review bombing

[AN4RCHID]

What do game developers think about it:

Spoiler

Question:
Does so called "review bombing" ie. Steam user review etc. actually work / does it matter at all?

Answer:
Not in the way the review bombers hope. We already know that there’s a vocal and passionate fanbase for our game out there - that’s a major reason why we employ community managers. And we know when they’re upset. But it’s like throwing a tantrum - it might feel good while you’re doing it and you leave a huge mess, but it won’t ultimately change anything that wasn’t going to happen already anyway.
All review bombing really does is (continue to) convince both publishers and developers that user reviews aren’t worth anything. We already hold a pretty low opinion of user reviews because they are almost never representative of the actual opinions of the user base, but they are sometimes useful for specific feedback on things. User reviews are, after all, self-selecting by nature. Only players that feel really strongly about a game will leave a review, which makes their reviews sometimes more detailed than others in specific systems. Brigading reviews just makes everything unreadable and makes user reviews useless for actually gathering feedback.
Review bombs aren’t real reviews, and they don’t provide any real feedback. They are an angry reaction to some thing that’s enacted by a [small, passionate, and vocal part of the fanbase], a message borne out of frustration. However, the frustration part isn’t because the developers or publishers haven’t heard the complaints before; it’s because the devs haven’t acknowledged the issue to the satisfaction of the angry mob, so the mob feels they must act out negatively. Review bombs usually happen for a specific reason - Dota 2 was review bombed because the bombers wanted HL3 and had practically nothing to do with Dota 2. It’s not like Valve isn’t aware of the community’s hunger for HL3 (or HL2 episode 3), but it really doesn’t help much when an entirely separate team gets a bunch of noise to cloud up their signal.
Thus, review bombs don’t help anybody. New Dota2 players might get weirded out by the bad reviews and might not get to find a game they actually might enjoy. Hardcore HL fans won’t get any more traction with Valve than before (which was already basically zero). Valve already knows what the HL fans want and has their own schedule and development going on. We don’t look at players more sympathetically because they tried to trash a game; it just makes us think of that small group of players as throwing a tantrum. Nobody on the development or publishing side has ever changed their minds because of a review bomb.

http://askagamedev.tumblr.com/post/165227143618/does-so-called-review-bombing-ie-steam-user

The point of review bombing isn't to inundate developers with useful game design advice.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

The act of review bombing is one of the few methods in which the playerbase can get "directly" in touch with the devs/publishers - namely, do something that cuts through the bullshit and gets to them directly, forcing them to respond in one way or another.

To quote John Doe: "Wanting people to listen, you can't just tap them on the shoulder anymore. You have to hit them with a sledgehammer, and then you'll notice you've got their strict attention."

It's just the latest iteration of a consumer base flailing its arms to keep up the poisonous love/hate relationship that gamers and game developers have been fostering for the past 25 years or so. (Coincidentally, what group of people has surfaced in modern-day society in that same period of time?)

 

[Lahey]

http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1448326897426987372

User Reviews
19 SEPTEMBER - ALDEN
We've been planning some changes to User Reviews for a while now, and we thought it'd be useful to give you some insight into our thinking on review bombing, which is one of the problems we're tackling. Review bombing is where players post a large number of reviews in a very compressed time frame, aimed at lowering the Review Score of a game. At the same time, they upvote each other's reviews and downvote all the other reviews. To understand why we think this is a problem at all, we first need to talk a bit about the goals of User Reviews, and the associated Review Score.

For User Reviews, the goal is fairly obvious - allow people who've played a game to tell potential purchasers whether or not they should buy the game, and why. When we first implemented reviews, we hoped their existence would be enough. But it became clear very quickly that many potential purchasers wanted a summary of some kind, so we created the Review Score. It shows you the ratio of positive to negative reviews for the people who've purchased the game, and from that, it has the goal of trying to provide a potential purchaser with an estimate of how likely it is that they'll be happy with that purchase.

So why is review bombing a problem? On the one hand, the players doing the bombing are fulfilling the goal of User Reviews - they're voicing their opinion as to why other people shouldn't buy the game. But one thing we've noticed is that the issue players are concerned about can often be outside the game itself. It might be that they're unhappy with something the developer has said online, or about choices the developer has made in the Steam version of their game relative to other platforms, or simply that they don't like the developer's political convictions. Many of these out-of-game issues aren't very relevant when it comes to the value of the game itself, but some of them are real reasons why a player may be unhappy with their purchase.

When it comes to the Review Score itself, however, it's even less clear that these out-of-game reasons are relevant. When we look at what happens with the Review Score after a review bomb, we see that it generally recovers, in some cases fully back to where it was beforehand. We took some time to examine the data more closely, measuring the weekly positive-to-negative ratio of new reviews in the time periods around the review bomb, it was even clearer - the review bomb ends up being a temporary distortion of the Review Score.

This implies that, while the review bombers were unhappy with a decision the developer made, the purchasers of the product afterwards were often as happy with the game as the players before them. In the cases where the Review Score didn't return fully to its prior level, we believe the issue behind the review bomb genuinely did affect the happiness of future purchasers of the game, and ended up being accurately reflected in the regular ongoing reviews submitted by new purchasers. In some review bomb cases, the developers made changes in response to the community dissatisfaction, and in others they didn't - but there didn't seem to be much correlation between whether they did and what happened to their Review Score afterwards.

In short, review bombs make it harder for the Review Score to achieve its goal of accurately representing the likelihood that you'd be happy with your purchase if you bought a game. We thought it would be good to fix that, if we could do it in a way that didn't stop players from being able to voice their opinions.

So what solutions did we explore? An obvious one would be to simply remove the Review Score. Then, as a potential customer you'd be forced to read the User Reviews themselves to see if the product sounded interesting. If you saw reviews talking about something outside the scope of the game, you could decide for yourself if it was an issue that would affect your happiness with the purchase. Unfortunately, we're pretty certain that this isn't really an option - scores were added in response to player demand in the past, and that demand for a summary of some kind is likely to still be there, even if players know it isn't always accurate.

Another idea was a temporary lock on reviewing, similar to how stock markets prevent trading on specific stocks when abnormal behavior is detected. Based on the theory that review bombs are temporary distortions, we could prevent reviews for short periods of time whenever we detect massive distortions in submissions. In the cases where the cause of the community's dissatisfaction truly affects the game's potential happiness to new customers, we're confident it would still result in the Review Score moving down after the lock period ended.

But if we lock reviews on a product for a short period of time, what does that mean exactly? Are players no longer able to post reviews at all during that time? Or should they be able to post them, but we ignore them for the purpose of calculating the Review Score? In the end, we didn't like the way this ultimately meant restricting the ability for players to voice their opinions. We don't want to stop the community having a discussion about the issue they're unhappy about, even though there are probably better places to have that conversation than in Steam User Reviews.

We could change the way the Review Score is calculated, focusing on much more recent data. One of the reasons a review bomb can distort a game's Review Score for a significant period of time is because the score is based on reviews over a period of 30 days for the Recent value, and all time for the Overall value. But doing this would likely result in more fluctuation and potentially less accuracy for all games, not just review bombed ones.

In the end, we decided not to change the ways that players can review games, and instead focused on how potential purchasers can explore the review data. Starting today, each game page now contains a histogram of the positive to negative ratio of reviews over the entire lifetime of the game, and by clicking on any part of the histogram you're able to read a sample of the reviews from that time period. As a potential purchaser, it's easy to spot temporary distortions in the reviews, to investigate why that distortion occurred, and decide for yourself whether it's something you care about. This approach has the advantage of never preventing anyone from submitting a review, but does require slightly more effort on the part of potential purchasers.

It also has the benefit of allowing you to see how a game's reviews have evolved over time, which is great for games that are operating as services. One subtlety that's not obvious at first is that most games slowly trend downwards over time, even if they haven't changed in any way. We think this makes sense when you realize that, generally speaking, earlier purchasers of a game are more likely to enjoy it than later purchasers. In the pool of players who are interested in a game, the ones who are more confident that they'll like the game will buy it first, so as time goes on the potential purchasers left are less and less certain that they'll like the game. So if you see a game's reviews trending up over time, it may be an even more powerful statement about the quality of work its developers are doing.

Hopefully this post has been useful. It's quite possible that we'll need to revisit this when we move to personalized review scores, where our prediction of your happiness with a purchase is based upon the games you've enjoyed in the past. In the meantime, we'll keep a close eye on the community conversation around reviews.

Giving more information to consumers. An elegant approach.

 

[Eyestabber]

What do game developers think about it:
Nobody on the development or publishing side has ever changed their minds because of a review bomb.
http://askagamedev.tumblr.com/post/165227143618/does-so-called-review-bombing-ie-steam-user

The point of review bombing isn't to inundate developers with useful game design advice.

Bull-fucking-shit. Rome 2 review bombing worked wonders. Emperor's Edition fixed 95% of the problems and was given out for FREE. Does anyone think this would've happened otherwise?

Shills gonna shill, keep review bombing, men.

 

[MLMarkland]

http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1448326897426987372
Giving more information to consumers. An elegant approach.

Bravo Valve.

 

[Ash]

What annoys me about review bombers is they're usually whining about things unrelelated to the game design. If I were to bomb Batman, Mankind Divided, Dishonored 2, Fallout 4, Mass Effect, GTAV and all the other dumb modern games mentioned, I'd do so because they're mediocrity. Not because they were buggy on release or featured shitty DLC paractices. Those are legitimate qualms too, but most people are fine with the design of these games (gameplay design especially) and that is sad.

Yeah, what this guy said:

Just saw this in the Fallout 4 review, says a lot about the PC community that only when they introduced paid mods, people started giving negative reviews to a sub-par game.

 

[fantadomat]

What annoys me about review bombers is they're usually whining about things unrelelated to the game design. If I were to bomb Batman, Mankind Divided, Dishonored 2, Fallout 4, Mass Effect, GTAV and all the other dumb modern games mentioned, I'd do so because they're mediocrity. Not because they were buggy on release or featured shitty DLC paractices. Those are legitimate qualms too, but most people are fine with the design of these games (gameplay design especially) and that is sad.

Yeah, what this guy said:

Just saw this in the Fallout 4 review, says a lot about the PC community that only when they introduced paid mods, people started giving negative reviews to a sub-par game.

There is difference between writing a review and review bombing.

 

[PulsatingBrain]

I find it ok to review something poorly if the decision or change actually ruined the game for you. Like if openIV was the only reason you liked GTAV.

Just jumping on the bandwagon when it doesn't effect you seems a little lame, and I wouldn't engage in it.

 

[Ash]

What annoys me about review bombers is they're usually whining about things unrelelated to the game design. If I were to bomb Batman, Mankind Divided, Dishonored 2, Fallout 4, Mass Effect, GTAV and all the other dumb modern games mentioned, I'd do so because they're mediocrity. Not because they were buggy on release or featured shitty DLC paractices. Those are legitimate qualms too, but most people are fine with the design of these games (gameplay design especially) and that is sad.

Yeah, what this guy said:

Just saw this in the Fallout 4 review, says a lot about the PC community that only when they introduced paid mods, people started giving negative reviews to a sub-par game.

There is difference between writing a review and review bombing.

Let me clarify:

Titan Souls was review bombed in April 2015 by supporters of the Youtuber TotalBiscuit after the indie game's developer mocked a statement that the reviewer made saying the game was "absolutely not for me", and Totalbiscuit responded saying he would no longer cover the game, reducing the game's Steam rating to "negative".[6]

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was review bombed in 2015 by customers angry about the game's introduction of paid mods, leading Valve to reverse their decision and remove the paid mod functionality.[7]

Nier: Automata was review bombed in April 2017 by Chinese players demanding a translation of the game to Chinese, whom PC Gamer called "a powerful new voice".[7]

Grand Theft Auto V was review bombed throughout June and July 2017 after publisher Take 2 Interactive issued a cease and desist against the widely-used game modification tool OpenIV, as an attempt to stop single player and multiplayer mods for GTA V and GTA Online. The review bombing reduced GTA V's overall Steam review rating from "positive" to "mixed".[8]

Crusader Kings II was review bombed in the same month by customers angry that they had raised the prices in some regions.[7]

Notice how none of them are "Because the users believed the game itself was 'awful, dumbed down and a disgrace to what came before, yet mainsteam gaming media highly praised and awarded it, and it was one of the biggest successes of the year as a result of marketing and ignorance as opposed to quality'".

I can think of more than a few games I'd send minions to bomb if I weren't bound by a code of ethics and actually had mindless drones to carry it out. Starting with the first Bioshock game to offset all the incredibly retarded and undeserved acclaim.

 

[AngryEddy]

I only give negative reviews to developers that dont support HIV

 

[mondblut]

Shitty products given to shitty people are ought to produce tons of raeg.

Feather-and-tarring sjws out of the industry is fair game, anything else is entitled retards thinking their uneducated opinion actually matters.

 

[Lahey]

snip.

Wikipedia is shit. The term "review bombing" first appears in this article from 2008 regarding Spore (which wikipedia doesn't reference, naturally). DRM prompted the "bomb".

Guess who wrote it and apparently coined the term. Ben Kuchera. I'm sure it's just a coincidence.

 

[Ali Assa Seen]

Was there ever an unfair review bombing? As far as I know all of them had good reasons to happen. As long as that's the case, I approve of it. It may not change their minds in many cases but at least it stains their sales page. If I was a dev and my game page had anything other than a 'very positive' score my OCD would demand immediate sudoku. Especially if it was the yellow mixed or the red mostly negative, those must hurt.

Out Of The Park Baseball got review bombed every year for a while thanks to the sincere reviews being overwhelmingly positive which made the game show up in the top rated games of all times list on Metacritic. This lead to some pretty bad butthurt for the morons who were shocked and appalled that a little text based management sim could be held in such a high regard by its fans. Looks like last years edition knocked Blood & Wine down to 2nd place for the years ranking and has also paid the price in the user reviews.

 

[MLMarkland]

It's like individual players have more power than game journalists now...

 

[mondblut]

Giving more information to consumers. An elegant approach.

Those who make their purchase decisions based on score number can't read that graph, so they could just as well remove score altogether.

(and the rest of us don't need it to begin with).

What they should have done is block the "review and refund" practice in some form or another. Either only permit reviewing after 2 hours of playing, or have the act of reviewing make the game unrefundable.

Also, something needs to be done to the "800 hours on record: shit game, don't buy" people. Like, if you played more than 50 hours, you can't downvote, you fucking liar.

 

[mondblut]

Smart, well-informed persons will always read the text instead of relying entirely on a score.

And they do so on the Codex, not the inane ramblings of ignorant steamtard peons.

 

[MLMarkland]

Also, something needs to be done to the "800 hours on record: shit game, don't buy" people. Like, if you played more than 50 hours, you can't downvote, you fucking liar.

 

[Kitchen Utensil]

Also, something needs to be done to the "800 hours on record: shit game, don't buy" people. Like, if you played more than 50 hours, you can't downvote, you fucking liar.

Can someone be a heroin addict for two years and downvote heroin?

lolno heroin is great.

 

[mondblut]

Also, something needs to be done to the "800 hours on record: shit game, don't buy" people. Like, if you played more than 50 hours, you can't downvote, you fucking liar.

Can someone be a heroin addict for two years and downvote heroin?

Only after he refunds it. Oops, he cannot after 2 hours, tough luck.

 

[Lahey]

What they should have done is block the "review and refund" practice in some form or another. Either only permit reviewing after 2 hours of playing, or have the act of reviewing make the game unrefundable.

Agree with the former solution. This would weed out insincerity from any source, "bombers" and astroturf alike.

Also, something needs to be done to the "800 hours on record: shit game, don't buy" people. Like, if you played more than 50 hours, you can't downvote, you fucking liar.

While these types are certainly disingenuous, I don't think anything should be done. The transparency already provided is enough for non-tards to see through and i'm a firm believer in keeping discretion in the hands of consumers.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Lahey]

Lockstep. Italicized/bolded emphasis mine.

https://archive.fo/PtAZt

Spoiler

Valve's "Solution" to Review Bombing Ignores Steam's Longstanding Problems
Patrick Klepek

Despite their influence over the PC gaming industry, Valve is not a company known for making knee jerk reactions, even under pressure. They move slowly, quietly, frustratingly. Staying in character, the company today announced a change to user reviews on Steam, in response to the now-popularized concept of "review bombing." Instead of tackling the platform's system problems of moderation and toxic, empowered users, Valve's solution is to rely on more data, by allowing review bombs to exist, brightly highlighted in a fancy graph.

Steam is an incredibly useful service that I use every single day, but as a company, Valve has made their philosophy crystal clear: 1) Assume the presence of More Data can fix human problems and 2) Assume consumers are so attentive and aware that they'll go digging for context, if only they had more data.

Marketplace consolidation has many consequences, including granting consumers the chance to weaponize those platforms. One of the most regular tactics is expressing displeasure at what a creator says or does outside that platform by writing negative reviews, aka "review bombing." By concentrating a blast of negative reviews at once, it's able to bring down the overall review score. If it succeeds, the review bomb drags the game from aggregate positive to aggregate negative, potentially influencing someone who stumbles upon the game and merely looks at the review score. This is common on storefronts like Amazon and Steam, and recently, Valve's portal was subject to two high-profile incidents.

When former Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw secretly released a summary of what Half-Life 2: Episode 3 could have been, unhappy fans targeted Dota 2 with negative reviews. And when Firewatch developer Campo Santo issued a DMCA takedown request to PewDiePie's video of their game in response to the YouTube personality uttering the N-word on a stream, Firewatch was hit with thousands of reviews suddenly disgusted with a game they'd bought.

(On Steam, you cannot review a game without purchasing it and playing it for 20 minutes, but it is possible to buy it, play it for 20 minutes, write a review, and then request a refund.)

"We decided not to change the ways that players can review games," said Valve product designer Alden Kroll, "and instead focused on how potential purchasers can explore the review data."

Valve's solution is a new set of data for users to parse, a graph that tracks the history of user reviews for a game. In Valve's eyes, this will allow people to visualize whether a negative review score is an anomaly (a review bombing) or truly indicative of a game's quality.

"As a potential purchaser," said Kroll, "it's easy to spot temporary distortions in the reviews, to investigate why that distortion occurred, and decide for yourself whether it's something you care about. This approach has the advantage of never preventing anyone from submitting a review, but does require slightly more effort on the part of potential purchasers."

What the graph doesn't do, unfortunately, is explain why the review bomb occurred in the first place. For this, Valve expects users to do their own homework and research what caused a spike in one direction or another. (Valve claims that, in aggregate, their data shows review bombs for quality games disappear, with user reviews reverting to their original form.)

Look at Firewatch's review graph, for example:

For one, the graph doesn't show up on a game's Steam page by default. You need to consciously click "show graph," which means most people aren't ever going to see this.

Two, the idea that a Steam user will take time out of their day to become an amateur reporter and discover the mystery behind a spike in negative user reviews is horribly naive. Even as a trained reporter, I often find myself relying on the snap judgement usefulness of an average review score on Steam to help me understand if a game is worth checking out. Review bombing relies on casual laziness to be effective; at the time the review bomb sticks, some number of users will rely on snap judgement usefulness to walk away from a game.

As a platform holder, it's Valve's job to make their service more useful.

Even though a casual search of Firewatch on Google would instasntly produce a bunch of articles about what's happened in the past few weeks, there's nothing on Steam itself that points you in that direction. Did a patch break the game's balance, introduce frame rate issue? Was a recent piece of downloadable content confusing? Steam could add some form of usefulness to this graph by linking highly shared articles about the game to the graph, providing context.

The reaction from developers I've talked to so far hasn't been positive.

"Seems like a copout," said Double Fine community manager James Spafford on Twitter, "putting the onus onto the new customer to figure out if the mob are angrily spamming or not. They're basically saying, 'We have all this data and can detect review bombs, here it's yours now, enjoy!' Washing their hands of the issue and walking off into the sunset uncaringly."

Perhaps more worrying is how the visualization of a hate mob's successes and failures might incentivize others to engage in similar activities. While the removal of review bombs might not outright stop groups from trying again, by making such activities part of the historical record, it adds legitimacy that's otherwise robbed by erasing toxic attempts to muddy history.

Firewatch was universally acclaimed upon release, by critics and players alike. Only recently did its reviews on Steam become "mixed," as part of a targeted campaign against the developer.

"Not entirely sure about how 'give review bombs more exposure, a permanent record, and gamify it with a graph they can min/max' fixes things," added No Goblin (100 ft. Robot Golf) designer Dan Teasdale on Twitter. "After looking at it in-store, it feels even worse. Putting up a big yellow banner saying "CHECK OUT THIS REVIEW BOMB!" isn't positive."

"These tools will probably help review bombers understand more clearly how effective or ineffective their criticism is," said PC Gamer editor-in-chief Evan Lahti on Twitter. "It's better feedback. Think about recent uptick in players using concurrency stats as "evidence" - rightly or wrongly, we'll see graphs cropped + shared as ammo."

In Kroll's blog about Valve's decision, he explained decided against removing review scores entirely ("Demand for a summary of some kind is likely to still be there, even if players know it isn't always accurate"), temporarily locking review score submissions ("We didn't like the way this ultimately meant restricting the ability for players to voice their opinions"), or changing the range of time a review score is calculated ("Doing this would likely result in more fluctuation and potentially less accuracy for all games, not just review bombed ones").

Valve's conclusion is reasonable, perhaps, but fails to address a longstanding critique of the platform writ large: Valve's misguided perception that the solution to everything is more data.

Valve is a private company, and therefore doesn't disclose how much it makes every year, butestimates put Steam's yearly profits at nearly one billion per year. Despite this enormous surplus, Valve continues to operate Steam as though it's a thrifty mom 'n pop shop unable to invest substantive resources into improving quality of life on its service for developers and users alike. The solution to review bombing isn't a graph, it's a resource-rich moderation staff paying close attention to influxes of user reviews, addressing them on a case-by-case basis.

In writing about Artifact, Valve's new trading card game based on Dota 2, writer Will Partin summarized the company's disappointing but effective tradition of distancing from the consequences of the products it creates, instead putting that weight on the users themselves:

Without getting too far into academic jargon, Valve is an exemplar of what's often called "platform capitalism." Instead of developing products, companies working in this vein develop platforms that create spaces where different kinds of exchanges can take place, and then take a cut from those exchanges. Steam is a prime example.

Though it began merely as a tool to keep Valve's own games up to date, it quickly expanded to a service primarily focused on distribution and facilitating trade among users. As Gabe Newellexplained in 2013, "our job is to maximize productivity of users in creating digital goods and services. The markets will determine what the marginal value add of each of those activities are."

The graph isn't useless, but it's a half-hearted solution to a problem that underscores larger, system issues Steam has faced, as it's continued to get bigger. These are issues Valve has done very little to address over the years, and this latest "fix" only highlights the disconnect.

Maybe just hire some people who can tell when people are being assholes?

https://archive.fo/NZI6N

Spoiler

Valve is ‘fixing’ its review-bombing problem by making users do more work
When you can frame a problem as a principle, why bother with solutions?
Adi Robertson

Last week, the indie game Firewatch suffered a Steam “review bombing.” Developer Campo Santo ordered Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg to remove a Firewatch video after he shouted a racial slur elsewhere. In response, angry fans pushed the critically acclaimed game’s score from an overall “very positive” to a more recent “mixed” reception, against PewDiePie’s wishes. Firewatch’s reviews are still generally excellent, so this controversy hasn’t necessarily hurt Campo Santo. But review bombing and similar attacks are a long-standing issue for developers, making Steam a less useful platform to buy and sell games. Given that Steam holds massive sway over the PC gaming market, that’s a real problem.

Yesterday, Valve seemed like it was finally addressing that problem, posting a long explanation of a new review feature. As it turns out, the company’s fix for review bombing is to foist responsibility on customers. Nathan Grayson at Kotaku has fully laid out the practical tweaks Valve is suggesting, but essentially, there’s a new chart that tracks a game’s ratio of positive to negative Steam reviews over time. As Valve puts it, “as a potential purchaser, it's easy to spot temporary distortions in the reviews, to investigate why that distortion occurred, and decide for yourself whether it's something you care about.”

I’m not sure what’s supposed to be “easy” about this system. If a casual customer clicks on the reviews forFirewatch and sees the recent distortion, they have to dig through posts to see whether it’s a game-breaking bug or an unrelated review-bombing. When I checked last night, the most recent comment said Campo Santo “took a stand” against PewDiePie over racism, and the highest-rated said the developer was “childish and thin-skinned” with no further explanation. Valve is asking for a lot of off-platform detective work here, especially for the many people who barely know who PewDiePie is. If customers have to stop and look up answers, they may as well ignore Steam and head straight to Google for reviews.

Moreover, the whole system is temporarily poisoned. Review bombers can make sure buyers only see negative feedback in the “most helpful reviews” section, and short but genuine-seeming reviews could just be subtler attempts at manipulation.

Steam is a storefront, and by its own admission, brute-force review bombs don’t “accurately represent” the likelihood that an average buyer would be happy with a game. Some people have defended review-bombing as the equivalent of a boycott, citing cases like a mass-downvote of Skyrim over adding paid mods. But posts about paid mods are on-topic complaints about something that affects a buyer’s gaming experience, while accusations that a certain game killed Half-Life 3 are not. And even a few righteous, ideological protests wouldn’t justify leaving a broken system in place.

Valve puts forward a reasonable solution: temporarily freezing reviews. If there’s a real problem, the company’s post reasons, the score would still dip when the freeze lifted. If not, would-be bombers’ immediate fury would pass without incident. Then, Valve demolishes this logic with a terrible justification.

"But if we lock reviews on a product for a short period of time, what does that mean exactly? Are players no longer able to post reviews at all during that time? Or should they be able to post them, but we ignore them for the purpose of calculating the review score? In the end, we didn't like the way this ultimately meant restricting the ability for players to voice their opinions. We don't want to stop the community having a discussion about the issue they're unhappy about, even though there are probably better places to have that conversation than in Steam user reviews."

Well, yes. If a segment of game reviews are not effectively functioning as game reviews, there’s not much point in accepting them. But it’s telling that between “disable all reviews” and “ignore all review scores,” Valve never mentions moderation.

Statistics site Steamspy estimates there are around 17,500 games on Steam right now, and review bombing likely affects only a tiny fraction; with automated detection, that’s eminently manageable compared to even a small social network. Valve could check to see if a distortion was related to the content of the game, or a classic review bombing — the result of, say, a dumb Twitter feud. A moderator could proactively sift out content-free or unrelated posts until the distortion evened out, the way they already evaluate flagged spam or abuse. If Valve thinks that’s too hard, it shouldn’t ask customers to do the same thing.

Patrick Klepek at Waypoint attributes Valve’s do-nothing approach to “platform capitalism” in which companies like Valve simply create places for commerce or conversation and wash their hands of the results. Kotaku’s Grayson points to a fetishistic faith that if people are badly manipulating data, the answer is to add more data.

I think these are both right, but there’s another dimension as well: companies co-opting free speech rhetoric to justify bad products. Valve outright admits that review sections aren’t a good place to hold certain conversations, and that better options exist. (Games already have their own Steam discussion boards, for one thing.) But it invokes one of the internet’s most beloved principles by insisting that players should be generically allowed to “voice their opinions” and “have a discussion,” even when it’s irrelevant to a specific, structured forum. In some idealized capitalist model, Valve would see review-bombing as a bug that made customers less satisfied and fix it out of pure self-interest. But why bother, when it can just say that dissatisfaction is better?

https://archive.fo/Aq7XM

Spoiler

Valve Solution for Steam ‘Review Bombing’ Doesn’t Go Far Enough
SEPTEMBER 20, 2017 BY JASMINE HENRY

Steam platform-holder Valve reveals its plans to tackle ‘review bombing’ on the PC gaming platform. The company hopes to address the issue, which has been used as a form of harassment and abuse against game developers, by giving users access to more data.
But while some have praised the company for finally highlighting the problem, others are furious and say that Valve has not gone far enough.

Steam Review Bombing: What is It and Why is Valve Being Criticised?

Review bombing is the act of flooding a game’s Steam Store page with negative reviews. While it has been used in some cases to highlight features that negatively impact player’s enjoyment of a game (e.g a lack of proper language support or a bad business practice), it is more commonly used to protest a developer’s political stance or comments that have been made outside the game with no impact on the game itself.

This has been an issue for quite some time, but things recently came to a head after Firewatch developer Campo Santo filed a copyright takedown against YouTuber PewDiePie over his use of the n-word. The developer rightfully did not want itself or its game to be associated with someone who used racist language, but some weren’t happy with the company’s actions and filed negative reviews on the Firewatch Steam page to have their voices heard.

The issue has also affected Valve-developed games like Dota 2, while Read Only Memories was also hit with negative reviews after developer Midboss took a stand President Donald Trump and his heinous policies.

Cut to yesterday. In a post addressing the review bombing problem, engineer Alden Kroll explained that Valve had considered introducing a temporary lock on reviews or removing the Review Score (which looks at reviews overall and provides an overall ‘Negative/Positive’ rating). But ultimately, the company settled on introducing a histogram that would allow potential buyers to look at a section of reviews and asses how the game was received before or after the review bomb hit.

By and large, this is a poor solution. Not only do some fear that it will encourage or even aid review bombers, by giving them more data to help gamify their actions, these histograms are not turned on by default. As such, it’s up to the consumer to go looking for them and when they do see them, the data and the graphs difficult to understand.

While you would hope that everyone is making informed purchase decision, for a lot of people that isn’t the case and deciding between of ‘buy’ or ‘avoid’ is often based on a snap judgement, influenced by reviews. The fact that negative reviews can be up-voted by review bombing mobs and therefore become the first review a prospective buyer sees is also another part of the problem.

To +1 this, steam needs to step up and have an actual abuse/safety department or representative instead of choosing to ignore abuse. https://t.co/juAsAUpuAa
— a haute mess(@UnburntWitch) September 14, 2017

The other side to this is that it conveniently ignores what developers and players have been asking for: a human-staffed moderation and review team. As theFirewatch review bomb campaign ramped up, indie game developer Zoe Quinn tweeted that “steam needs to step up and have an actual abuse/safety department or representative instead of choosing to ignore abuse.”

In the thread above, Quinn also detailed her own experience with Steam saying that when she reached out to Valve for help on a harassment-related issue, the company essentially told her that she was on her own.

And despite the name, review bombing is not generally restricted to the reviews section. As Campo Santo has discovered, disgruntled often take to a game’s Steam forums to voice their anger too. Firewatch lead artist Jane Ng saw “violent language on steam forum, which I’ve never actually seen before” while dealing with the hateful threads and messages left in the game’s forums.

*puts on Hamilton soundtrack*
Time to ban some gators shitting up the Firewatch steam forums again, just like old times
— Jane Ng (@thatJaneNg) September 11, 2017

Earlier this year I wrote an in-depth report for New Normative about Steam and how the platform can be a nightmare for marginalised game developers and inclusive games. I spoke to several indie developers, who cited hateful messages like this as a major headache for them, and many suggested that Valve could offer more support for affected creators and improve moderation support.

Replying to Ng, Firewatch designer Nels Anderson said that “it is pretty spectacular how bad Steam’s moderation tools are for stuff like this,” with Ng highlighting the lack of an option for mass deletion of forum threads as one area of frustration. A lack of tools like this, including things like the lack of reporting option for comments (you can currently only report the accounts that left the comment) only make the situation that much harder to deal with.

Of course there is no guarantee that with a team of human moderators, Steam’s will suddenly be fixed. But it would give developers the time to focus on their games instead of handling the hateful mobs, who are angry just because a developer made a game about refugees or included a transgender NPC.

There are several pillars to this problem, with Valve also needing to combat hateful Steam groups, but a group of moderation focused humans would be a much-needed start. Right now the situation is untenable and so the sooner Valve puts some human-power behind it, the better.

https://archive.fo/oynHr

Spoiler

Steam has a “review bomb” problem—but will this new feature fix it?
Follows a September 2016 overhaul which aimed to remove fraudulent reviews.
SAM MACHKOVECH

Steam, the largest digital PC game storefront in the West, continues to struggle with user-contributed game reviews. Valve launched the feature in 2013, and since then, it has seen various updates to deal with issues such as false and gamed reviews.

But none of those updates was much comfort to the game Firewatch last week. Its Steam review page was swarmed with negative reviews after its developer, Campo Santo, denounced the hateful speech of game streamer PewDiePie and issued DMCA challenges to that streamer's videos about Firewatch.

Maybe it's a coincidence that Valve not only announced a new Steam user review feature on Tuesday but also tied it in a huge way to the issue of "review bombing." Either way, Steam store pages now come with a lot more data in the form of "review histograms." What are they? How will they affect reviews going forward? And most importantly, is that enough action to deal with a noticeable rise in irrelevant and poisonous use of Steam's storefront?

What, you don’t believe the scores, do you?

The Tuesday blog post, written by Valve staffer Alden Kroll, calls review bombing out by name and defines it: "where players post a large number of reviews in a very compressed time frame, aimed at lowering the Review Score of a game. At the same time, they upvote each other's reviews and downvote all the other reviews."

Kroll says that these coordinated bursts of review activity often focus on issues "outside of the game." The post mentions a few hypothetical examples, including differences between a Steam version and other platforms or "the developer's political convictions," which is as close as Kroll gets to directly referencing last week's Firewatch bombing.

Perhaps more interesting is Valve's own data-driven verdict on the practice. Namely, the company says that these bursts of user-submitted reviews rarely have a significant statistical impact on a game's reviews going forward—meaning, Valve looked at game review averages and found that bombs were very rarely followed with a legitimate shift in customer opinion in either direction. This discovery, Kroll claims, is what led Valve to fight the practice: "review bombs make it harder for the Review Score to achieve its goal of accurately representing the likelihood that you'd be happy with your purchase if you bought [it]."

The post mentions a few strategies that Valve considered as a response when its system recognizes a review-bomb incident. One would have shifted a game's "review score" (a conversion of a game's positive/negative game review ratio to a "positive" or "negative" descriptor) to only score "more recent" data, but the post didn't clarify exactly what that meant. Another would have temporarily frozen out all game reviews when a spike in review activity occurred, much like Wikipedia's page-locking feature uses in the case of a newsworthy or controversial topic.

Perhaps the most effective practice would be for Valve to remove those user-generated scores at the top of each game's store listing—especially when they can be gamed, so long as users are allowed to contribute and up-vote reviews to the service. Then users would have to read reviews to understand their context before letting them sway their purchase.

But Kroll shot this down in a curious way. "Unfortunately, we're pretty certain that this isn't really an option," the post explains. "Scores were added in response to player demand in the past, and that demand for a summary of some kind is likely to still be there, even if players know it isn't always accurate."

In other words: review-bombing is a problem, but, like, review scores are sometimes fake?

Interesting data—if you can scroll to it

Instead, Valve has opted to add "review histograms" to every Steam store listing, effective immediately.

Steam's new review histograms allow potential game buyers to filter game reviews based on either the month or day they were posted and also by their positivity (as blue bars above a line) or negativity (orange bars below a line). The idea being, if you scroll to a review bar chart and see a giant red line appear on a certain day, you can click it and see that day or month's similarly minded reviews grouped together. Maybe they all mention the brand-new addition of obtrusive copy-protection software or a new online mode that has somehow dramatically changed the game. Or maybe they all mention a certain misappropriated cartoon frog. You could judge from there.

This follows efforts in September 2016 to segregate the service's game reviews between "Steam purchases" and "others." The latter are primarily game owners who unlocked the game using a 25-digit code, which sometimes comes from legitimate purchases but often comes from free copies given out by game developers. These were sometimes used by developers, Steam says, to puff up review scores.

The first problem with today's new histograms is in their looks. Quite frankly, they're hideous and hard to parse. The histograms are designed in such a way that their blue and orange bars take up an entire maximized Steam window, yet the bars are itty-bitty in terms of pixel size, so they're simultaneously hard to click. Plus, numbers and other data points are tossed onto the X and Y axes without any lines or other design cues. They look like they were designed in Microsoft Word.

Should you successfully click on the bar you want, you then need to scroll your entire window down to see the relevant reviews that load (and if you don't do so quickly enough, you don't even see the reviews load or propagate). This interface still also has a confusing, separate column of "recent reviews," which will fill up with different reviews no matter which month or year of data you might be looking at.

Worst of all, because Steam's store listing pages are such a cluttered mess, you have to scroll quite a ways before even finding these charts. It's a gol-danged journey: past the official description, any Early Access explainer box, the "buy now" buttons, the DLC options, the "recent news" boxes, an "About This Game" text box, a "system requirements" box, a "more like this" ad for other games, and the "what curators say" box.

And after all of that, Steam thinks we want to pick and prod at a massive, unclear line chart?

Origins of hate

I'm currently mixed on the gameplay I've seen and played thus far for Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Origins. But I'm in no way mad or upset about the gorgeous art direction and characters in the game. The hateful Steam forum posters who tried to attach a racist meme campaign to this game should take a good, hard look at themselves.

The idea, of course, is sound: give users a better look at spikes in review activity to ascertain what the heck caused them. But there has to be a better way. Yelp, for example, is clever about pulling out specific buzzwords in any restaurant's hundreds of reviews, either about specific dishes or restaurant features. Surely Steam could do the same for whatever terms reappear in various reviews: "Denuvo," "no 21:9 support," or "Jim Sterling actually liked it."

The bigger issue, of course, is that this is another example of Steam passing the "users have gone amok" workload buck. As Zoe Quinn reported in her book Crash Override, Steam has said that it employs neither a department nor an employee whose job it is to "handle abuse or user safety" and that it blamed its choice not to remove offending content from Steam review or forum pages due to what it called the "Streisand effect." Quinn learned this after trying in vain to get Steam to take action against users who'd posted personally identifying info or links to nude photos to the reviews and forum pages attached to her game Depression Quest.

Ubisoft learned this, as well, in a recent explosion of racist and disturbing comments, images, and ASCII art on the forum pages for the upcoming game Assassin's Creed Origins. This comment bombing on August 28 revolved around a racist meme and remained on the page until Ubisoft moderators swooped in to delete posts and ban offending users from the forum. Neither Ubisoft nor Valve responded to Ars' questions about this incident. But it put a spotlight on a glaring issue for Steam: that its community pages are all solely policed by game makers, as opposed to Steam itself. For tiny independent game-development teams, that means they may be one misunderstood blog post away from being overwhelmed by poisonous users—and being stuck playing comment clean-up.

If those issues aren't enough, Steam's gatekeepers are currently letting in drivel like The Mexican Dream, a game in which players must murder Mexicans as they approach an American border wall.

Histograms may expose data for one small portion of the Steam experience, but the shop as a whole has begun to show serious cracks in its content-management armor. And without an apparent outcry from Valve or a pledge to go so far as to wholesale ban user accounts and IP address ranges for repeat TOS offenders (and thus risk losing paying customers), there's no reason to believe the Internet's worst trolls and abusers won't keep on creating new accounts and raising hell wherever they're allowed on Steam.

tl;dr
:trigglypuff:

 

[MLMarkland]

Valve proven correct by coordinated, predictable and boring outrage.

 

[Murk]

Things got meta.

 

[fantadomat]

What annoys me about review bombers is they're usually whining about things unrelelated to the game design. If I were to bomb Batman, Mankind Divided, Dishonored 2, Fallout 4, Mass Effect, GTAV and all the other dumb modern games mentioned, I'd do so because they're mediocrity. Not because they were buggy on release or featured shitty DLC paractices. Those are legitimate qualms too, but most people are fine with the design of these games (gameplay design especially) and that is sad.

Yeah, what this guy said:

Just saw this in the Fallout 4 review, says a lot about the PC community that only when they introduced paid mods, people started giving negative reviews to a sub-par game.

There is difference between writing a review and review bombing.

Let me clarify:

Titan Souls was review bombed in April 2015 by supporters of the Youtuber TotalBiscuit after the indie game's developer mocked a statement that the reviewer made saying the game was "absolutely not for me", and Totalbiscuit responded saying he would no longer cover the game, reducing the game's Steam rating to "negative".[6]

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was review bombed in 2015 by customers angry about the game's introduction of paid mods, leading Valve to reverse their decision and remove the paid mod functionality.[7]

Nier: Automata was review bombed in April 2017 by Chinese players demanding a translation of the game to Chinese, whom PC Gamer called "a powerful new voice".[7]

Grand Theft Auto V was review bombed throughout June and July 2017 after publisher Take 2 Interactive issued a cease and desist against the widely-used game modification tool OpenIV, as an attempt to stop single player and multiplayer mods for GTA V and GTA Online. The review bombing reduced GTA V's overall Steam review rating from "positive" to "mixed".[8]

Crusader Kings II was review bombed in the same month by customers angry that they had raised the prices in some regions.[7]

Notice how none of them are "Because the users believed the game itself was 'awful, dumbed down and a disgrace to what came before, yet mainsteam gaming media highly praised and awarded it, and it was one of the biggest successes of the year as a result of marketing and ignorance as opposed to quality'".

I can think of more than a few games I'd send minions to bomb if I weren't bound by a code of ethics and actually had mindless drones to carry it out. Starting with the first Bioshock game to offset all the incredibly retarded and undeserved acclaim.

All except the first one are righteous smithing of a dick moves from stupid devs.Review bombing is not giving a negative review because you don't like the game,review bombing is shitting on a game you like because you don't like how stupid and greedy the dev is.The most recent example is Firewatch and its retarded sjw developer.Review bombing is a good way of raining in stupidity and greed.It is refreshing to see idiot cowering before the might of reviewbombing.