Steam changes it's review system to counter "review bombings"

I thought this was of interest to everybody - now we'll probably see how SOTA really does come launch.

@Berek , please feel free to move this if you feel it better belongs to some other place in the forums.

http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1448326897426987372

"One of the reasons a review bomb can distort a game's Review Score for a significant period of time is because the score is based on reviews over a period of 30 days for the Recent value, and all time for the Overall value. But doing this would likely result in more fluctuation and potentially less accuracy for all games, not just review bombed ones.

In the end, we decided not to change the ways that players can review games, and instead focused on how potential purchasers can explore the review data. Starting today, each game page now contains a histogram of the positive to negative ratio of reviews over the entire lifetime of the game, and by clicking on any part of the histogram you're able to read a sample of the reviews from that time period. As a potential purchaser, it's easy to spot temporary distortions in the reviews, to investigate why that distortion occurred, and decide for yourself whether it's something you care about. This approach has the advantage of never preventing anyone from submitting a review, but does require slightly more effort on the part of potential purchasers."

 

So only review bombing with negative reviews is a bad thing, while review bombing with positive reviews is a good thing, even if those reviews are tainted with out-of-game things? But I like the change, noticed it Tuesday night, but never checked out the Steam Blog. Good stuff, good read.

 

It's definitely a tough problem. How do you separate the FUD, hate and rabid fanboyism from the reasonable reviews? I applaud them for the effort though.

 

It can also be that the publishers or whatever could be bombing their own games with positive reviews to combat the negative ones, or 'lack there of'. Steam wouldn't be the first media to face buffered scores.

 

Would developers (and fanboys) really do such an immoral thing?

 

Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to help things. Maybe in the future?

 

Whether it's games or anything else, usually the best way is just reading the reviews.

 

It's just another piece of information you can use to make your purchase decision. It's not meant to fix SotA's reviews.

 

Of course you could spend the next month reading reviews....

 

Buuh Steam users are just haters! The Game is fine and they cant understand that it is sill in Development. Everyone how likes this game uses the Shroud Launcher and doesnt care about the reviews! *cough*
Now back to the truth. Is there any gaming site out there who gives a honest positive feedback to this game? Even on the German sites like pcgames or gamestar (not good but well known) they reflect the negative feelings from the playerbase.
But like Starr said: Make everyone equal unhappy

 

Hi all, I took the snapshot below just a few minutes ago to get the feel of the review trending for SOTA. Note that very recently there has been a downtrend of negative reviews.

 

Hello Alleine, the Steam trending graph is supposed to reveal anomalous trends such as unusual & brief spikes of upvoting or downvoting over a period of time.

One good example of review bombing is what happened to Firewatch recently - note the Steam alert about the unusual negative trending of reviews.



Details of that incident can be found here :

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-09-19-firewatch-steam-review-bomb-pewdiepie-racism-incident

 

SOTA is not a victim of **review bombings** , so that won't change anything . Just sayin.

 

I'm, unfortunately, going to have to agree.

 

It's not going tk change the negative trend of reviews for sota, however just in general it is a pretty cool little feature for Steam to add.

 

It's because EA and Blizzard actively pays people to troll and bomb reviews. Glad steam is doing something to help show this.

 

Oh, come on now. I doubt they pay anyone to do that. It's super easy to get people to do it for free.

 

True enough, but they definitely pay people to "start the fires", so to say.

 

[citation needed]

 

I doubt any source I give would be sufficient for you.