Steam's "bombshell" patch fails so far at first big test

Last month, Valve announced a new policy to reduce the problem of "bombs off-topic reviews" on Steam, in which a horde of players publish negative reviews of a game for reasons other than content. This month, this policy has not yet allowed for the correction of some clear test bombs on Gearbox. Borderlands Games.

During the six months preceding March 31, Borderlands 2 received a total of 412 negative views on Steam, which represents 4.5% of all notices published during this period. Over the past few days since April 1, however, the game has received a flood of 2,156 negative reviews, accounting for nearly 62 percent of all notices issued during this period. You can see similar recent review templates on the Steam pages of the Borderlands, The pre-suite, as well as various DLC packages from the series.

Plunge into the text of these recent negative reviews and you will find that hardly anyone criticizes the games themselves. Instead, you'll see hundreds of people expressing their dissatisfaction with Gearbox's recently announced decision to publish the next Borderlands 3 exclusively on Epic Games Store for a period of six months.

A characteristic critic with over 300 hours spent on Borderlands 2 writes that the game is "one of the few looter shooters that really keeps me engaged". But the critic then justifies his note of "bravo"[because of] Epic Games Exclusive[for[for[pour[forBorderlands 3], please, do not play in the game of Epic. "Many other critics use the art of double-finger ASCII copied / pasted to express their general disgust for the decision of Epic and Gearbox.

This seems to be a school case of the kind of bombing criticism that Valve is trying to fight. The company has defined this type of revision bomb in 2017 as "a problem".[s] Players are concerned about … the game itself. "Valve reformulated this definition in March as a situation" in which players publish a large number of reviews over a short period, in order to reduce the score of a game review. [and] when these reviews are about a subject that we believe is not related to the likelihood that future buyers will be satisfied if they buy the game. "

This is not the first time that Steam users are addressing companies that are going to be Epic exclusive. Games in 4A Games & # 39; Metro series facing critical bombs off similar subject in the months after the sequel Metro Exodus migrated away from Steam. Many other Steam titles have faced critical reviews for issues totally unrelated to the content of the games themselves. But the bombs of reviews of these games predate Valve's announcement of a potential solution to the problem on March 15, which made Borderlands first real test of the new system.

expected

Valve says it has an automated tool that "identifies any abnormal review activity on all games on Steam in real time as close as possible". But the final decision to remove such potential criticisms from the overall control note lies with "a team of people at Valve" who investigate machine-identified anomalies.

If Valve manually identifies a revision bomb, the developer is notified and "revisions during this period will be removed from the revision score calculation," Valve wrote last month. While such reviews will continue to exist and be visible, they will no longer be reflected in high-level global summaries (ie, "overall positive").

To date, the apparent Borderlands The bomb test lasted more than 48 hours in a separate pattern that should have been readily identifiable. Until now, however, no apparent action of Valve. If an action is pending in the works, Valve failed to identify it in response to several unanswered comments from Ars Technica.

(It's also possible that Valve does not see the criticisms focused on Borderlands 3The transition from Epic Games Store as "off topic" to the previous Borderlands games on Steam. But that would raise other questions.)

Overall, it's not a big deal for Gearbox (which has sold more than 41 million copies of Borderlands 2 only) or the Steam users themselves. Yes, the main statistics "Recent Reviews" for Borderlands the games on Steam have been switched from "Very" or "Mostly Positive" to "Mixed" or worse because of these critical reviews. But these anomalies are still a drop in the bucket compared to the tens of thousands of positive reviews the games have received over the years, as shown in their summaries "All Critics".

It will almost certainly end up being the kind of "temporary distortion of the critics' score" announced by Valve in 2017, forgotten by everyone except obsessed fans. That being said, it's also the same type of temporary problem, said Valve, who was now able to quickly identify and combat a combination of new policies and tools. Borderlands"The Steam situation is the first high-level test of this new system and, after just over two days, it's a failed test.