Positive spin to take a neutral tone? That is BS. When the world is complaining about how terrible a game is in the real world, with complete and verified BS problems and they ignore that fact to promote what amounts to a commercial advertisement then it isn't a site worth venturing to.
A spade is a spade and a lot of sites are like this, but then this thread is about one of those spades and I commented specifically to that jaded spade.
How is that BS, that's the same thing you're saying. Seriously, WTF? "Nuh-uh, but let me just rephrase what you said, which was just you rephrasing what I said!"
I don't recall Joystiq ignoring stuff like that, they often reported on all manner of issues. They'd take a neutral tone about it "people are having problems, this is the gist of the problems, here's links to where that's being discussed, we'll report on the publisher/developer 's response when it comes. I never saw them spin issues as non-existent or anything. They generally stayed completely out of it beyond reporting on what was going on.
I hope you're not naive enough to think that somehow overrides them doing promotional stuff. If you do then sorry but you're outright an idiot for not knowing exactly what those blogs (and magazines and similar) are and have been for decades. If you're expecting serious analysis then the joke is on you for not being able to immediately discern that from basically any and all articles on there. I see this rampant opinion where it's like people feel like they were betrayed when it was that way the whole time and they were just too obtuse to notice it.
Maybe you're talking about their reviews? Again those were always weak and you should've been smart enough to vet them for what they were. But that also highlights the problems inherent to games reviews. There's varying levels of technical expertise (and blogs like Joystiq have almost always been staffed with people with fairly low-basic levels of this), they're given different versions of games than what gets released, and all manner of other things (like reviewing online games on non-wide release, etc). They generally pointed things out (like how things could be different at release for online play for instance, I seem to recall they didn't have the rampant network issues that plagued Diablo 3 upon release) although, like I said, they often didn't take a very critical tone about it.
Joystiq was ok for the glorified PR for gaming that they were. You went there for fairly basic information about games and general thoughts about the industry with a light tone and focus on enjoying games. That's why they became successful in the first place, and that's all I ever treated them as. I never really had a strong need for that so they were never a site that I put much attention to (really mostly used them as quick reference for linking about topics).
Well then you've got a straight going with all your spades. Seriously I don't know where some of you people have been living that you haven't realized the major gaming sites and magazines have always been this way. That or I'm guessing you're just now learning that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny aren't real.