1566

You’re barking up the wrong tree. We’re not complaining about “reviews”. We’re complaining about “review bombing”. It’s clear that you, and others like you, don’t know the difference, and thus think that they are interchangeable. I wrote about that this morning. Here is the direct Tweet with an example of each.

Review Bombing

Not Review Bombing

1567

I know the difference. I don’t have problem with it. It happens in several industries. You don’t know enough about me to say something like those like you, but then again, that never stops you from labeling people you don’t know.

If a company is getting support requests in their reviews, there are things that company can do other than bitch about their customers. Some developers just don’t want to take that extra effort or just deal with the fact that some customers aren’t going to be perfect customers, and it’s a fact other industries can handle; gaming can too.

1568

This is correct. Incidentally I have seen first hand a game lose several hundred thousand dollars in revenue because it was review bombed… why? The Chinese localization wasn’t done at launch. Other examples I have seen second hand are games being review bombed because it had gay or transgender characters in it.

These reviews STAY, Valve does NOT remove abusive “reviews” on a regular basis. They do NOT do their job consistently if at all.

I would hope nobody here would care to defend any of that nonsense.Steams review system is badly broken and Valve have been too lazy to address it, I completely agree with Derek.

1569

Review bombing is a problem - but how else would you recommend that customers (again, the seemingly forgotten group in this discussion) quickly share and review sentiment of a game?

I find the user reviews extremely useful in Steam, especially the ‘recent reviews’ to see how a game is trending. I don’t read much on the individual reviews, but seeing recent reviews of Mostly/Very Positive help me make purchasing decisions. If they say mixed, then it drives me to go do more research.

1570

The internet. Same place everyone finds out if the biggest games in the world are good or bad. LOL, Blizzard, Fornite players all seem to do just fine without random nonsense on the store page.

Nobody can ban user reviews, the internet still works and thats great. What you can do is not have a pile of untrue or offensive abuse crap dumped outside your stores front door.

1571

What makes it an abusive review? It was review bombing and vocal revolt, largely in review sections, that took us away from the machine limit DRM stuff that the industry was trying to push. You know 3 installs, then calling for permission kind of thing when you changed your GPU.

Some of these games get massive negatives due to predictable choices made, selling a paid DLC on a game not in release, selling pre-orders on the promise of Linux support and then having that support yanked at release, not responding to any sort of customer support e-mails… the list is large, and again, other industries deal with it. They deal with it the way many company’s would deal with it, do their best and they still allow reviews. If it’s too bad they can handle it case by case, but this idea that Valve is going to go through and cherry pick out negative reviews that the developer or publisher doesn’t like is kind of a ridiculous ask.

It seems a more reasonable ask would be to have the critical reviews posted alongside user reviews, and for that I think they may have to pay.

1572

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.

1573

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.

1574

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.

1575

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?

1576

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.

1577

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.

1578

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.

1579

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.

1580

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!

1581

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.

1582

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.

1583

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:

  1. Common trolling keywords. SJW, gay, etc.
  2. HTTP referrers. All coming from a single twitter post, for example.
  3. Variance from the mean
  4. Unusual review volume with no obvious trigger
  5. Length of time the user played the game, weighted strongly when they pass two hours and cannot refund it
  6. Check against a bayesian data corpus from another game, trained by humans voting bullshit or not bullshit on its reviews

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.

1584

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.

1585

HOTAS.