Valve (Steam) to address review bombing in new update to User Reviews system

[Keystone Nyan Cat]

Source- https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/

 

Sometimes, developer actions outside of a game have affected game reviews; whereas other times, it's due to community driven discussions. Citing Wikipedia, "Titan Souls was review bombed in April 2015 [...] after artist Andrew Gleeson mocked a statement that Bain made saying the game was "absolutely not for me"." This hurts game opinion, and thereby sales. 

 

To address this, Valve is integrating a system that notices a large swing in player reviews, and notifies someone within valve about this for manual review. This person will decide whether the reviews are related to the game or not, and 

Quote

Once our team has identified that the anomalous activity is an off-topic review bomb, we'll mark the time period it encompasses and notify the developer. The reviews within that time period will then be removed from the Review Score calculation. As before, the reviews themselves are left untouched - if you want to dig into them to see if they're relevant to you, you'll still be able to do so. To help you do that, we've made it clear when you're looking at a store page where we've removed some reviews by default, and we've further improved the UI around anomalous review periods. 

Users can completely opt out of this system. Of note though-

• DRM and EULA changes are classified as review bombs
• On-topic reviews made during the review bombing period will be identified as a review-bomb and will not be included in the review score.
• Reviews are NOT being deleted, only changes to how the score is being calculated./
• Past review bombings are NOT being flagged, this is something affecting reviews only moving forward.

 

My personal opinion- While this is a great step forward in terms of reviews and helping only show consumers content related to the action game they're buying, I feel as though DRM and EULA based matters shouldn't be identified as a review bomb because they can affect game play (e.g.- always online making games unplayable in areas with poor networking).

[Spotty]

Just now, Keystone Nyan Cat said:

Source- https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/

That was a month ago. It was already posted.

 

[Keystone Nyan Cat]

1 minute ago, Spotty said:

That was a month ago. It was already posted.

 

Oops Sorry; I should have checked the date on it before posting.

[suicidalfranco]

Valve should add a review section on publisher/developer page, that way games won't have to suffer.

Or introduce something akin to the worst company award, with a user review system, a timeline that aggregates news and user review activity and the release of the award at the end of the year, and paradoxically add a best company award 

[mr moose]

More and more it seems the best reviews are the LTT, jays, GN style of review (goes for games as well).  It's a lot easier to be critical of these types of reviews than trying to work out if a forum post, review post or other user generated review is legitimate from someone who knows what they are talking about.