More Updates to The Steam Customer Review System

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According to this update, the Steam review system is being overhauled to prevent abuse. One of the ways Valve is combating fraudulent reviews is by not factoring in reviews written by customers that activated the game through a product key. The reviews will still be visible, but no score won’t be factored in.

Over the past few months, we've been reading your feedback and reports on the Steam Customer Review System. In addition, we've been looking at the different ways customer reviews are being used on Steam and evaluating which aspects of the feature need the most improvement. In May of this year we made changes to highlight the recent reviews on games to better show the current state of quickly evolving products (read more about those changes here). Now we are releasing the next update, which adds more filtering and sorting options for the displayed reviews, and sets some new defaults to highlight the recent, helpful, and relevant reviews.
 
Seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I look for deals everywhere, i figure others do the same. Filtering based on whether or not someone entered in a product code is stupid. Figuring out which accounts were created just to write positive or negative reviews is really the key. Amazon has the same problem. In steam they have metrics as to how long people have played a game and how many achievements. I would assume the fraudulent reviews don't have a lot of time and no achievements meaning it should be scored less.
 
Hypergreatthing a lot of the abuse comes from devs paying steam users to write positive reviews. It's rare that new accounts are created solely for writing positive reviews.

I for one think this is a great change. Now Steam has to figure out a way to deal with their rampant Greenlight abuse. A much more difficult problem.
 
Guess I'll stop writing reviews then since I get my games from the cheapest source possible.
 
So my opinion doesn't matter anymore? How do they think is this a good idea? Where I'm from new games on steam cost about 20% more than buying retail, and about 30-40% more compared to alternative key selling sites like cdkeys, and greenmangaming. Just because I'd rather pay less, doesn't mean my review of the game is invalid stupid jerks.

Funny,

As always, please let us know what you think.
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But there is no option for comments. Then how?
 
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This doesn't make a lot of sense. I buy the majority of my Steam games from other sites and then activate on Steam.
 
I wonder how much the beating ARK took factored into this decision. This new change doesn't effect me as much since I buy 99% of my games through steam. I still have two more bad reviews to copy and paste through my kid's account.
 
This is an idiotic move. There's still retail box copies being sold at bricks and mortar stores. What, do those gamers don't matter?

To prevent abuse, they could have simply gone with a time played cut-off, to prevent spam reviews, both positive & negative.
 
Wait, what's the connection between Product key'ed product owners and fradulent reviews?
 
sir-gold said:
If you look at this another way, they just silenced the collective opinion of everyone who bought the game somewhere other than directly through Steam.
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Yeah, this is bunk. Not that I ever really trusted Steam reviews anyway, but this makes it even less so.
 
Awww, Gabe doesn't like negative reviews because it affects sales. That's the real issue here and not "fraudulent" reviews.
 
chenw said:
Wait, what's the connection between Product key'ed product owners and fradulent reviews?
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As far as I know, you have to have a game in your steam library before you can review it.

Valve believes that the dishonest game devs are giving away cd keys to the fake review writers, so they can add the game to their library without having to actually buy it from steam.
 
Steam Spy put together a list of games severely affected by this change.
 
M76 said:
So my opinion doesn't matter anymore? How do they think is this a good idea? Where I'm from new games on steam cost about 20% more than buying retail, and about 30-40% more compared to alternative key selling sites like cdkeys, and greenmangaming. Just because I'd rather pay less, doesn't mean my review of the game is invalid stupid jerks.

Funny,



But there is no option for comments. Then how?
Click to expand...
You can still write reviews and those reviews will be visible by other people visiting the store page for a game. They just will no longer count toward the average score. If being counted in the average is so important to you, then you shouldn't mind paying extra. In all honesty, I never put much weight in the average anyway. I actually take the time to read peoples' opinions.

Abuse has been getting worse at an alarming rate. Frankly, I think this is a good move to stop the issue in its tracks right now. In the future Valve may revise the system to be less aggressive.
 
Armenius said:
You can still write reviews and those reviews will be visible by other people visiting the store page for a game. They just will no longer count toward the average score. If being counted in the average is so important to you, then you shouldn't mind paying extra. In all honesty, I never put much weight in the average anyway. I actually take the time to read peoples' opinions.

Abuse has been getting worse at an alarming rate. Frankly, I think this is a good move to stop the issue in its tracks right now. In the future Valve may revise the system to be less aggressive.
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Why is it my responsibility to pay more for my valid reviews to count? It shouldn't be important to me that my rating is counted. It should be important to steam to not exclude valid reviews. But the stupid changes they're making to the steam store in recent times, makes me cringe. I went from liking it to wholeheartedly hating the steam store. First the queue shit, then killing off daily deals, and flash sales, and then the changes that old reviews are marked as less important as more recent ones. And now this crap? If I've ever seen a bad track record then this is one. Whoever is in charge of Steam store should be fired.
 
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