eBay's horribly written/erroneous product information
eBay does it again. It never ceases to amaze. In all the years I've been selling Mortal Kombat for Genesis I've never actually looked at the product information. Here it is unedited:
The Mortal Kombat is an action video game developed for Sega Genesis. The evil wizard Shang Tsung gives a challenge to fight against the unbeaten competitor of Mortal Kombat tournament, named Goro. The motive behind this tournament is Earthrealm i.e. conquering the world. The player in this Sega Genesis game assumes as one of the 7 characters - Johnny Cage, Kano, Raiden, Liu Kang, Scorpion, Sub-Zero, and Sonya. The player in this Action video game must fight and defeat each of its seven opponents including a mirror match contender to reach to the higher levels. The player then goes through three endurance matches in this Sega Genesis game where winning over two consecutive opponents is a must to clear the level. After winning quiet a few matches in this Action video game, the player goes through a special game, Test Your Might which gives a chance to win huge bonus points. This Mortal Kombat allows up to 2 players to play simultaneously.
Where do you begin? Well straight away there is no game called "The Mortal Kombat." Secondly it's a fighting game, not an action game. Next we get a couple of strangely worded sentences on the edge of being correct and then some grammatical, punctuation, spelling and capitalization errors. To top it all off, "The Mortal Kombat" has been replaced with "This Mortal Kombat" at the end, an even more incorrect version of the name.
Now I'm not the type to troll forums pointing out errors in posts. But this is information on a corporate website that has probably been viewed by over a million people over the years. And it's absolutely terrible! It seems to have been written by someone for whom English is a self-taught second language. Teaching yourself a foreign language is admirable, but you probably shouldn't have people with English difficulties writing your copy. Not to mention the whole thing is strangely written and only vaguely correct.
But of course it doesn't stop there. I recently found out that at least 17% of my Saturn auctions have errors in their product information or tech details. The product information and tech details can't be submitted for correction either. Half of these incorrect entries are misspellings, incorrect game series information and HTML where it doesn't belong. The other half are completely incorrect product information. For instance, here is the product information for Virtua Fighter 2:
Rough and tumble to the core, TOTAL OVERDOSE: A GUNSLINGER'S TALE IN MEXICO for PC by Eidos Interactive is all about the guns, shooting, and action. The storyline is based around the character Ramiro Cruz... blah blah blah.
So now I have to go back through and check/revise about 300 games. I did end up calling eBay and finding out that they use a 3rd party for the product information. Supposedly the rep I talked to is sending an error report to them. I called them before about a similar problem years ago and they never did anything about it, hopefully they will this time.
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Originally Posted by Wookie
