Should there be an explicit rule against review manipulation in featured giveaways?
No one even reserved the first comment. I'm amazed. Hopefully this'll be the beginning of a healthy and constructive conversation. For now it's just a bump I guess.
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Echo! - echo - ec... - ...
Maybe the impression is that a simple click on 'Yes' or 'No' says everything that needs to be said at this point.
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And now I'm standing alone in a crowded room and we're not speaking...
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I would also put free keys for Greenlight votes in the same pile (a practice that is also embraced on SG forums with little to no ethical qualms).
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The theory is sound though. If you want a gift, the bare minimum to do is to at least use it. Too many people just hoard free stuff and never even look at it. Here, too.
It's another question that the implementation results in generic/troll/useless spam reviews.
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The intention is certainly not to ensure you actually play and enjoy your free game. Reviews help sales.
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It isn't obligatory, I got all games from that site and I haven't written any review.
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It should be an explicit rule? Yes, maybe but... Can you counterfeit the stupidity of people posting "11/10 would bang" or "got cards or die trying m8" with those rules?
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That's up to Steam to decide. Maybe they'll require one to play a game for a certain amount of time before posting a review, or maybe they'll introduce some kind of a hidden achievement that unlocks at a specific point in a game and lets the player post a review, or maybe they'll just do nothing and hope that the trollish reviews will get sifted out over time by the users themselves using the 'unhelpful' and 'funny' buttons.
What is up to us - is that SteamGifts doesn't become instrumental in those kinds of reviews.
I am extremely wary of excessive legislation, and I'm generally against introducing any rules unless the systems in place are getting abused systematically. Which is why the current vote is in place: I don't really follow featured giveaways all that closely, so for all I know, the incident in question may be an isolated issue. But TechRaptor raise a valid point when they say that despite the fact that most people would agree that this kind of review manipulation is wrong, there's no readily accessible written rule that outright prohibits it. Neither in Steam's review guidelines, nor in its user agreement. There's nowhere you can point and say 'That's why you can't do it.'
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I admire your thoughts, but I also marvel at your naiveté that Valve is caring the least bit about their review system. Review trolling and even user review bullying have been around forever and Valve doesn't even respond to these tickets, they auto-close after 4 weeks.
As for you idea: game idling is already a thing for cards, and hacking achievements on Steam is child's play. Including the hidden counters.
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It would only take a couple of high-profile cases similar to this one to make the general public highly suspicious of positive reviews on Steam, and positive reviews are currently one of the more important factors in the game sales numbers. Less trust in Steam reviews -> fewer sales. My bet is that Valve care at least a little bit (otherwise they wouldn't have removed all those reviews for Epic Quest of the 4 Crystals).
You can usually trace hacked achievements by their timestamps, or via a combination of playtime and existence of mutually exclusive achievements. It's solvable. You could even make a system of two hidden achievements spaced out by a short gameplay segment, blocking every user who unlocks both achievements too quickly from reviewing the game. Or do a combination of different methods. The point is not to prevent 'unfair' reviews. The point is to make abuse of the system not worth the trouble. But, as I said, that is for Valve to fix, not us; what we can do is try to remove SteamGifts from the equation.
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I agree that you can do many things, but I also say that shady devs would find surprisingly easy ways to cheat the system.
The review system is inherently flawed to a degree, same with metacritic all all sites with open review options. It just takes a little experience to find the real ones, luckily. I agree on that still, if a game has med/low scores, people will rarely even take the time to read the reviews, whereas with really high-rated ones they may buy them out of curiosity or for herd instincts ("people like so I should like it too to fit in"). Still, I never saw any sites, sites much larger than Steam, ever solve this issue. :(
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people will do anything for free stuff, even a $0.01 game.
you can't stop the leeches and beggars!
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The army of leeches are coming from the north! Ready the free Overtures!
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Quite so, sadly. But we could try stopping SteamGifts from housing the swamp and the slums. ;j
We've already got the rule that prohibits begging - so having one that prohibiting bribery shouldn't be much of a problem. And monitoring shady giveaway makers is (arguably) a bit simpler than monitoring beggars thanks to the lower numbers of the former.
I realise that one of the problems with this is that begging is hated universally, by everyone except for the beggar, whilst bribery yields some pretty candy to everyone involved in it - but it only takes one whistleblower to break the candy van.
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can anybody enlight me as to what exactly this whole WtfFree contreversy was about (to which they refer in the article)?
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The article touches on this. The idea is that when there's free stuff involved (especially when the free stuff comes from the person whose product you're reviewing), you can never say whether a review is unbiassed.
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In all fairness, they probably did. The dev's intentions may have been noble - to encourage honest reviewing, to learn what they did right and what they did wrong, to find out how they could make their next game fare better - it's just that it doesn't work that way.
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The recent update to the featured giveaways (one giveaway per game per user) should be able to curb this abuse of the system.
In case I'm missing something, could you please elaborate while I go get the mop?
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Cheers, that's quite extensive. Oddly, I think I caught wind of the Original Curators Group blackmail (both of developers and of reviewers) somewhere, but I had no idea that octopus had its tentacles in SteamGifts as well.
Some of that stuff is quite actionable. That blackmail incident falls under the following rule already in force on SG: 'Do not ask users or developers for keys or gifts, whether in comments, chat, or outside the site.'
The fact that group members are asked to donate bundles to AngryErpel, which they then give away on SG, falls under this rule: 'Do not ask users for payments or donations for any reason. Fees to gain access to gifting groups, or attempts to raise money for lotteries or giveaways is not allowed.'
Are these ban-worthy offences?
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I went through the rules and couldn't find anything on not asking devs for keys/gifts. If you're referring to begging thats entirely different.
As for the second part, "Do not ask for any sort of payment/exchange in order to enter a giveaway. This applies to group rules as well." is the exact wording. And by group rules I'm assuming this is a SGV1 rule where you were allowed to have "rules" to enter private/group giveaways. I believe you had to get them approved, blacklist or requirements, but I believe they no longer enforce them. I really don't know, I never used em or cared for them.
But even so, according to suspension permissions noted here, no it wouldn't be ban worthy.
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I was quoting both clauses verbatim directly from the current guidelines: http://www.steamgifts.com/about/guidelines
This thing is listed in the navigation bar on the FAQ page accessed via the button at the top of the page, so I'm assuming these are the rules currently in effect site-wide. The clause about begging does stipulate explicitly that we must not ask developers for keys outside of SG.
But yes, I guess that might be a cause for suspension (which AngryErpel may have already served), but hardly a reason to ban the user from the site altogether. Apparently we're stuck with AngryErpel here, either waiting for them to commit something violating the rules of SG directly, or enjoying them as a paragon of a SteamGifts user.
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Oh my mistake then, I was looking at this but thats 4 years old.
There was a similar situation with another group owner ("Hookups" group). I don't think anything happened to him although some staff expressed their feelings on the situation. Unfortunately banning someone for being an asshole isn't against the rules. But in this case, I wonder if that rules applies to "reviewers", no matter how shady one is.
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Well, quite. Being an ar-ehole is a personal matter, and we've got blacklists for those. Am I... reading this correctly? You're saying that you were one of those vocal about the situation and you were banned for doing so, and are now witnessing that a proven ar-ehole and a repeated abuser of the system may avoid getting banned under basically the same circumstances?
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Naw I was never suspended, I wasn't really that vocal about it either. No one got suspended for calling out in that situation, I believe the reasoning was something along the lines of, "its a community issue involving the 30k+ members from the group".
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Oh, okay. Damn, I'm reading too much into things now. ;j
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It is cg's site, he can ban whomever he chooses for any reason he wants. If it were my site, I'd ban that dude and every single person in those groups, regardless of what my site rules were.
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Sorry but that's just ignorant. You set up rules but then ban as you please?
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I was going to say it's not the giveaways that should be removed from this community, but the person making them. :) But BongoGT beat me to it. :)
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Hi MuIIins! :) Sorry, I was typing too slowly to reply before you deleted your comment... :(
(In reply to the suggestion I shouldn't do this, really...)
Oh? He doesn't appear to have broken any rules around here. A stain on the community, perhaps, but he's rededmed all his wins, and given away a whole pile of keys...
Since the main thread discussing this situation has been around for nearly four months with over 800 comments, I have to assume the management of Steamgifts have noticed it. And since they are honourable I also assume they have discussed what to do with this fine fellow. And since he's still around, it appears they have decided to do nothing. Fair enough, it's their site...
Anyway, if his behaviour is not sufficiently vile to merit removal from this community, but mine is, that's simple enough to understand. And if that's the sort of place Steamgifts has become, I won't miss it.
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i don't remember deleting my message here, weird O_o
anyway, it was just to prevent a suspension :3
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I think the problem lies more in Steam reviews than in SG. Unless the admins decide to take a stance against all these questionable practices (vote for Greenlight and receive a free game, give a positive review and get a free game ...) and forbid them from forum and GAs, I don't see how a rule about GA description can solve the issue.
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A lot of people are using giveaways to promote their stuff, for example:
1-People promoting their greenlight games.
2-People promoting their groups/sites/etc.
3-An account with the name of one of those dudes running for presidency in USA, was giving away Fallout to get more attention to his name.
4-One dude was posting ref links in his giveaways once.
The giveaway's description is like a dark unknown place and not monitored by anyone.
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No. 4 is against the rules and a reason for reporting the user (or at least warning them).
No. 1-3 are not unethical per se (unless the entrants were required to vote on those Greenlight games or visit those websites to join the giveaways). These are valid forms of PR.
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Yeah, I was just giving examples of the stuff that I found in descriptions of random giveaways.
And I find promoting for stuff annoying at times even if it was a peaceful promotion.
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Oh, yeah, I agree, those things are quite annoying. Still, as long as a description doesn't do anything illegal or encourage unethical behaviour, it has every right to exist - otherwise we'd be banning potatoes and anime left and right. ;j
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Just not in the way you'd expect: http://techraptor.net/content/steam-cracks-down-on-epic-quest-of-the-four-crystals-user-review-manipulation
Essentially, the allegation is this: because the developer of Epic Quest of the 4 Crystals was offering additional free keys to everyone posting a review of the game within 24 hours in the description of the featured giveaway of the game on SG, this resulted in a flood of positive reviews. And the mere incentive of getting free keys (despite the developer not overtly requiring the review to be positive) skewed the perception of reviewers and resulted in them reviewing the game more positively than they otherwise would have. Or, conversely, it made them realise their bias and try to counteract it by reviewing the game more harshly. In either case, the reviews weren't genuine.
One other thing TechRaptor may not have picked up on is the level system of SG. The fact that for merely posting a review you could get a free key and then make a giveaway to raise your CV points - it may have played a certain role in getting a bunch of people to spew out a couple of half-coherent sentences and click the thumbs up button as well. And in this sense, since higher CV means, in a way, that you'll have better chances at winning games on SG in the future, this incident walks dangerously close to bribery.
I'm not suggesting we should be fixing Steam reviews (and Undertale may pretty well be a game worthy of 2000+ positive reviews within 24 hours of its release), but maybe we could at least prevent SteamGifts from being a tool for review manipulation? By maybe including a stipulation in the FAQ that featured giveaways are a promotional tool in itself, and should not be used to provide additional incentives to SG users in order to make them play the role of PR agents?
Thoughts?
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