Confess HN: 40% of my app's 5-star ratings result from a minor bug

I'm running a printable escape room game. People love it- but they don't rate it on the App Store, they mostly play it 2-4 nights and then delete it - fair enough!

Recently, my ratings skyrocketed. Why? I was also receiving much more customer service complaints. Turns out: those complaints, and me helping people, were the reason (!) for the good ratings, and for people rating it at all.

What happened?

A while ago, I started selling Escape Team on Groupon. Groupon got 10K+ voucher codes from me, each looks roughly like this:

G--*

Being the cowboy programmer I am, I implemented my voucher-checking PHP code very straightforward.

It will not (!) forgive users who didn't put in those dashes.

But they do, every day. And then? They reach out to me to complain, I tell them about the dashes, they apologize. I tell them they are not the first, all good. PS: We'd love a positive App Store rating!

And there we go.

They rate it. Not the app, but the service - and the short experience of (true) humanness.

Not sure how I should feel (or act) about this, but I think it's an interesting example of unexpected UX effects.

If you want to play it yourself, here's the game:

https://www.escape-team.com