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Valve battles review-bombers by introducing review histograms

C

Chairmanchuck

Member
Because of the PDP/Firewatch incident, seems Valve also took a look at the so-called review-bombings and will now add histograms.

Some user from the comments describes it well:

Starting today, each game page now contains a histogram of the positive to negative ratio of reviews over the entire lifetime of the game, and by clicking on any part of the histogram you're able to read a sample of the reviews from that time period.
Click to expand...

http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1448326897426987372

66793e5d30a8fe79f54216ceeac0fb1765594ae9.png
 
N

Nzyme32

Member
KZXcellent said:
This should have been added a long long time ago. Glad it's finally happening.
Click to expand...

Indeed. There have been quite a few traces of this for a while thought (and much prior to the whole PewDiePie thing)

Lunaray said:
Took them long enough.
Click to expand...

As opposed to what other game platforms taking this approach. Shit amazon could do with this sort of thing along with app stores, yet we don't see much. Particularly since most review systems are not Binary like Steam
 
Truner

Truner

Neo Member
Now THAT is a massive middle finger to the review-bombers, literally making their efforts irrelevant. Good.
 
P

PMS341

Member
SumGamer said:
Is this because people were spamming Dota 2 reviews for the absence of HL3?
Click to expand...

Honestly, this was probably the main red flag for them, while the PDP incident seems like good blanket PR to combat it all at once.

This is a good first step, but still feels slightly passive.
 
R

RoboPlato

I'd be in the dick
How does this help? It only visually organizes when it starts getting review bombed and does nothing to discourage or prevent it.
 
Zomba13

Zomba13

Member
This is good. Definitely needed these days where nasty people get pissed off when anyone related to a game says or does anything to their racist youtubers.
 
P

PMS341

Member
Artanisix said:
fucking hell valve just can't win with some of you people huh

glad valve added this, it's a great feature to have
Click to expand...

All things considered, Valve is hardly in any place to "win" with anyone slightly knowledgeable about the current state of the PC gaming market.

This is a positive step no doubt though.
 
B

brad-t

Member
This is the most Valve-like solution possible. Don't actually do any additional ongoing work or improve policy, just provide a bar graph illustrating the timeline of the abuse.
 
Alexander DeLarge

Alexander DeLarge

Member
This is a nice tool to have, especially since it might visualize when a game slipped up. Games are ever evolving nowadays and it'd be interesting to see how something like Star Wars Galaxies would look before and after the NGE (probably the most controversial update to a game of all time) if we had this back then...

Ultimately I don't see why people using reviews to express their distaste with a publisher/developer's action is wrong. I reviewed GTA5 negatively when Take Two was sending private investigators to the homes of modders. I've reviewed games negatively for their draconian DRM measures. Sure, it's open to brigading but overall, consumers should have the right to negatively review a game as a result of technical issues, whether or not they liked the game or even issues surrounding the title (DMCA nonsense included).
 
F

FGanz

Neo Member
RoboPlato said:
How does this help? It only visually organizes when it starts getting review bombed and does nothing to discourage or prevent it.
Click to expand...

Well it helps to contextualize the shifts happening to a game’s reviews, which hopefully will reduce the amount of bias on them. I’d say that’s already quite good actually, provided that the person considering that game takes the time to use the feature.

But sure you have a point, it won’t stop review bombing yet, but it may reduce its impact on sales and maybe even the amount of people who spend their time writing them.
 
finalflame

finalflame

Gold Member
brad-t said:
This is the most Valve-like solution possible. Don't actually do any additional ongoing work or improve policy, just provide a bar graph illustrating the timeline of the abuse.
Click to expand...

Did you actually read the blog post, or just driveby shitpost? They explain their reasoning for not making changes to the review system itself and the tendency of review ratings over time for games that did suffer from review bombing.

Anno said:
If people would read the blog post they might get answers to some of their questions about why this is the method they're going with for now.
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People are far less interested in that and far more interested in shitposting.
 
A

Anno

Member
If people would read the blog post they might get answers to some of their questions about why this is the method they're going with for now.
 
2

21x2

Member
It's good that they finally implemented something to combat this. Shame it's taken this long and that Valve apparently are completely incapable of improving their service before things escalate to the point where they have real life consequences.
 
K

khaaan

Member
I'm feeling out of the loop, what happened that caused people to take out their Half-Life 3 frustration now of all times? The story details that came out?
 
N

Nzyme32

Member
brad-t said:
This is the most Valve-like solution possible. Don't actually do any additional ongoing work or improve policy, just provide a bar graph illustrating the timeline of the abuse.
Click to expand...

What possible policy would you add to prevent anyone giving a negative review for any reason - whether valid or not valid negativity?

If you want an open system for reviews, the best possible steps you can make are to provide as much data as possible for people to identify what is causing bad or good reviews - whether that is review bombing, updates to the games, jokes, spam etc - and then letting customers make their own mind up / utilise the data to filter out what is irrelevant (which should be the next step with enough data)

Censoring reviews arbitrarily doesn't work, and the only thing you can do with censorship / moderation is block obvious and repeating spam.
 
C

c0Zm1c

Member
It's not going to make a lot of difference tucked away down the bottom of the page and out of sight (and for some reason the graph doesn't display for me! Edit: working now!)
 
H

hesido

Member
It may protect from review bombers but also any game can receive a game breaking patch or something like that that could take away the initial quality of the game too (e.g. introduction of pay to win elements), so one could understand it by analyzing the timeline. Also a game with a bad history can get better over time.

This way if a game starts receiving worse scores, you could analyze whether the negativity is uncalled for or not.
 
M

M3d10n

Member
Chairmanchuck said:
That and apparently the Pewdiepie/Firewatch incident, where the Firewatch devs DMCAd a video of PDP and fans were review bombing Firewatch.
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While those events certainly fast tracked id, that's far too soon to have such a feature developed and ready to release. It was probably in the works already for more mundane reasons, like seeing how reviews change over time after the game received updates and whatnot.
 
P

patapuf

Member
nubbe said:
Is there a minimum playtime for reviews?

Should be at a minimum of 4 hours so you can buy and refund
Click to expand...

A review system that forces you to keep the item even if it's bad in order for you to be allowed to review it sounds kind of busted from a consumer rights perspective.
 
H

Hektor

Member
nubbe said:
Is there a minimum playtime for reviews?

Should be at a minimum of 4 hours so you can buy and refund
Click to expand...

This would result in the fact that no one who encounters game breaking bugs, unplayable performance, constant crashes or any other objectively bad issue would be able to leave a review as they'd all be refunding the game.
 
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