Then it means no more reviews from me. I have no idea which games in my library I got as gifts and which as keys, with big libraries it's impossible to remember, Steam does not provide easy to look/check UI solution to check whether your review will count or not (and no, searching whole licence history for every single game is not an easy UI solution). Typical Volvo - bring changes, but don't adapt your client to said changes.
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Looking at your reviews, I'm not sure why you'd stop. You obviously don't just care about being tallied, but want to provide your opinion about the game, in the hope it will help others. You could do that even after the change.
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but he gets hidden by default, that's a major visibility issue :-/
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by default new system settings show only steam-purchased reviews, and while settings can be changed we both knoww very well that most of people don't - as long as they can use service without problems they will keep using default settings. Not only on Steam - look at FB for example. Way over 90% of population uses default privacy settings, even if system allows you to tweak privacy setup quite a lot. Same will be with steam. So it's not only a case of my reviews no longer impacting game score, but also a case that if my main incentive for reviews was to provide my opinion to help others - it becomes pointless as well, because my helpful opinion will not even be visible to most of people because they wuill use default review filtering setting.
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There's a different with Steam, in that the filter is, so far, smack in the face of users going to read the reviews. That's different from most user user options in other places. This tells users up front that not all reviews are there and that they can easily change that.
Obviously not all people will, but it's still decent enough that I think more users will use it.
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still most of people won't. Like I said - people tend to change settings only when they need to - if something is not working for them. Maybe someone will change the setting WHEN he finds a game that will have no reviews in his language. But if he see 100 reviews present he won't bother changing settings just to be able to see 100 other reviews.
Like many times before because of Valve laziness fair users are getting punished in a process of fighting bad guys. Same as happened with "no anti-scam protection", mandatory mobile authenthication, trade locks on items and gifts and so on and on. Valve could very easilly solve the things differently. The linked article shows that they are very capable of finding anomalies in reviews, they even directly give numbers how many titles abused the system - if they are able to get that data easilly they could easilly moderate it, but it would require work on their part, so like usual they implement restrictive system that will punish thousands of fair users in the process of fighting a few bad ones.
And writing a review, proof-reading it, trying t be objective etc - it all takes time. It is utterly unfair that me as a fair customer will be punished because I got the game as a key. And it doesn't matter if difference in my review visibility compared to someone who reviewed gift copy will be 90%, 50% or 10% - what matters is that there is this difference which is unfair towards me, because we boith had to play the game, both had to do the same work writing review (if we assume that our reviews are at the same level) etc.
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Just want to say; Great post.
Yeah, don't really got more, I agree on everything you say.
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If you know that the potential readership of your review has been reduced to friend list + maybe a few really curious people, instead of potentially anyone who scrolled down to a game's review section… that isn't particularly motivating.
There are people who write reviews exclusively for friend lists though. I cannot deny that.
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I don't know if this is related to this update, but some reviews I have deleted over a year ago came back. This made me go through my 60 reviews and I've got this problem where I can't read something I've written without thinking it's utterly terrible so I deleted them all to be sure. ;_;
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how to volve (fuck) things up - a guide by volv:
- introduce a user rating system (what could go wrong anywayz)
- acknowledge the the rating system is shite
- let some time pass (pp = profit & pretend ... see how things play out)
- acknowledge that most gaems sell for a penny and a dime (steam gaems = worthless)
- come up with the genius idea that keys are so worthless, in fact the key users shouldn't have a rating option
- implement the sneaky usual way ...
- expect the derps that only buy in the steam store to rate the geamz at all or more positivley ...
- future steppe - realize there aren't enough reviews on not so popular geams (80%) ...
- future optional: undo user ratings altogether / re-enable key-user ratings / allow 1 - 10 review show up as an entire legit LABEL
- finally "legit" reviews, crisis averted, repeat volving things up
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The Steam scoring system is flawed anyhow in my opinion, e.g. there being no option to give a neutral review or to filter all the 'biased' reviews and so on. It's not a bad step towards cleaning that mess up that Steam reviews are but I personally don't rely on them anyway. It's easier for me to just watch some gameplay footage on YT and then decide if I would like the game or not... isn't failsafe but convenient enough.
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Agreed. Steam reviews should not be based only on thumbs up or down, it should be a star or number system, 1 to 5, 1 to 6, 1 to 3, 1 to 100, whatever.
No game ever is simply "recommended or not". Check imdb, metacritic, NME, ING or whatsoever, there is always a 1-10, 1-100 score system.
What they're now doing is simply discouraging developers to bundle their games because the bundle reviews will not be featured.
At one hand they can kill "bought reviews", which I think its fine, but this is not the way to do it at all. The system has flaws since its orign of thumbs up and thumbs down only.
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I realized that yes, I don't like one aspect above everything - I'm having hard time trusting any game's score if it's based on only a handful of people, simply because it's a too small group to be objective.
Steam hows only Steam-bought reviews, and scores based on that
I have to scroll down to even check whether there are more reviews at all - and looking at the whole picture, how many people will even scroll down to reviews, and won't just make a choice based on the review% out of 100 users? I guess not many
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Seriously? I would think that most people do not blindly trust a review% and at least check shortly the written reviews and what other people say about the game. Or am I on the minority side here?
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you are the minority. You gotta remember that while you are gamining enthusiast (you being a part of gaming community here on SG already means you're a minority) most customers are casuals. Theyu do not follow gaming communities, medias, they are affected mainly by PR and scores. They see some commercial or trailer and thinkomg how good it looks, they go to buy it and already want to before they even see any score or review. They then see Very Positive score and it only encourages them more. You gotta remember that average customer only plays very few games per year, they maybe have collection of 20 or 30 games and that's all.
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People trust the review%, yes. Many people get a game's "score" from one, maybe two sources (one written and one video series, if you are lucky), but usually a game's rank is often determined with a glance. It happened on Reflexive, happens on Big Fish Games, happens on GOG, happens on Steam as well. This is why fake devs spent so many freebie keys to generate artificial ratings, because this was still a cheaper way to lure in new people to pay money than even a simple advertisement.
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great!
for example http://steamcommunity.com/app/526460
Steam Purchasers (30)
Key Activations (64) - most of them are positive
Nice move by Valve! (▰˘◡˘▰)
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I can see this affecting a large number of AAA box titles that are activated on Steam through keys. Titles such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, (others escape me at the moment)
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Well, Steam sure is having something against bundle sites, that is obvious now. :-)
EDIT: I had more negative reviews (4) from bundle key activations (32) than from negative (3) steam purchases (45). So its not like it I had much effect on my game. But this surely makes me think twice about putting my game in a bundle again. I might just stick to Steam sales now. And I'm sure a lot of developers will think the same as me.
Its clever by Steam, from a monopoly point of view, but it sucks for who looks for other opportunities to sell their games.
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depends whether your game is good or bnot ;) If you are well aware that your game is shite, you're even encouraged to bundle it to death now - because you can sell hundreds of copies via bundles and it will still not affect your reviews. Even better - the more you bundle the game the less likely are people to buy it off steam, because why would they if there are keys available for 5% of the price? For shady asset flip companies profiting mainly from card trading it's a win-win situation. They can flood the market with thousands upon thousands of keys, profit from cards and still none of these keys will affect their review score ;)
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I don't think my game is shite, it was my first game and I didn't know what to expect of it until I learnt that people like it. But its a niche simple game that depends from a lot of other forms of marketing (like bundles) to get noticed. Obviously I can't compete to a Geometry Wars or games from bigger studios (I mean, I'm one guy only) in Steam Sales, but the reviews from bundle buyers helped on raising awareness.
I dunno. I just feel now like bundling is useless, unless you need quick bucks. Reviews will come in one way or another through the regular sales, so why bother to use bundles as a marketing tool now?
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oh don't get me wrong, I'm not saying your game is shite ;) I'm saying that there are defvs who deliberately make shite games with as little work as possible just to profit from card selling (they even give away tens of thousands of free keys just to do this) - and for these devs the new system is great, because they can give free or ultra cheap keys, still profit from cards, but will no longer get negative revirews out of thousands of key copies people have ;) If review scores are importasnt to you you may be less likely to bundle your game now. But if you know your game is bad and it will get bad reviews - yoiu are even more encouraged to bundle / key-giveaway it now than before ;)
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and for these devs the new system is great, because they can give free or ultra cheap keys, still profit from cards, but will no longer get negative revirews out of thousands of key copies people have ;)
True that. But what about those who bundle their games to get their game known? Steam is a huge market and bundle is a great way of marketing.
I even get it what Valve is trying to do, if it is with an honest intention to make reviews more reliable, but in my guts I feel they're trying to hurt the bundles market. I dunno but I get that impression.
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Of course they do.
And in the meantime make Digitial Homicide's wettests dreams come through.
Each sane person can see the complete and total disaster in doing so... but no, not Valve.
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So basically devs now just have to find a way to buy pople the game inside steam so they can have an overwhelmingly positive score. That's just brilliant!
20/20 positive review of owners trough steam
750/800 negative revies of steam keys
But hey, those scores are more legit no?
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I can already imagine short-timed price bugs, for example happening in just one unpopulated steam region in the middle of a night. Game get's Price Bug in Saudi Arabia only let's say, devs buy 50 gift copies during price bug and fix the bug few minutes later. Almost noone was able to profit from price bug, and bam - 50 positive reviews that can be countered only by people paying full price for their game on Steam. They can bundle game to death and worry not about review score dropping no matter how bad game is ;) And the more they bundle it the less likely are people gonna to purcghase it on Steam ever, so even better for devs, because even less likely review score to change ;)
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I can already imagine short-timed price bugs, for example happening in just one unpopulated steam region in the middle of a night. Game get's Price Bug in Saudi Arabia only let's say, devs buy 50 gift copies during price bug and fix the bug few minutes later.
Just a heads up, this cannot happen. Price bugs are flaws from Steam, not from developers setting a discount. There is a limit to what developers can do. You have a time limit (there is a minimum - if I'm not mistaken a week - and a maximum amount of time), a few choices that can be choosen (from 10% to 90% or something like that depending on the full price) and a delay between one discount and another (8 weeks I guess).
So a developer cannot "create" a price bug to get benefit on that.
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but dev can for example set up regional price, right? So just set up much lower price in designated low population region.
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If you change prices it has to be approved by Steam. I haven't changed prices yet, I went with the suggested by Steam, but if they have to approve it, I'm pretty sure they must have a criterion.
You cannot do it by only yourself, this is what I mean, everything goes through Steam.
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Or, you know, just accidentally get a -99% in Russia. :)
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like takk explained it will luckilly not be possible - any discount or price change must be approved by valve, any discount needs to have predetermined time frame, so it will nont be possible to make short 99% discount in russia just to buy review gift copies.
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We all know it's coming. It's far easier to rig the game now, and make shitloads of money of bundles, entirely risk-free!
Except Valve of course.
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steam doesn't like cd-keys and third party sellers. it lowers steam's profit. steam doesn't have a support for cd-key problems too. but devs like it. because they can make better profit by selling cd-keys. as U know steam take 30% of game price. devs can sell the keys 20-25% lower than the actual price and make more profit. steam is doing ir's best to encourage players buy the game directly from steam rather than shops like G2A or Kinguin. U can agree with me if U know the only way to refund a game that U didn't like after playing, is to but it yourself through steam. so I think it's gonna be good for steam and bad for others.
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Of course that's the reason and not reviews. Just like the mobile authenticator was obviously not at all about "security" no matter how much they tried to twist it that way.
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i feel that all games won some %positive reviews... illusion ? :o)
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Hm, it is a tough call. It is a bit annoying that reviews from keys are not shown by default and that I have no chance of raising the score of a game I really like as long as I got it from outside Steam. On the other hand the reviews are still there and easily accessible. Well as I write my reviews to be read anyway (and not solely in order to raise the percentage) it won't make much of a difference since they are more interesting for the people spending more time on the review section anyways.
And maybe, just maybe (activating wishful thinking mode) it will motivate people to take a closer look at the (more informative) reviews to make up their mind instead of trusting blindly a single number (end wishful thinking mode).
On a special note. I can finally see all the reviews on the shop site again. I don't know if it was a bug before or a problem on my side but although I set English as second language those reviews would not have been displayed after chaning away from the "All" section. So that's a plus in my book. Also like that bit of customization where I can choose what I want to see and what not.
And lastly (and this may be strange and many people will not agree on this with me) it will make developers more hesistant to put their games in bundles. There are many games which are in my opinion are good enough that there should have never been the need to be bundled. And it annoys me a bit to see developers going this route since they don't have good sale numbers. So it may motivate them to look for other marketing possibilities.
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There are so many developers abusing the review system that something had to be done about it. I'm not sure this was the best way of going about things though. For a lot of good games most key-activated reviews are legit and useful and it's unfair that they won't count for the overall score on store page.
I do like that you can choose to read reviews only made by people who bought the game via steam, those that got it via key activation or both. I don't like that the default is set to "Steam Purchasers" and that there isn't a way to change the default to your preferences.
There are both pros and cons to this, which shouldn't be surprising because Valve always half-asses everything when it comes to Steam.
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I can see the pros, but even so I can only see this with an intention a way of hurt bundle sites.
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Pretty much, since it's so easy to get around for evil devs...
"Hey, we locked the door... please don't use this MASSIVE open window next to the locked door to enter please. Thanks."
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They again did it in the Valve way. Like finding ants in your house, chance to infect neighbouring houses - napalm the whole street. No house, no problems. Few dozen problematic reviews on a few dozen games? Let's hide every single user's every single key-based review. Because they don't want to manually check them. Or they don't want a report review system because that also would mean work for them. Valve is trying so hard to avoid doing anything that would increase the need for manpower, while even their support is in shambles...
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Many legit reviewers and review sites work with keys given to them by the developers so as one of said people I'm not quite happy with this. It won't stop me from writing reviews but it's a shame that they won't count to helping a score.
It just seems like a kick in the pants when they could easily just implement a policy that reviews have to be reviewed before being submitted. I imagine that would require an actual human being doing, god forbid, work but it would help filter the crappy reviews and troll reviews.
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basically this. Any press review copy is a key. Any review copy some blog, YT channel, Twitch stream etc gets - is a key. Professional review outlets don't buy products to review them. They get products to review from publishers.
As for reviews having to be reviewed - it's impossible. It would require not a few but hundreds of employers. thousands upon thousands of reviews are posted daily, it's impossible to moderate every single one of them. But something else can be done - in linked article they proved that they are capable of finding "anomalies" - games that have very different review scores between gift and key copies. They don't have to moderate all reviews posted. They could just use automatic system to find "strange" games, games where reviews are different between gift and key copies and then just moderate these ones. Determine whether there is a legit reason for this difference or something shady is going on. And this work could be done by 1-3 people. But Valve being Valve prefers to make an automatic system that will ounish 99.9% of fair and honest users just to get rid of 0.1% of unfair ones rather than do any actual human work. It wouldn't be the first case for Valve of doing that - same was with trade locks, mobile aurthenthication, discontinuation of scam-protection etc.
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Well you don't have any kind of data that says how many votes are bought (devs gave hundreds or thousands of keys for such groups for free), or by legitimate user who got key to review stuff. And even when someone will get key for review, they may feel pressure to not list all faults of the game, as devs could not provide them new keys for rewievs and/or free raffles on their website, to feed people with them and grow in subscriptions.
There are not that many yt reviewers who already have hundreds thousands of subscribers, so they can buy their games easily by monetizing ads. And even when you do have some yt user with huge audience (like pewdiepie), they can still be bought by devs to write positive reviews.
So it's not that simple.
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Seeing massively bought positive reviews is actually pretty easy, since they generally have an overwhelming similiar distinguishable pattern to it.
So no, it would be very very easy... if they just took the time for it.
Instead, they launch this crap.
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And would you voluntarly sit and mark those similar, fake revies by yourself?
Valve is known from not wanting to hire more people to have normal, working support. They just moved this task to some other company, which said to them "hey, we're cheapest and will solve your customers problems by copy-paste unrelated answers all over the place". I don't think they'd hire hundreads of people to supervise reviews.
And similarity between reviews can be easily masked by "Reviews groups", by providing text file with hundreds of lines / texts from which people would cut out pieces and put together to make "reliable" review without having to think about it too much. Is it easy to find bought reviews among "10/10 would recommend" texts with 0,1h game playtime? yes. But if they'd be longer and more complex? Not much.
And algorytm to weed out those "fake-cut reviews" would take long to make and it'd make lots of mistakes, as not everyone know english perfectly, so everyone can make mess-review.
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It's called "hiring people"... not leech on free users (yes, that is the Valve way, but they make billions, they can hire fucking proper support by now, thank you).
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I know they can hire people (but won't), and I think Valve support is one big mess.
But if they didn't do anything to have better, working, user-friendly support for past YEARS, they won't do shit to "waste money" on steam reviews.
I'm realistic and I know how they work, and nothing will change their attitude. Just as companies won't stop to make their products in China to use cheap labour force.
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They already stated they have already identified the 160 offending games in the first place.
All they had to do is act on that info, that was already there.
Instead, we got this.
"We know who did it, we know where they live... let's blow up the entire city instead. Much much better"
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And torch the rest of the country, just to make sure, with this magnitude…
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It reminds me of those recent DC movies.
"Superman COULD be bad, let's pre-emptively kill him even though we have no legit reason to even suspect such a thing, it's just our own fear"
And I thought that was completely and utterly retarded (and goddamn, do they do it AGAIN the movie after. The fudge guys?), but it seems Valve operates like that too.
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sorry, but what point do you try to make? There is also no data indicating that majority of key-based reviews are biased. I'd rather say otherwise, it's the very small minority, which is shown by numbers of detected anomalies mentioned in linked aricle - 160 titles out of what? 10000 games available on steam. So 1.6% - that the % of cases where unfair key reviews had impact. In 98.4% games it's not the case. Yet Steam is punishing all the people who write legit reviews based on keys. Also reducing review stats for all games on their platform (excluding few rare cases where there are no game keys at all - like GTA V) just to fight with 1.6% of titles that was able to abuse the system. It's a massive overkill based purely on Volvo laziness - because this 1.6% could easilly be moderated manually by one or two employers rather than punishing whole community.
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i'm writing about this imaginary "99,9 legit users and 0,1% fakes" which were mentioned to support your points.
And it's not stated that it's only 160 games, it's mentioning 160 games where you have extreme cases. valve didn't provide any kind of analysis with detailed summary. There are hundreds of other games (as you're aware from all this duck spam, gleam spam and so on) that their percentage was boosted up by bought reviews.
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Gleam doesn't force you to leave a positive reply. Infact I would review negatively a free game if it's utter shit.
Now those warnings to stay away don't count no more.
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The thing is there are not. We can now easilly see the difference between key and store purchased reviews and in almost every case % of positive between store purchased and key purchases is almost identical. Only in less than 2% it was significant enough to actually boost positive %. It only sjows that in most cases this bought reviews were not even impactful enough to make any difference.
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But Valve being Valve prefers to make an automatic system that will ounish 99.9% of fair and honest users just to get rid of 0.1% of unfair ones rather than do any actual human work.
Exactly. Valve notices the problem which is nice, but they try to strangle the whole service to limit malicious behaviour instead of looking for the specific ones. :( and it's really a trend
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I imagine that would require an actual human being doing
Its hard to expect that from a company that does everything to avoid having an human being doing something unless it generates them money.
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Overkill. I'd rather count achievements at this point.
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Perfect, first bought votes were cut when gleam was "closed", and now duck-leaded groups won't be able to harass devs, as their reviews won't show up by default, so they won't be able to either boost percentage to "hugely positive" or "hugely negative" ratings.
And you can still check user's reviews score by marking "key activations" / "steam purchases" / "all". In fact it's helpful, as when user reviews percentage is "hugely positive" and steam purchases are "negative" you clearly see that those votes were bought for free keys. I don't see flaws in this system, I will just change between "steam purchase" and "key activations" to check if they match eatch other.
Maybe only flaw is that people don't care about stuff, so they won't care to check what this small question mark with explanation of new system say.
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I personally don't really see how this matters. If you aren't decided on buying the game and are relying on the Steam reviews, just look at some reviews, right? I mean I guess it can be helpful (?) to see the overall rating, but if you're deciding whether or not to buy it, isn't it more important to know what people like/don't like rather than how many people like/don't like it?
Idk, maybe I'm wrong and most people decide whether or not to buy a game solely based on what the majority think, though?
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Those are also (by default) hidden from the public. So unless people actively look for them (unlikely) that's also not happening for key-buyers (read: bundle buyers).
Basically it's a waste of your time in every regard, and why would one do that? I wouldn't for sure.
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If you scroll down it by default only shows Steam user reviews... if you want to get key-code activated reviews you specifically need to request them.
Guess how many people will do that. Manually. Each and every game. All the time.
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Anybody who's on the fence about buying a game and wants to know what key-buyers have to say about it?
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And how big a group would that be, now that bundle-buyers are also painted by Valve as "bought keys, illegitimate users and generally frauds".
You know, just like I was for not owning a smartphone (he doesn't have a smarthpone! Don't trade with him! He's a fraud!)
Guess how many people trade with me and my 15 days hold...
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I'm going to be honest I have no idea what point you're trying to argue. What I said is that if a user is wondering if they should buy a game or not, and won't make a decision until they check reviews, they'll check the reviews, won't they?
My main point is that the overall rating (overwhelmingly positive, etc.) doesn't tell you what people like about the game, so I don't see how people can make a decision based on that alone...
P.S. I'm really not sure that you read my post right? I don't understand where your response came from at all...
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They will... but they are very unlikely to change said reviews from the default parameters. Where bundle buyers are hidden since "evil free keys".
Me neither, but people do act on it. And I can say for myself the little thumb icon in the store does sometimes affect what I look at further... that was until the Mobile Authenticator made me decide not to give those Valve-scumbags one more cent.
PS. The answer to my question is "no-one"
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So you're thinking about people not seeing reviews you write, right?
I personally don't feel too worried about whether or not people see my reviews or not. I mean, if I like/dislike a game enough to leave a review and it helps someone make a decision I guess that's nice, but it doesn't really have an effect on me at that point as far as I see it... If that makes sense.
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That's what I did.
But now that it's pretty much 98% guaranteed to be not read and doesn't actually modify the score... that's just a giant waste of time.
I would really love to upvote games I kickstart and love, but that's just wasting my time, not helping them, not helping ANYONE. Then why do it?
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Very few of us are left who accept a trade offer from a user like that, sure. Most don't even dare to post simple card swap offers any more, crippling even my "complete your sets" account I set up for others to use their leftover cards for badge completion.
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No, if they are on the fence, they will read the first, maybe first three reviews. That's it. This is why curator groups tear at each others' throats to downvote anything not from them and upvote reviews from the group. This is why Steam implemented the most useful review of 30/60/90/180 days/all time feature to begin with.
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Okay, I understand, I'm a weird one who tends to be more interested in what the reviews say than whether they're positive or negative. It still won't have much effect for me, though, both in writing or reading, because when I usually write reviews because I want to (whether for my friends or kind of like a thanks to devs?) not because I want sheep to follow me.
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Not exactly weird, just not exactly representing the average user behaviour. Most people are only interested in a review as far as a single-page display goes.
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by default reviews written by key owners are hidden, user gotta change his setting himself to view all reviews. A lot of users, especially casual users do not tend to change any s4ettings ever unless they need to, they tend to rely on default settings, so it's fair to assume that a lot of users won't change their review visibility settings thus if you write a review based on key not a gift/store puurchase it won't be visible for many other users.
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But I'm saying if you want to know whether or not you want to buy a game, and are basing your decision on the reviews, are you not going to read any?
If a casual user isn't planning on reading reviews, than they probably wouldn't read reviews whether they were hidden or not.
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you see - you're looking it from your perspective as buyer, I'm talking about reviewer perspective. You as buyer can decide to show all reviews and nothing's changed for you. but from reviewer perspective a lot changes because his key-based teview will have less visibility than store-purchase based. Because there will be users like you who will change settings to view all reviews (that's your perspective), there are casueals that don't read reviews at all (that's the perspective which is not important because nothing changes here), but there are also people who will read reviews but won't change setting and your review will never be able to get to them because of Valve assuming that you may be writing fake reviews simply because you wrote review of key copy.
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Okay, I get what you're saying I was just confused about how all these replies I got weren't about what I was talking about. Though I guess I still don't know what a reviewer's goal is, I guess, because I don't understand what more/less people seeing your review means/does. But yeah, I don't really feel wronged if not as many people read my reviews, but I might be in the minority for this too, I don't really know...
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First they came for the non-smartphone users... but I didn't complain since I do have a smartphone
Then they came for bundlebuyers... but I didn't complain since I'm a Valve lapdog buying everything for the store for 300% more
But surely... Valve will someday find a way to mark me a scammer too, eventually.
This will probably affect Steamgifts giveaways from devs, in a negative way. And I was so close to winning Super Star... maybe, eventually. Now I guess that opportunity is no longer being provided.
And after not owning a smartphone and being demoted "scammer" and secondhand user with 95% of my library being bundles I'm now launched into "super-scammer", third-hand user and Valve terrorist watchlist user... I wonder what the 3rd rape event will be Valve will be having out for me. They already screwed over their entire Steam-experience, what more could they harm I wonder.
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You're around on Steam for some time as well.
Do you remember the time when there was no trading, no community, no bundles?
When Steam was basically just a game library with a friendlist, kinda like what Origin & Co are still today. Imagine how those platforms would look like, if they had implemented these features.
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No trading; Yup. I also remember giving them tons of cash from their cut they take off every markettransaction. They might have gotten more money from me there than their store. And then they decide to make me second-hand-citizen.
Community existed from the start.
We didn't need bundles since Steam had good sales. Now we don't, so god bless bundles. Filling up the gap Steam itself has made.
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Oh well, i mean the time before the market even existed. Community also came later, but not sure anymore when. Apparently around / before you joined.
My point being: before all those features were a thing, these kind of problems didn't exist, and they still don't on other platforms. Or can you sell your skins on Origin? Or get some "free" cards on Battle.net? Or have a botnet for all kinds of crap with uPlay? Etc. etc...
Steam itself isn't the problem here, it's those unique features that attracted a few too many abusers at one point. The main business, which is similar to other platforms, still remains the same since the start.
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And in return they made billions more than Origins, GOG etc.
And while they actually return that with good costumer support, all Valve does is screwing over users.
How does less profit = better service vs. more profit = worse service be remotely a pro towards Steam?
Those "unique features" generate a lot more profit for Valve than just the store does.
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Well, Steam was never good in service, but extremely good in providing.
True, and that's why they need to keep it under control. A major change to reviews had to be done - the current implementation is suboptimal though.
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They already had the tools to identify fraud and deal with it.
Instead... they for some reason don't, yet do this.
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Origin would be the cesspool of the gaming world, UPlay would be a troll nest. GOG is almost on the edge of falling into a similar pit, but so far, bless them, they managed to avoid it. I doubt Battle.net would change. (And not because the user base is so damn perfect but because there is very small difference between a Blizzard fan and an Apple fan.)
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Bullshit move, as many cd keys come from buying the games on retail, that doesnt necessarily mean they are obtained through online stores. I don't see how this will help in any way. Did they shit their pants after no man's sky or what?
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so what a second, if I buy a game via another site, amazon, GMG, etc etc etc,,, I can't write a review for it and have it count for anything anymore... that's just stupid, I guess the saying goes a few bad apples can spoil the bunch..
Oh well, what can the end user do because take it up the tailpipe..
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You can still write reviews, but it'll just be under a different category on the store page and not counted into the "Overwhelmingly Neutral" score. Anyone who's actually interested in reviews will still be able to see it, though.
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Anyone who's actually interested in reviews (numbers dropping) AND changes the default settings (you're in the wastelands now, baby).
Pretty much you're wasting your time writing anything.
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I've already got 2 blacklists from this topic.
Some sad Steam fanboys out there...
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it's not the matter the reviewer got the game for free. actually I don't pay attention to percentage of positive reviews. I read most helpful reviews and then watch some gameplay. even if devs giveaway some copies, it doesn't help them much. because the receiver of the giveaway doesn't even have to play the game.!
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Just tried the review filter.
I selected a random game in my library, went to the store page, switched "purchase type" to "all". OK, seems to work, other reviews are showing (but the overall score isn't affected, of course).
Just to be sure, I selected a second game, and lo and behold, the filter was back to default. Came back to the first game's page: filter was also back to default.
Working as intended heh? So I can save my choice of language, but not my choice of which reviews to show? Good job Valve -_-
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Who cares really? If I like a game, i buy it! F@ack the reviews! :P
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Not agreeing / disagreeing with what was said but out of curiosity how does seeing a review mean you've played it :P
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they are talking about this part of posters comment -> "If I like a game, i buy it!"
how can somebody know they like it before they have bought it?
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Well, you could easily try the game from a demo, or at a friends, etc.
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oh i know, was just explaining what aristofop was asking though =)
there's also the not so legal ways to try a game out too <-NOT that i am promoting this (tho im sure u meant this as "etc")
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http://store.steampowered.com/news/24155/
Second update:
http://store.steampowered.com/news/24331/
What do you think?
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