Fucking finally. I love a funny joke but if you're looking for serious reviews, you currently have to wade through a sea of trolls, jokes and copy-pasted meme reviews in order to figure out if a game is interesting to you.
Community features are cool but if you're the most popular platform of your kind, you're gonna attract a lot of trolls who's content can be really out there. Filters are a good solution to this!
Better than sex
Nobody will read this so I'll just say it: I'm gay.
A lot of them aren't even about the game at all...
And people explaining what the game is instead of how the game is.
A review should tell you what the game is. It should also tell you what they like/don't like about it, but different perspectives about how the core mechanics work are absolutely critical parts of the discussion.
Indeed, sometimes I really appreciate a heads up of if I can save in the middle of gameplay or if I have to complete a whole run before it saves progress, things like that are not deal breakers but it can definitely affect how I play a game
There's stuff like that, but it's also as simple as most game pages just not accurately depicting what the core gameplay loop is. The number of games with 10 cinematic trailers that combine for 3 seconds of gameplay and have descriptions full of setting with maybe some features but don't mention whether they're a card game or an FPS is way too high.
Screenshots can probably resolve my example, and tags are "OK", but marketing trash is just so abundant that a lot of pages are genuinely hard to figure out pretty basic elements of what the minute to minute experience is.
God I hate cinematic trailers for unreleased games. It's fine if it's a released game that I can just Google gameplay.
This is a side effect of YouTube content creation practices where a video will have an overview of the plot or story to pad out the run time or article. Often, because game journalism is basically long distance abusive relationships between the writer and the game publisher, the review is too mild to contain actual opinions and will draw on comparisons to other games instead of forming genuine critiques and admiration.
The end result is a generation of games and movies where the review is unable to provide enough genuine content to fill 10 minutes or 3 pages, so they instead spoil the game while riffing on very specific foibles. They don't know how to talk critically about mechanics or story or design.
It's because sometimes I just want to "rate" the game, not "review" it but steam won't let me. So sometimes I just write "it sucks." or sometimes some random shit. Steam should have a idk 5 star rating system with optional reviews. Makes more sense but shit games will be bought less I bet.
There's this very nice template you can use to quickly make a more detailed review without having to write it all yourself. You can always just google "Steam review template" to find it.
I hope this is partly to deal with review bombing, but I also hope it doesn’t completely hide review bombing.
It can be really helpful to know that there is a social media shitstorm around a game.
But sometimes the shitstorm is a bunch of basement dwellers getting mad over nothing, and it makes it hard to see actual opinions about the game.
Some review bombs are for legit reasons. I've seen a few for games that dropped support for a language well after release.
Wasn't it helldivers 2 that region-locked people months after release?
Over 130 countries.
Is it even review bombing if it's for a legit issue with the game in question?
they already have a system for review bombing. i hope this is for stupid "joke" reviews that say nothing about the game but regurgitate the same fake review for the 1400th time.
I've never discovered review bombing over steam. Either my peers mention it to me or I see it on social media.
Though to be fair, almost all of my decisions about buying games are made from watching videos of said game, rather than reading reviews. Steam reviews, for me, are either for very cheap games I'm buying impulsively or games where I have some insight but am still on the fence.
I used to read Rock Paper Shotgun as part of the decision making process, but I've found their input less useful the last few years.
If a game isn't overwhelmingly positive, I almost never buy it. I also find review bombs completely valid in almost every case and I'm not interested in funding games that have managed to outrage their player base. In every case I would be outraged by the same thing they are.
Take a look at games like Gta5 when Take2 tried to ban modding (lol).
If I'm grokking the feature correctly, people will have to review bomb the review bombers with "unhelpful" flags.
Good. I'm sick of seeing the "pet this cat" reviews at the top of the list. Hopefully this changes some of that stuff.
This is a good change, they have had the unhelpful/helpful/funny review system for years now, but I always found it weird it didn't do anything aside from boost on "helpful" rating. something that is majority unhelpful rated shouldn't be shown on the review page or arguably in the score in the first place.
Does this mean “reviews that negatively affect profits” or does in mean genuinely removing irrelevant content?
It probably works based on whether users marking reviews as helpful or unhelpful and then uses some formula to remove the unhelpful ones. So it can be neither, but the key takeaway is that the users decide what ends up filtered out.
Thanks. That’s actually not too bad an idea. However, I’ll offer that it could lead to critics being silenced. Not necessarily out of nefarious purposes, but people love the downvote train sometimes.
Yeah, that's why I said it's neither because people can be unpredictable. It might not filter out irrelevant content because people love to upvote memes and it might filter out criticism because sometimes people downvote criticism.
Overall like with some other Steam features the value of the feature is dependent on the community, and generally that value has been a net positive.
I would hope that it’s removing that one review about being a 40 year old dad that plays the game with his son that’s on every single game in the Steam store. And also hopefully that copy pasted one with the check boxes
Speaking of unhelpful, eurogamer.net is littered with ads. They add no value to the original Reddit post (https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/1emb4ch/valve_is_finally_addressing_bad_reviews_issue/).
I wish they would also let us filter out unuseful guides.
PROS
CONS
3/10
Reviews being a message board for grievances and memes really sucks. It reflects badly on gamers. Makes everything look trashy.
Memes? yes!
Grievances? That's exactly what a review is for! Telling other people what you do and don't like about a thing.
For every like I will eat a spoonful of salt
I wonder how many real reviews are going to get filtered as "unhelpful" because the developer or other people don't like what the review says, even if what is said is factually true.
One problem steam doesn't have is with fake accounts. They can be reasonably sure which accounts are legit and ignore votes from the more questionable ones
Please just give us a "maybe"
"unhelpful" review aka reviews that could make them earn less money.
I do enjoy a sprinkling of meme and unhinged reviews - especially as part of Northernlion Reads Hentai Game Steam Reviews segments - but overall this is probably a change for the better.
Should probably just filter them out by default, and then have a sort by funny or something.
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