Seems like quite a level headed approach to it. I’m always a little leery of these types of systems but they explain it well and I think their reasoning makes sense.
Thank God. I’m so sick of seeing low effort reviews with one or two actual reviews on the front page. From copy paste ASCII art to listing every single disease in the world when reviewing a bad game. And don’t even get me started on the “if this gets [blank] I’ll do [blank]” reviews
I will kill the next ascii cat I need to rate helpful to pet
Sounds like AI will be used to detect the shitty meme reviews. Honestly a great use of ML
There’s a “not helpful” button under every review.
It has never worked though, as far more people would vote helpful if something made them laugh (because people just think “more upvote”)
Seems like not enough people click those. We are taking about gamers here.
Probably true.
Bionicjoey is right though, too. They’re using AI to scale the not helpfulls and other review responses. Personally I’m all for the change.
and some machine learning algorithms to help scale the human judgement calls
I’m just glad they called it machine learning instead of “AI”
When I like or dislike a game a lot and I’m able to articulate why, I usually write a long-winded 2-3 paragraph review on what I liked and didn’t like about it. These reviews tend to get 1-2 reactions at most
One time, I decided to write a positive review for a game I really liked but didn’t feel like saying “the shooting good” six different ways, so I wrote my one and only joke review
It then became my most popular review, with now 37 reactions
So yeah, I see why people do it and yes, I heavily agree with what steam’s doing
I want to be able to rate games as ‘meh’, a lot of games i dont feel strongly enough to say its outright good or bad.
Example: there is an extremely highly rated game from a few years ago that i got around to playing, but to me it was just okay and i’ll probably never get around to finishing it. Based on my achievement progress i find it highly unlikely that 95% of the reviewers have finished the game either. They probably reviewed it after playing for an hour.
I dont want to review it as good or bad so instead i just wont.
But if 0 is bad and 1 is good then tallying 0.5 as meh shouldnt be that hard.
Good, the Steam reviews were in dire need of an overhaul. The amount of absolute garbage in the reviews and how it’s practically only used to bomb games for whatever reason is getting out of hand and it was often very difficult to get to the good informative reviews about the actual game.
The next problem will probably be that the people that review bomb games are now likely going to target helpful reviews instead. Because nothing is more obnoxious than haters taking down games and people who actually enjoy them, even if provided with helpful and informative descriptions.
A good example right now would be Star Wars Outlaws, most people who got to try the game are mostly optimistic about the game, while still being realistic about flaws and issues. But on the other side there are a load of haters using various excuses elevating the toxicity to a new level. Some of these reviewers are scared to even post their opinions because they get targeted by toxic trolls trying to take down their content because the reviewer’s opinion doesn’t fit their narrative. Some reviewers even ended up having to remove their content because it was hurting their image they’ve been working on for so long.
I think that Steam would really need are truly neutral curators judging whether reviews on Steam are legit helpful and informative or not. But with the amount of games on Steam that might be an impossible job.
