Discontinue Rewards for Forum Posts.

[Blk_Mage_Ctype]

Steam Community Rewards have singlehandedly ruined every Steam Community Hub by indirectly encouraging Trolls to post deliberately outrageous threads in order to farm Jester Awards.
Granted, this is equally the fault of the Steam Community for literally feeding the Trolls by Rewarding them for their misbehavior, but clearly they cannot help themselves in that regard.

As a result, Steam Community Discussions on any game with an active community have become a dumping ground for obnoxious, disruptive, worthless, spam posts by users who rarely even have the game in their Steam Library. It's just an endless stream of garbage posts posing deliberately inflammatory, polarizing, or otherwise controversial questions like; "Is this game woke?" or "Is this game LGBTQ friendly?" or statements of a similar nature.

Frankly, Forum Posts shouldn't be eligible for Rewards at all because they seldom require any effort, and just as well, few people actually reward helpful posts anyway, so it honestly won't have any negative effects whatsoever to remove them.

[Gwarsbane]

It would be nice if people used the search feature and READ all the other threads on this topic and yes there has been a LOT of threads on this topic, that should give you a hint that they are not going to do anything.

ANYWAY..... removing just the "reward" won't stop them. You need to fully remove all of the awards from EVERY part of Steam that Valve put them in....

And even then that won't stop the spam, though it will slow it down quite a bit. How do I know this? Because we still get spam for people trying to get a badge that had a requirement to post on the forums, that requirement has been gone I think almost close to a decade now.... and we still get those spam posts.

So if you remove the awards from just the forums, you will get people spamming "hey give me some awards on this review" or what ever.... it will just spread out from every other place back into the forums in other forms.

We warned Valve this would happen every time someone made a post requesting this crap but they did it anyway and now we have these crap awards causing lots of spam.

[William Shakesman]

If they remove the steam points, forum behavior won't change, everyone will just have to come up with a new explanation for funposting.

[Spawn of Totoro]

Keeping the awards is fine, but I think removing the points being given wold lessen the issue to some extent.

And don't give XP for giving/receiving awards either.

[Gwarsbane]

Originally posted by Spawn of Totoro:

Keeping the awards is fine, but I think removing the points being given wold lessen the issue to some extent.

And don't give XP for giving/receiving awards either.

We also seen people going out of their way to get X number of game bans, which then got Valve to change that so it now longer showed how many bans people got.

Just taking the points away will change nothing, they will still spam/farm the awards just to show off the large number of awards they have....

Scammers will use it... "you can trust me, look at how many awards I have".

The only solution is to fully remove the awards... it will cut down on the farming spam, but as we know, it just won't ever stop. As I pointed out, we still get the spam for "just posting this for the badge" spam now and then... and its been a longtime since Valve made that mistake including that and removing it soon after.

[Spawn of Totoro]

Originally posted by Gwarsbane:

Originally posted by Spawn of Totoro:

Keeping the awards is fine, but I think removing the points being given wold lessen the issue to some extent.

And don't give XP for giving/receiving awards either.

We also seen people going out of their way to get X number of game bans, which then got Valve to change that so it now longer showed how many bans people got.

Just taking the points away will change nothing, they will still spam/farm the awards just to show off the large number of awards they have....

Scammers will use it... "you can trust me, look at how many awards I have".

The only solution is to fully remove the awards... it will cut down on the farming spam, but as we know, it just won't ever stop. As I pointed out, we still get the spam for "just posting this for the badge" spam now and then... and its been a longtime since Valve made that mistake including that and removing it soon after.

As you said, there are people who want X number of game bans.

At least if award exist, people have something more benign to give or receive, but it just shouldn't we awarded anything extra beyond the award it's self. All that does is create another set of users who farm point to spend on their profile. Hence why I think removing points from awards will lessen the issue, not eliminate as that isn't possible, but lessen it.

I doubt award will be going away. They are too entrenched now.

[Arokhantos]

It's because its being ignored, if seen some moderators just delete these type of post, like the usual this game sucks do not play it aka the low effort type of post that is only made to get jesters

[Kitt 🌟 Stargazer]

Yeah, would be nice to go to new forums that just openned because a game came out and not have to sift through about 45 bait topics out of a page of 50 to find good and decent topics because people flock to that forum to quickly take advantage of the hype and farm jesters.

If I have to put excessively more time into finding a good thread then I do actually in an individually good thread, then I'd honestly rather just go somewhere else altogether. It's driving good potential conversations and people aware from the steam forums when topics they want to get invested in get buried after mere seconds of them being created.

Originally posted by William Shakesman:

If they remove the steam points, forum behavior won't change, everyone will just have to come up with a new explanation for funposting.

It would definitely slow down over time as you can't be rewarded for making bait threads any more. People would lose interest, not everyone of course, but many.

As it currently stands, awards are more or less just enables for bad behavior and that's it.

Originally posted by Gwarsbane:

It would be nice if people used the search feature and READ all the other threads on this topic and yes there has been a LOT of threads on this topic, that should give you a hint that they are not going to do anything.

It's because no one that matters cares, simple as that. If it's a problem that they fail to address it's going to get more and more topics about it wither you like it or not. Telling people to search for things just goes to encourage people to actually make more threads about it if anything.

If you really wanted threads like these to go away. You'd help people encourage the people who run this site to make changes that address the problem. If there is no problem, then these threads will cease to exist. Don't want to do that? Then you're going to have to learn to deal with these threads as they're not going away period, so you better suck it up and get used to it bebe lol.

[JellyPuff]

Originally posted by Spawn of Totoro:

And don't give XP for giving/receiving awards either.

It's already softcapped at 1k exp, but i think that it wouldn't really matter much either way. The awards themselves are the magical internet points, that people crave. The exp or Steam Points are more of a bonus.

I would just make it so, that if comment/post gets removed due to a forum rule violation, their rewards get revoked (and possibly the Steam Points refunded).

[MewTressym]

Honestly the fix is very easy. Remove the points shop and points system. Keep the awards themselves. Instead tie the rewards currently in the points shop to achievements for given games instead so players can unlock things like Emoticons, Backgrounds, etc, etc, etc by playing the game itself rather then posting ragebait for jesters. Then when people do get jesters it's actually an insult as intended and not just a con for points.

[Spawn of Totoro]

Originally posted by JellyPuff:

Originally posted by Spawn of Totoro:

And don't give XP for giving/receiving awards either.

It's already softcapped at 1k exp, but i think that it wouldn't really matter much either way. The awards themselves are the magical internet points, that people crave. The exp or Steam Points are more of a bonus.

I would just make it so, that if comment/post gets removed due to a forum rule violation, their rewards get revoked (and possibly the Steam Points refunded).

I have to disagree there.

People are point begging fairly often, rather then seem to want the awards themselves. If they were after awards, then they would be asking for one, not wanting ANY award they can get. Points have become kind of needed, due to the Point Store and some don't seem to want (or are unable to) get points the regular way.

Originally posted by MewTressym:

Honestly the fix is very easy. Remove the points shop and points system. Keep the awards themselves. Instead tie the rewards currently in the points shop to achievements for given games instead so players can unlock things like Emoticons, Backgrounds, etc, etc, etc by playing the game itself rather then posting ragebait for jesters. Then when people do get jesters it's actually an insult as intended and not just a con for points.

No, using achievements for that is a bad idea. People already use SAM (Steam Achievement Manager) to give themselves achievements. Giving them more of an incentive to use it and get free stuff is a really bad idea.

And the jester was never intended by Valve as an insult and really shouldn't be.