Todd Howard did it again

The review isn't banned any more. I wonder if accounts were unbanned too.

The primary fault [for this particular matter] lies in whomever flagged [or was responsible for the flagging of] the review as inappropriate in the first place. (Which, yes, appears to be Steam, as Fnord comments below that developers/publishers can't directly handle reviews themselves.)

If Bethesda handled the ban (or heck, even just pushed it to Steam), then all Steam did was take their ban request at face value, and thereby can be considered to be duped by Bethesda (on top of being as poor in quality of oversight as always). Should Valve have a more skeptical, better moderated system in place? Sure but, it's Valve. Of course they won't have that. So any fault Valve'd have, would be the same broader fault they've always had: Not giving a damn about offering any kind of quality or user responsiveness to any of the secondary elements of their service. Heck, it took them over 10 years to fix their store and library layout, and those can be considered primary elements of the service.

But again, Valve's broader issues aside, this could potentially be on Bethesda, if they had any part in initiating the matter.
If not? Well, yay, yet something else to be exasperated with Valve about. Kudos, Valve.

Of course, if it's [user reports]->[automated ban], then Valve needs to come in, reverse the existing bans, and perma-ban the users [or developer/publisher!] who flagged the review from future review interactions. But if Valve gave a damn about review quality in the first place.. well, maybe so many games wouldn't cause and/or cure cancer, and I wouldn't keep coming across ascii images of defacating dogs and completely trolling single word reviews such as "gamesense". Nevermind Valve actually removing games with countless reviews stating the game is non-functioning..

Well, there's probably a bit better odds of Valve correcting a review handling error that's purely based in their automatic system, but heavens know how long it'd take them to implement such a fix, or how many additional issues they'd introduce along the way.

It seems that the spamming of reviews rightfully rose a redflag on Steam

It rather seems wrongfully in this case

haha exactly i did the same now

Careful, you'll get banned for spreading misinformation

It is surprising, to say the least. Reading through the comments on Steam is slightly mindboggling, to me at least.

Just to give an example below

Actual banned review:

I have played Fallout 76 on Bethesda launcher over 20 hours awhile ago and I just returned. Still was disappointed that they haven't add in-game text communication, I can't communicate with anyone except emotes, because I am deaf and this is great big discrimination to deaf community -100 / 10

Steam user X responds

The only issue I see with this review is the tone is really mean from the start. The problem would be if they were trying to give constructive feedback, thats all gone with the way it was written. Theres also a possibility that it was auto flags from certain text or because of the hours played.

Steam user Y ask:

How is that review "mean"? He simply states that he is deaf, so he cannot communicate with other players because there is no text chat. It really is a slap in the face to the deaf community, so how is what he said mean?

Steam user X:

The tone of the review is negative from the start and from an outsiders point it can come off as flaming right off the bat, paired with the playtime being low. it would make sense that this could of been flagged.

I agree with oursmenusier, that this is probably some automated system that Valve has implemented that has gone wrong.

View attached image.

As someone who does write reviews relatively often, I've ran into trouble with Valve's automated systems on a few occasions. It's highly schizophrenic. It might let you post the review, then 2 days later flags it as potentially bad and that someone at Valve needs to approve of it, then a few days later it returns back up again, and two weeks later it gets flagged once more....

So what you're trying to say is, it's about as sensible and well-functioning as their tagging system, or their recommendations system? :P

This. Exactly this. I've upvoted many negative reviews in my time, even those who simply said "F*** you, Randy Pitchford" and whilst Borderlands reviews were heavily moderated back then, I wasn't banned at all.

If you mean the global moderator response in Steam Community, it was posted 5 hours after this thread was made, and after the majority of the comments in this thread were made. While the thread's summarization was overly based in unsupported supposition, it was completely in line with all the comments in the linked content prior to that point, outside of the same kind of neutral "probably an algorithim error" comments we also had here, and a few irrationally formatted fanboy comments.

Both Steam and SG make their timestamps very clear and readily accessible to those reading through their associated comment sections. While you can definitely question the presentation of this thread, "bother to read the comments" seems like a completely unjustified premise for that, and potentially also an act of shooting onself in the foot.

In any case, it does seem to have gotten addressed fairly quickly, if we take the moderator's comment at face value, so it's probably worth giving Valve some initial leeway on such matters in the future.

most dickish thing is they waited until our lord and savoir gaben was gone to spring the traps on us

Did they get rid of the person who banned you?

i just realized the reviews are best of the day so it wouldnt still be on the front page but i still couldnt find it with the filter. it had over 200+votes. whatever.

And hats!