Dear Steam: the reviews are a joke -- literally

[Zeke45]

I don't think I've seen a mainstream consumer forum that has degenerated as badly as Steam reviews have.

A whopping percentage of reviews are now pandering to the most wretchedly puerile and imbecilic among the audience -- and getting applauded, encouraged, and rewarded for it.

Meanwhile, Steam has been known to remove legit reviews (and even punish people for upvoting "verboten" reviews) under some pretext or other, but the real reason is muh sales and less deterrence.

But ASCII illustrations of cats or Walter White, copy-pasted stories about "I'm a middle-aged gamer and I bonded with my estranged son," posts about "my buddy said if I wrote a review and it got 200 likes and 50 awards, he'd buy me a crate of oranges," etc etc ad nauseam -- those joke reviews are apparently fine and dandy. Many in the community apparently can't get enough of 'em -- no matter how many hundreds of times the same lame shtick is recycled. Makes you realize what kind of community is being fostered here.

It's sort of unforgivable, really. You're better off going to Reddit or YouTube to get real insight and cogent opinions.

[Reaper]

Originally posted by Zeke45:

You're better off going to Reddit

Yes, let's avoid the award farming by going to the other award farming site

[( ( < < <🤖> > > ) )]

it good that you have realised there are alternatives that might suit you better...

i learnt very early on that you cant really trust a review
if the user has only played a few minutes... and or the
free games chasers that will say nice things all the time in
the hope they will get free keys to review other games...

[ShelLuser]

Ah, yes.. Reddit. Where you state a plain out fact in the comments, only to get downvoted into oblivion because "reasons".

I'm not claiming Steam is perfect, but just because you don't appreciate some reviews doesn't imply that the whole thing is bad. I mean... I made some very solid game purchasing decisions based on the Steam review section.

The trick is learning how to properly use it.

Yah, dumb reviews can be annoying at times, I can definitely agree to that. But the other side of that medal is that Steam obviously allows much more freedom in the way you express your opinion of a product than other platforms do. That has some value for me as well.

[Crazy Tiger]

Just ignore the reviews that don't interest you and go for the ones that are useful for you. Which is the same process for every site/platform that utilises reviews, in my experience.

I just look at negative reviews with shorter playtime, those bring me the most useful information. The rest I largely ignore.

[Kiara ♥]

No

[Zarineth]

I never had much problems with reviews on Steam. Sure troll reviews and ASCII spam can be annoying, but they also can be easly skipped/reported, so you can go for "legit" ones.

[TWPanda77]

There are many people that make an effort and take time to share their opinions through reviews. I have found many that offer good insights to gameplay and the overall experience. However, you are right to that there are a lot of low effort "good game" and silly ascii pictures etc but I just ignore them and move on.

[Yujah]

To me it appears rather blindingly obvious that "awards" need to just go.

Perhaps as someone recently suggested in one of these threads, limit their possible use to e.g. being given to "friends" for example on a profile or some such but in any case they need to go for reviews, and forum posts, and probably most other uses I'm not even aware of where people now abuse them for farming "points".

Useless "points" at that but people will farm. Only getting rid of these dumb "awards" can help.

[pasa]

IDK, not my experience. MAybe connected to my habit of only start looking at games with 75+% discount. By that time the reviews on the first pages are only those relevant to the game. Both by upvotes and recent. What you see may be on the brand new releases that we have more than enough reasons to not touch with a stick.

[AmsterdamHeavy]

Ill chalk this one up to "easily frustrated".

Ya, theres spam but its hardly difficult to wade through.

[rawWwRrr]

Start flagging the meme reviews. Force them onto Steam Support to deal with.

[Hobbit XIII]

Originally posted by rawWwRrr:

Start flagging the meme reviews. Force them onto Steam Support to deal with.

^^
Steam Support are good for using the ban hammer even when they don't know why they are using it.

[Tito Shivan]

Originally posted by Zeke45:

But ASCII illustrations of cats or Walter White, copy-pasted stories about "I'm a middle-aged gamer and I bonded with my estranged son," posts about "my buddy said if I wrote a review and it got 200 likes and 50 awards,

It seems Steam's stance on that kind of reviews is 'let the users sort it out themselves', Which mean don't act upon then and let people downvote them into oblivion.

But Valve keeps forgetting people will be people, and thus all these kind of reviews keep getting upvoted because the lolz and teh memes.

[76561197960287930]

Originally posted by rawWwRrr:

Start flagging the meme reviews. Force them onto Steam Support to deal with.

Ya, see how many you can flag, and then see just how un fast they are at removing them, if at all.
https://help.steampowered.com/en/accountdata/GameReviewReports (how many do i have now valve?) Apparently not enough for them to be concerned with removing them...

How about people sending huge list of them to the Federal Trade Commission for them to frown upon instead? And maybe with enough consumer complaints and Valve being fined, they'll finally decide do something different?

What do we expect? They also gave us a curator system, where most infulencers are spam too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSx3ez70Rlg Thanks Valve & FTC!

[Boblin the Goblin]

Originally posted by 76561197960287930:

Originally posted by rawWwRrr:

Start flagging the meme reviews. Force them onto Steam Support to deal with.

Ya, see how many you can flag, and then see just how un fast they are at removing them, if at all.
https://help.steampowered.com/en/accountdata/GameReviewReports (how many do i have now valve?) Apparently not enough for them to be concerned with removing them...

How about people sending huge list of them to the Federal Trade Commission for them to frown upon instead? And maybe with enough consumer complaints and Valve being fined, they'll finally decide do something different?

The FTC literally can't enforce people putting memes in user reviews.