Steam Reviews - Unable to Mark as Funny "and" Unhelpful?

[[OTS]EchoZenLogos]

As is usually the case with reviews put on Steam for comedy, they tend to be very useless as actual reviews. The option to mark them as both funny and unhelpful (and some are funny "and" helpful, but this is rate) was always nice to have, but I now am unable to do so when I was reviewing games.

This seems like a universally terrible idea, as the top-rated reviews have enough joke reviews in them as it is without people like me being able to rate them down as they deserve. Having the funny button be mutually exclusive with that simply means that my only real choice is to mark it as unhelpful, and not funny - which isn't always the case. I'm not without a sense of humor.

Anyone have thoughts on this.

[username12121]

Lots of people claim that the funny button was introduced as a way to downvote funny reviews, based on the popular assumption that funny reviews cannot possibly be helpful at the same time. I suspect they're right about the reason, but the assumption is just ridiculous.

[[OTS]EchoZenLogos]

Funny reviews can be either helpful or unhelpful, but in general I find that they are almost always unhelpful. Still, being able to decide whether a review is helpful or not should have no bearing on whether or not it has comedy.

I admit however that there is no easy solution to the problem of funny reviews getting overwhelming attention, when it is due to people who are too lazy to read actual reviews blindly rating them up just for a quick laugh.

One solution I've seen proposed would be to have a minimum character limit for reviews, and make it possible to flag them - so that if a person decides to say, cheat and just put in a bunch of fluff letters to meet the limit, they might get banned from writing any more reviews. Though I admit that the time it would take to review reviews might be a bit much.

That way, funny reviews that still cover the actual game would be helpful.

Games that are totally broken as well might have negative reviews, but cannot have a lot of characters in the review, since in that case the person can't even play the game. So It's a complicated issue.

[username12121]

I do agree that most "funny" reviews are not helpful, although I use the term loosely, because there are a lot of failed attempts at being funny, and I think some people try to be funny more with the intention of being annoying than being funny.

I do think it's a shame though in the more rare cases where someone actually writes a good review that is also funny, and readers are forced to either reward the reviewer for their helpfulness but not congratulate them on their humour, or vice versa. There is no crime in writing skillfully enough to entertain readers, and yet by and large Steam encourages a more mediocre writing style. At least the annoying, unhelpful reviewers get the satisfaction of knowing that someone told them they were funny.

[Calypso]

helpful - review that are helpful for newcomer. it can have jokes as long as it's helpful or detailed some of the reviewer include jokes to make it more fun to read something long. not everyone loves serious review.
unhelpful - review that are unhelpful for newcomer. eg, complain about 1 little bug for 3 paragraph,,complain about the game is not 'fun' after playing for 1000 hrs (oh the irony) ,act like 12 years old and said 'IT SUCK DONT BUY' , meme review or fake,paid review.
funny - review that are purely memes and joke. no review talking about game at all. just 'got shot 420/420 DANK MEME xdxd' and stuff.

i think each button working nicely. no need to press funny and then unhelpful at the same times. problem would be tons of people love upvoting funny memes review. while some of it is funny, it's not helpful and will never be. stop upvoting meme review jeez press the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ FUNNY button.

[JimDeadlock]

I noticed that previously when you could select both, most people didn't realise this so they were clicking one or the other, while people in-the-know would click both. I'm only guessing, but I suspect that Valve realised that this resulted in inconsistent voting and decided to change it.