Valve still trying to stop Steam user review manipulation

[Cal Jeffrey]

Valve has been waging war against review manipulation for some time now. Back in September, it began adding histograms to review pages to allow users to see if a game has been subjected to review bombing. Steam implemented the measure after both Firewatch and GTA V were bombed following takedown orders filed against popular YouTubers. Since then administrators have noticed another type of manipulation involving how reviews are ranked on the site.

As with many other websites that offer user reviews, Steam allows visitors to rank reviews as helpful or unhelpful. Ideally, and indeed on most other sites, this works well in pointing users to the most useful reviews when considering a purchase. However, Valve has found that users with a gripe are also abusing this system.

It works in much the same way that upvoting works on Reddit. After reading a review, users can mark it as helpful or unhelpful. The most useful reviews float to the top of the list, so they appear before others. At least, that is how it is supposed to work.

What Valve discovered though, is that some reviews are being unfairly marked, usually with an aim to impact the game negatively.

“It turns out that not everyone is as helpful as we would like. Instead, we are seeing more and more feedback from players that the helpful reviews shown on store pages aren’t representative of how well people are actually enjoying the game.”

According to Steam, 11 million people have used the review ranking system. Most of them are using it as it was intended. However, it has found some users appear to be manipulating reviews by marking negative reviews as helpful and positive reviews as unhelpful (or vice-versa). It has recorded some accounts ranking as many as 10,000 reviews on a single game.

“This behavior is not only humanly impossible but definitely not a thoughtful indication of how 'helpful' each of those reviews were,” said Valve.

To combat the situation, Steam will be implementing a couple of changes to the system.

First it will change the way reviews are ranked by taking into account users who appear to be trying to influence the system.

“Ratings from users that follow normal patterns of rating will continue to be counted the same way that they have, whereas accounts that rate an excessive number of reviews on an individual game will see the weight of each individual rating count for less and less.”

The second change will be on the store pages themselves. Each page will show helpful positive and negative reviews proportionately. If a game has 80 percent positive reviews overall, then the store page will display the top eight positive and the top two negative reviews.

The changes are being beta tested starting today, and for now, users can turn the new system on and off with the “Review Beta” dropdown to see how it affects the review rankings.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/71991-valve-trying-stop-steam-user-review-manipulation.html

 

[BSim500]

"Valve has been waging war against review manipulation for some time now. Back in September, it began adding histograms to review pages to allow users to see if a game has been subjected to review bombing."

Obvious problem being, not all negative review floods are "manipulation". That's increasingly becoming an attempt at a "catch-all" cop-out excuse for games with "issues" (sh*tty micro-transactions, grind-as-an-in-game-advert-for-degrind-MT's, performance impacting DRM, bad remakes / reboots that are obvious "cheap and nasty franchise cash-ins", etc) to deflect the blame / unpopularity onto their critics. Likewise a lot of backlash aimed at Campo Santo / BeamDog for "political" reasons, is often more due to "response escalation" by personnel who have zero conflict management skills / ability to handle criticism in forums and start indirectly screeching "one liners" at people via social media rather than talking to them directly in a de-escalating manner.

"However, it has found some users appear to be manipulating reviews by marking negative reviews as helpful and positive reviews as unhelpful (or vice-versa)."

Negative reviews ARE regularly helpful when they go into detail about technical issues and positive reviews are unhelpful when all they do is consist of one-liner "Best game evah!" or the usual "comedians" trying too hard to get posts "marked as funny" (the very first thing that needs removing if Valve is serious about wanting only "grown-up reviews"). Strangely the devs seem to have no problem with the unhelpfulness of the latter two if it sings unwarranted gushing praise...

Overall, I think most people are discerning enough to figure out which developers are genuinely concerned about a random unfair "out of nowhere" bomb vs those full of BS trying to play victim over a self-inflicted situation (under-estimating dislike of trashy pay2win mobile mechanics in full-priced AAA's, etc). Steam is ultimately a sales company and their self-reviews (and attempts at "shaping") will actually be biased towards the positive because of that. Hence the large amount of barely working Early Access / asset-flipped cr*p that never seems to go lower than "Mixed" even when it crawls along at 20fps on high-end cards before crashing every 2 minutes or "Product received for free" reviews infomercials (which Valve also never seemed to have problems with...)

Developers churning out regular bad games are panicking for the same reason they previously killed off playable demo's - Good games will sell anyway due to word of mouth in gaming forums / schools, etc, but it's the bad ones that get hit the hardest with "pre-sales dirty laundry" being aired. Same reason why they're also the same publishers pushing the pre-order + review embargo combo, which is far removed from the "all we want is for gamers to wait for honest reviews" angle they've been recently pretending to support...

 

[Uncle Al]

Now would be a good time for a truly independent party or company to set up a "Review Center" that was tightly regulated and used by all the game companies as well as anyone that wanted to generate a review. Through checks and balances they could confirm if the person was a legitimate game "owner" and limit them to one review per product. It could be a great service for both the user as well as the makers IF they would participate. Over the course of times those that chose to opt out would be pressured to comply or have their own systems identified for probable manipulation ....

 

[Reehahs]

"Valve has been waging war against review manipulation for some time now. Back in September, it began adding histograms to review pages to allow users to see if a game has been subjected to review bombing."

Obvious problem being, not all negative review floods are "manipulation". That's increasingly becoming an attempt at a "catch-all" cop-out excuse for games with "issues" (sh*tty micro-transactions, grind-as-an-in-game-advert-for-degrind-MT's, performance impacting DRM, bad remakes / reboots that are obvious "cheap and nasty franchise cash-ins", etc) to deflect the blame / unpopularity onto their critics. Likewise a lot of backlash aimed at Campo Santo / BeamDog for "political" reasons, is often more due to "response escalation" by personnel who have zero conflict management skills / ability to handle criticism in forums and start indirectly screeching "one liners" at people via social media rather than talking to them directly in a de-escalating manner.

"However, it has found some users appear to be manipulating reviews by marking negative reviews as helpful and positive reviews as unhelpful (or vice-versa)."

Negative reviews ARE regularly helpful when they go into detail about technical issues and positive reviews are unhelpful when all they do is consist of one-liner "Best game evah!" or the usual "comedians" trying too hard to get posts "marked as funny" (the very first thing that needs removing if Valve is serious about wanting only "grown-up reviews"). Strangely the devs seem to have no problem with the unhelpfulness of the latter two if it sings unwarranted gushing praise...

Overall, I think most people are discerning enough to figure out which developers are genuinely concerned about a random unfair "out of nowhere" bomb vs those full of BS trying to play victim over a self-inflicted situation (under-estimating dislike of trashy pay2win mobile mechanics in full-priced AAA's, etc). Steam is ultimately a sales company and their self-reviews (and attempts at "shaping") will actually be biased towards the positive because of that. Hence the large amount of barely working Early Access / asset-flipped cr*p that never seems to go lower than "Mixed" even when it crawls along at 20fps on high-end cards before crashing every 2 minutes or "Product received for free" reviews infomercials (which Valve also never seemed to have problems with...)

Developers churning out regular bad games are panicking for the same reason they previously killed off playable demo's - Good games will sell anyway due to word of mouth in gaming forums / schools, etc, but it's the bad ones that get hit the hardest with "pre-sales dirty laundry" being aired. Same reason why they're also the same publishers pushing the pre-order + review embargo combo, which is far removed from the "all we want is for gamers to wait for honest reviews" angle they've been recently pretending to support...

Well said, the honest criticism of BF2 saved from wasting my money on that game.

 

[Someone8MyPosts]

The only reason Valve sees this as a problem is because it hits the bottom line. When they want to push bullcrap curator reviews that no one cares about, it's all game on.

 

[Someone8MyPosts]

Now would be a good time for a truly independent party or company to set up a "Review Center" that was tightly regulated and used by all the game companies as well as anyone that wanted to generate a review. Through checks and balances they could confirm if the person was a legitimate game "owner" and limit them to one review per product. It could be a great service for both the user as well as the makers IF they would participate. Over the course of times those that chose to opt out would be pressured to comply or have their own systems identified for probable manipulation ....

It's called the internet.