That was a good thread, kudos.
I find the issue of review bombing overblown though. Extremely tiny number of games have it happen to them, and it is always a reaction to something. It doesn’t happen for no reason. Is it ok? No, but throwing reviews out entirely because of it would be stupid.
Reviews are extremely useful particularly for less known indie games that mainstream press would never write about.
Someone saying they wished I would die because I made a game they didn’t like. Thats not unique to me incidentally, I am a white straight guy, incredibly I get LESS of those than others and yet I still remember each one.
I am happy to “man up” and laugh it off, but its a bit much isnt it? Really? I dont get to post permanent death threats on the InNOut drive through sign because I didnt like my burger for whatever crazy ass reason.
I mean - those are massive games… right now my Wishlist on Steam has ‘Ultimate General: American Civil War’ on it. I’ve been on the fence about buying it, but I’m leaning towards yes because the user reviews are ‘very positive’.
I’m not going to be able to get a sense of that without a lot of time spent scouring the internet.
Additionally, I like user reviews, because I find that professional reviews very often don’t seem to match how most people feel about a game. Civilization 6, for example, is rated as an 88 on Metacritic. I bought it and it is extremely mediocre in my opinion. Guess what the masses say on Steam? Mixed. Those Mixed reviews and Mixed recent reviews have helped me hold off on buying the DLC until there is a significant sale down the line.
Death threats and review bombing are not the same thing. I realize they can be mixed together, but I think it’s disingenuous to try to lump death threats in with the general negative review so called problem.
Death threats are a problem that very few online public spaces has figured out how to handle. What do you want them to do with someone who does that? Ban the account?
Consistently deleting the abuse that was flagged would be a start. How would you handle the Chinese language example I gave? That wasnt abusive it was completely unjustified review bombing.
But tbh good luck finding a developer who privately thinks Steams review system is in anyway implemented competently. Derek is simply voicing what is (as far as I can tell) the majority opinion among game artists & creators.
If folks want to project onto that game developers are afraid of criticism then go ahead. But if you want to know what people think on the inside then Derek pretty much nailed it.
Google. Facebook. Twitter. None of them do this well. Why do you think Valve ca?. It would be different if the rest of the world didn’t have the same or similar problems, but they do. Amazon has it too. Walmart has it, almost every news site that has a comment section has it. This is not unique to gaming. I think the developers are demanding a solution to a problem that no one else has really figured out yet. For some of these other companies, they don’t take down the bad reviews until they show up in the news, and it’s not because those comments haven’t been flagged. They often are.
I can’t blame Valve for not having a solution for something a lot of companies struggle with.
They are afraid of criticism if the only criticism they are willing to be exposed to are the ones they think are valid. When you deal with the public, you deal with the public. And what can be also aggravating as hell is some of those same developers will have problems within their games and they don’t deal with the problems there either. Death threats. Harassment. All that can be found in some of the games and they refuse to give tools to deal with it there. And you don’t have to give anyone a death threat, you just show up with a name or a voice that isn’t average white and you have the problem.
I don’t support death threats or abusive reviews in that line, but if someone wants to complain that the game isn’t available in Chinese, then they can complain about that. I would not put those two in the same tree let alone the same branch as an example of review abuse. In the good old days, you would see people from different regions ask about other languages or e-mail them, these days, people are posting requests and problems and complaints in reviews because that’s where they realize they can get a response. That’s a symptom of a problem, and the review is not the problem.
I read and I respectfully disagree :) The problem is easily solvable. Epic has solved it, Blizzard has solved it. We dont have to look very far. Let artists sell their games and make a store front the way they want. If developers or potential purchasers want to find out other players experiences then the internet still works. If people refuse to buy a Blizzard game because there are no user reviews right there next to the buy button then they should do that and move on. Simple.
I will leave you with this . Would everyone be in favour of anonymous comments to be posted tagging each of our posts & profiles here?
Like below this one or anyone else, there could be an anonymous review on your post and yourself personally?
Does that sound like it would be a helpful feature? What if you had zero ability to modify or remove those? Comments about you and your posts could only be deleted by say Stusser, one person, and there are thousands of anon comments posted each day, sometimes they get in the tens of thousands so naturally some stay up.
If folks here can somehow imagine that would be a good thing as it would help readers of Qt3 focus on the “high quality” posts and ignore the “bad” ones then fine. We have reached the end of the road with our thought experiment because I think that would be a terrible idea.
Rod, I’m not selling you anything. I am not offering support. I am not asking you to give me money and then give you the benefit of the doubt. I’m not your customer right now.
You’re trying to make this sound like some sort of social engagement, and maybe to some it is, but this is a business arrangement.
If I go to a store, and I have problem with a purchase, and I can’t get an associate to deal with it in a way I think it needs to be handled, and I can’t get the manager to deal with it or the store general manager, or the region manager, or corporate and I wind up on Social Media and suddenly someone is listening and a solution is offered… Do that enough times, and the instinct is going to be bypassing all the other channels and just going to Social Media. That’s a learned behavior.
Now does this mean every request is reasonable? No. Does this mean sometimes the engagement and request can’t go beyond reason and into abusive, no that can still happen. But skipping to reviews in order to be heard and to get a solution is a behavior that customers learned after engaging in pretty piss poor customer service for years, decades even. This is learned. They are short-cutting the system because the systems suck. And anyone who looks at reviews and says that’s the problem, isn’t really paying attention.
If you don’t want to engage the public, don’t sell to them. You are not required to sell to the public or deal with them, but if you choose to, then know you will deal with abusive, desperate, eager and skeptical customers right alongside the ones that treat you like you’re some kind of rock star.
There are many industries that deal with the problems described here. It’s not called reviews, but it might patient or customer satisfaction, or engagement or any other marketing spiel, and guess what, panic buttons exist, death threats, bomb threats… it’s all there, and the answer has never been stop engaging.
I agree 100% and businesses have a myriad of different ways they decide to interact with customers depending on their segment. Its not one size fits all. Gucci has a very different approach to Walmart. The local 7-11 is different from the local Ruth Chris. Customers have every right and business owners have every right to decide how appropriate certain techniques are for their service to better serve customers.
I reject the notion that the only answer must be user reviews because as noted, we have so many examples where businesses work great and give extremely high customer satisfaction without them.
Good discussion btw :) Although I certainly am out of my arguments and I appreciate yours!
For what it’s worth, I’m sad that this discussion is going to be forgotten/lost in a week because it happened in a topic with 100 posts/day.
The review situation is even more embarrassing because the solution is both simple and already proven procedure. Just find some way to flag reviews, for example let the devs and the community do it. Then have each and every one of them checked by hand in a service center on the philippines. The costs would be relatively small but the effect big. Even 10k checked reviews per day would cost only peanuts.
edit: There’s a whole industry for services like this in the philippines.
Review bombing is easily solved through a mixture of analytics, machine learning, and gold ol’ fashioned moderation.
You assign each review a bullshit rating between 0 and 1 based upon:
When the number of reviews autonomically marked bullshit passes a certain threshold you have a paid human moderator come in and make a judgment call as to whether the title is being review-bombed, and if it is, you freeze posting for 24 hours so people can cool off.
This would, of course, cost money and not directly generate revenue for Steam.
But not a lot of money, and I bet at least one engineer at Valve would find it to be a really neat project to work on. And while it wouldn’t directly generate revenue, fixing this problem would make game makers happy and help to justify what’s increasingly looking like an usurious 30% cut.
Yes but Gucci, Costco, Wal-Mart, Amazon, and even 7-11, your local hospital, many of your restaurants, all give you a means to to engage the company if you choose to do so. Many of them have review systems, if not directly through them but through a third party. You’re making it sounds like 7-11 doesn’t have an address or a phone number or managers or corporate headquarters when they certainly do. This is also in addition to the manufacturer attempts which might also press you to give them feedback.
And the real kicker is a lot of them want you to review, they send you emails and calls asking for it or at the very least it’s on a receipt encouraging you to share your experience.
Yes, I’m sure each genre has its own trolling keywords.
Reading it over, I really think my #5 is key, users with less than 2 hours of playtime should have far less weight than those that paid for the game and cannot refund it. That alone seems like it would help a lot.
Could there be another solution too, encouraging more people to actually post a review, making it easier for someone who is not inclined but is generally content or happy? This might actually soften the top and the bottom?
What percentage of players actually leave a review?
This is a good point. A lot of sites end up having a disproportionate number of negative reviews because people tend to only log on to complain about a bad experience. If you have a normal problem free experience, why leave a review?
Valve, here is a free idea for you.
If you post a review, you get a random trading card for the game you review, and this could also trigger the end of the refund window. (i.e. you get a card or a refund with your review)
The only time I ever review a game on steam is when I get an incentive to do so, like during the sales events when you get a badge for leaving a review.
If I got a trading card for every review I did, I would review games a heck of a lot more, but right now I don’t see an incentive to do so.
I review very few games, but I like more games that I buy then I don’t. Of the games I don’t like, I’d say maybe 30% I would even think about leaving a negative review because sometimes I buy a game I just don’t like… there isn’t anything wrong with it, and then I give reasons why my experience might be relevant to encourage others like I did with MHW.
The No. 1 reason I don’t leave reviews is because I don’t think I have anything to add that hasn’t been said before. When I do review a game it’s usually with the intention of encouraging people who might be hesitant to try it.
In my entire life as a gamer, I don’t think I’ve ever been encouraged to leave a review, not even once (exception is beta/alpha testing). Based on the responses from the developers around the reviews and comments, I get the impression they don’t want to hear from me or anyone else. It’s one of the few industries I heavily engage with that generally does’t want feedback.
I don’t know if you’re being serious because I only partially understand the whole trading card thing, but it seems like something others really like and value.
Are there any metrics on Steam review bombs? I would guess the percentage of credible incidents are negligible given the quantity of total games.
I am actually being serious.
I don’t really care about the cards, but for some reason I get unreasonably happy when I get one for free.
So, maybe I do care about them.