What is the point of user reviews if developers decide which ones to show?

[kn0wmad1c]

Came here from reddit[♥♥♥♥♥♥♥www.reddit.com] (thanks, /u/buggeer[♥♥♥♥♥♥♥www.reddit.com] for bringing it to people's attention). But as someone who reads user reviews before making a purchase, it's sickening.

Arbitrarily giving developers access to the delete button on reviews is a huge failure in the system. The reviews on Steam are supposed to make it easier for people to decide on their purchase. That's the whole point of a review. Allowing developers to artificially fluff their games with the user reviews that they want is a terrible practice.

It's unprofessional to allow it, and if this is what I can expect from the store when the Steam machines are released, I'll be incredibly disappointed.

Look at this "off-topic" review[♥♥♥♥♥♥♥steamcommunity.com] for TS2014.

Now have a look at this review that's considered on-topic[♥♥♥♥♥♥♥steamcommunity.com].

Please, Valve, step in on this.

[Black Blade]

Well so there are abusing there powers.... but really like you can see they cant delete it all the way... the review is there and it stays high on the list of reviews

[Satoru]

but the RSC policy, namely RCS moderator, that deletes all the posts related to the issues people are encountering, giving only support email as an advice.

Any wonder why it's considered 'off topic'. It' snot a review of the game.

[kn0wmad1c]

Yeah, it's not deleted, that's true. But it won't be visible from the game's store page, and it IS hidden from view on the reviews page now, shown only in collapsed form.

[kn0wmad1c]

Originally posted by Satoru:

but the RSC policy, namely RCS moderator, that deletes all the posts related to the issues people are encountering, giving only support email as an advice.

Any wonder why it's considered 'off topic'. It' snot a review of the game.

Here's another review considered off-topic[♥♥♥♥♥♥♥steamcommunity.com].

[TomB]

Originally posted by bgm:

Yeah, it's not deleted, that's true. But it won't be visible from the game's store page, and it IS hidden from view on the reviews page now, shown only in collapsed form.

Reviews that are flagged by a developer are still visible on both the store and community hub. They appear in a collapsed form on the store or with a big black box on the community hub. They still maintain their sort order, their comments, and their helpfulness votes.

That said, we have reviewed some of the reviews that were flagged and have cleared the flag status on some of them.

[Jawaka]

Is there anything preventing the developers from flagging them over and over again?

[TomB]

Originally posted by Jawaka:

Is there anything preventing the developers from flagging them over and over again?

We'll have a conversation with the developers if this continues to happen.

[kn0wmad1c]

Originally posted by TomB:

we have reviewed some of the reviews that were flagged and have cleared the flag status on some of them.

Thank you! That's great of you.

[Nyx]

Shouldn't flagging be moderated before taking effect? I'm sure this happens to a lot of game reviews to clean out bad reviews, if even for a short period of time.

[shakey2]

That's not going to happen, steam doesn't have the staff to be looking over that many reviews in a timely manner.

[Black Blade]

Originally posted by shakey2:

That's not going to happen, steam doesn't have the staff to be looking over that many reviews in a timely manner.

These,,,, but as they say if its really going to be abused Steam seem to going to take care of it

[Amene]

Small suggestion though - can you add a filter option to "show only off-topic reviews" ? In practice, "off-topic" is essentially a giant beacon flashing "readme.1st". If users are presented with simple filter option to only show "off-topic" ones, then developers will be very careful with overusing it.

[Warlord]

Not surprising.

Valve is very anti consumer whether it's their customer service failure or their general anti competitive business pratices.

Obviously there had to be a catch because heaven forbid consumers do more than blindly buy non functional games and say so on the reviews affecting Valve's bottom line.

[Drunken]

Can't be that hard to make a fairer review system.
Anyway, you should read reviews and what videos from different sources before buying an expensive game.
Who can tell what is deleted on steam... if amazon reviews are real ones... or if the magazine got paid for a good note? So there is a higher chance of knowing what a game is really like by chosing different sources.
For me, it's nice to have the reviews here, but they're not the only ones.

[Nijuu]

Originally posted by Drunken:

Can't be that hard to make a fairer review system.
Anyway, you should read reviews and what videos from different sources before buying an expensive game.
Who can tell what is deleted on steam... if amazon reviews are real ones... or if the magazine got paid for a good note? So there is a higher chance of knowing what a game is really like by chosing different sources.
For me, it's nice to have the reviews here, but they're not the only ones.

Yeah but a lot of people will read the reviews here as being gospel, so if devs are allowed to just delete stuff they dont like, it wont give a potential purchaser a fair indication whether game is for them or not. Lot of amazon reviews are a joke - its obvious a good number of reviews are paid - look at the writing