiwan are listed as countries within the game, and the ensuing wave of negative reviews from players. ‘Our Chinese community is very important to us and we're continuing to work with them to listen to their feedback, address their concerns, and ensure their needs are met,’ the representative stated.

Warframe is still suffering from review bombings, but Valve has now made it clearer as to whether negative reviews are part of a strategy such as this or a player’s independent conclusions of the game. Recent negative reviews have been tagged as ‘off-topic’ with an asterisk; clicking the asterisk brings up the message, ‘This time range has been marked as containing an abnormal set of reviews that we believe are largely unrelated to the likelihood that you would enjoy the product. The reviews within this period are excluded from the Review Score by default.’

Warframe is out now for PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch.