Originally posted by Elvenkind:

and since I've looked at Steam as THE PLACE for finding QUALITY GAMES

That is a matter of perspective; so you have to look at it differently: only a fraction of the games in the store are "quality" games for you.

The tool is based on subjective inputs from other gamers. In simple terms: Steam has a pattern P that consists of your gaming activity, review scores, wishlist, ect and are trying to find a group of closest matching pattern Px from other users. Then they compare your games and their games. In theory it would works in an extend, but don't expect it too much from it. You have an unique taste and it happens that the Recommender is showing you a game that you really would like. But it would also show you games that you would not like. The algorithm that does a best recommendation the majority of time has to be discovered yet.

I suggest to use the tool as it is: a tool. Don't follow it blindly. Use it as an additional input to your search for games that you would enjoy when playing it.

Originally posted by BORG:

Need a great example? Look at the garbage and dumpster fire that is Outlaws of The Old West (basically a prettier version of the Wild West Online scam) that said they would be making an amazing western. A year later and it's still the same pile of trash it was day 1.

Developers and publishers don't care about the players. They're allowed to abuse the Steam members in any way they see fit with no consequence all while taking the customer's money and not delivering a quality product. Early Access in itself is a dumpster fire nowadays and is more or less a reflection of Valve's standards. The Valve standards are money first; quality second. That is the Valve in 2020. This new update - just another reflection of Valve's standards. They care more about selling quantity than quality.

Not sure if it is correct to blame Valve for this. It appears to be a false marketing from the developer/publisher of that game. Valve has only provided them a platform to sell games. Sure, you can expect from the company to moderate the content, but that's a lot work. So they just make themselves easier by relying on content-based algorithms or users feedback.

A sale of a bad game is still a profit for Valve...

Originally posted by xybolt:

Originally posted by Elvenkind:

and since I've looked at Steam as THE PLACE for finding QUALITY GAMES

That is a matter of perspective; so you have to look at it differently: only a fraction of the games in the store are "quality" games for you.

The tool is based on subjective inputs from other gamers. In simple terms: Steam has a pattern P that consists of your gaming activity, review scores, wishlist, ect and are trying to find a group of closest matching pattern Px from other users. Then they compare your games and their games. In theory it would works in an extend, but don't expect it too much from it. You have an unique taste and it happens that the Recommender is showing you a game that you really would like. But it would also show you games that you would not like. The algorithm that does a best recommendation the majority of time has to be discovered yet.

I suggest to use the tool as it is: a tool. Don't follow it blindly. Use it as an additional input to your search for games that you would enjoy when playing it.

A big problem is that many games are bad tagged and/or have not enough reviews for a rating.

Originally posted by MaoZo#C.Bennington†2017:

A big problem is that many games are bad tagged and/or have not enough reviews for a rating.

that's one of the weakpoints of a recommender algorithm :-)
One of the approaches to "improve" it is to not include if you don't have sufficient # of game plays (in hours) or # of reviews. But that would remove its potential to suggest unknown games or "hidden gems" to the users, giving the developers/publishers of it a chance to market their game. Otherwise they would skip Steam. In contrary to that, Spotify has a great mechanism to suggest lesser know artists/groups to the users. So it is possible, however you have to fine-tune the algorithm correctly for that.

An other problematic influence on the recommender system is the current tagging system. It is not so flawless than before. Now a game has so many tags that some aren't not really correct. That led to weird suggestions in the discovery queue because it relies on the tags in a greater extend ...

Originally posted by xybolt:

Originally posted by BORG:

Need a great example? Look at the garbage and dumpster fire that is Outlaws of The Old West (basically a prettier version of the Wild West Online scam) that said they would be making an amazing western. A year later and it's still the same pile of trash it was day 1.

Developers and publishers don't care about the players. They're allowed to abuse the Steam members in any way they see fit with no consequence all while taking the customer's money and not delivering a quality product. Early Access in itself is a dumpster fire nowadays and is more or less a reflection of Valve's standards. The Valve standards are money first; quality second. That is the Valve in 2020. This new update - just another reflection of Valve's standards. They care more about selling quantity than quality.

Not sure if it is correct to blame Valve for this. It appears to be a false marketing from the developer/publisher of that game. Valve has only provided them a platform to sell games. Sure, you can expect from the company to moderate the content, but that's a lot work. So they just make themselves easier by relying on content-based algorithms or users feedback.

A sale of a bad game is still a profit for Valve...

They blatantly broke Valve's Steam developer guidelines by falsely advertising and more. That is absolutely a developer and publisher problem. Valve sits back and does nothing about it all the while putting primary importance on marketing tools rather than actually looking after their platform. So long as Valve is getting their money, any company can act out in any way they want because Valve's hands-off policy is their excuse to not take any responsibility of what goes on over their Steam client.

There was a time when Steam used to be more of a gamer oriented launcher than a full blown extreme sales push and marketing platform.

genre defining should be a developers job. currently, the way it's set up anyone can just tag any game with any word... like "pooperscooper" and what ends up happening is due to the mass amounts of uh..totally intelligent and completely tolerable and in every way respectable oxygen breathing machines..cough... everyone thinks pooperscooper is funny and so "likes" the tag. NExt thing you know tons of games on Steam are labelled as "pooperscooper". This is how UNO got tagged as "souls like".

It's a bad system and you keep having to spend time fixing it.

Fix the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ library!!!!!!!!

可以更愉快地剁手了呢~

7

The amount of times I've used this feature since its introduction: 0

It's no wonder Valve has such a big fat F on the BBB. Complaints keep stacking up too. Valve corporation cares more about marketing and sales than quality of their launcher.

For example the voice chat quality is terrible. Been that way for many years now. What's the point of having it in Steam if it's garbage and worse than Discord, Teamspeak, Ventrilo, or any other voice chat client? That's only one, one single example of the stacks of garbage built into Steam that have been neglected for more than a decade. There are more marketing qualities in Steam now than quality features for the players.

Need another example? We've needed better group administration, management and features for over a decade! Instead, what do we get? More marketing features come first before making Steam better for the end-users - the players.

We've needed a better reporting system for years. What comes first? Marketing features. The reporting system is so bare bones and featureless when it comes to reporting scammers, fraud or other to the security team. Almost always, we have to e-mail support to give them specifics. and details about fraudsters. Worse is it takes almost a week for support to respond to fraud reports. Again, we see the repetitious picture of sales pitching and marketing being put as primary above all. I've experienced this first hand. The fraudsters got away because Valve took so long to respond.

Sketchy (Early Access especially) developers and publishers have too much control over censorship within the community hub which encourages them to take part in fraudulent activity on Steam because they have such strong censorship abilities. Is the hands off policy really as good as Valve claims it is? In some regards, it's like handing a loaded SAW to a child. The end-users are at the mercy of those gun wielding children. Valve absolves themselves of any involvement - even when you report blatant fraud, they seem to ignore it as I have reported several fraud scenarios and nothing got done about them. Valve seemingly ignores anything that doesn't seem to arouse a mass amount of attention to avoid getting involved. Losing money by shutting down fraudulent developments on the Steam platform is not something Valve is interested in unless they have no choice by mass public outrage.

Did we really need this interactive recommend feature? No. Did majority ask for it or want it? No. People have been asking about a lot of other things though, that go ignored by Valve for decades.

Marketing quality first; quality end-user features come second. That is Valve in a nutshell and the way it's always been since Valve got a taste of the game marketing industry.

vai tomar no cu <3

This new tool told me about 3-4 games that "people like me LOVES these games" and I hated them. I'd say that you would need extremely good algorithms in order for them to manage to understand exactly what kind of taste a person have in games". So the new wonder-tool just made me waste the time of moderators, because I wanted a refund.

So personally I'd like to warn against using game-tags to "analyse a gamer", because even if the tags look just right (and I even thought so) the games might be generally bad quality, not getting good feedback, or simply be cases of wanting to scam people by some pretty screenshots, that not at all is what the actual game is about, one of those I chose had so many bugs, I've never seen a worse example, and the rest had a early 2000's type of graphic, and had probably not even ever been rated by any gaming magazine or website.

So I'm really sceptical to the tactics Steam is using to increase sales in this and it's my honest opinion that the algorithms is very unpresice, so I would like - in my best intentions - to make people study game recommendations they are getting, if there's suddenly a lot of games that you haven't ever heard of before, then do check YouTube and try to gain a clear image of what is being recommended to you.

Me: *playing Skrim, Rome TW, Rollercoaster Tycoon 3*
Steam: "Players like you love #*#& Fairies and Furry ^&# Adventures*

Originally posted by Zalfir:

Me: *playing Skrim, Rome TW, Rollercoaster Tycoon 3*
Steam: "Players like you love #*#& Fairies and Furry ^&# Adventures*

YOU READ MY BRAIN!!! I thought I had bought another (obviously GREAT) pacific ocean survival game, but in none of the pictures did they clarify that I would have a puppy following me from the start, nor that the new update was with a World of Warcraft kind of gryffon to transport from island to island once you discovered a new one, lots of cartoonish animals with gigantism mixed with some serious ones, like a pretty well made shark, but it was swimming above land, not under the sea.

I tried in vain to chop down the puppy with an axe, tried to drown it, dried to bury it, nothing worked. YOU HAVE TO HAVE A PUPPY! NO CHOICE! And it is whining nonstop, because a goat attacked it, I tried to capture some rats or bunnies or something, that ran sideways into the sea and vanished, palms I cut down had leafs that looked like they turned into liquid when they moved around, think it was called "My Island" and they said "Players like me LOVES it", and I never had a more honest refund request, because "Barbie Survial" as I called this awful thing in my review, did actually just show the sunsets and the azure blue ocean, poorly dressed blondes, and such that they had managed to make, and that was enough to brainwash a Norwegian with 40 winters into buying, but not for more then 2 hours, that also seemed like their intention.

If I had been playing as if I was serious about the game, I would have noticed how broken it was, after 2 hours, and had to go without refund.

A couple of other games had "open worlds", but were less then 100MB large, just with things repeating itself, loot I picked up was represented with sentences describing the objects, not pictures of objects, and a couple more that was more of a mystery how and why I was recommended them. I think Steam will regret quickly if they put profit over people here. Look at what happened to the music industry. There's so many skilled programmers that do amazing work to make people happy, and satisfied, and then there's the huge companies that milk the same cows until the poor animals do NOT AT ALL have more milk left.

Do not trust the algorithms to find games you like, you will ALWAYS be dissapointed and ripped off