Valve says it's going to hide bad faith scores to blunt a bomb attack



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Valve announced it has adopted a new approach to user reviews in its gaming market, Steam, after unsuccessfully trying to solve the problem of the so-called bombing of reviews that tarnishes its consumer referral system. In a blog post published today, Valve said that he "continued to listen to comments from players and developers," and that he was implementing a new approach: hide the scores of the critics off topic.

The company claims to have defined the Critical Bomb as "a critical bomb whose object is to deal with a subject that we believe is unrelated to the likelihood that future buyers will be satisfied with it." They are buying the game. "To identify such campaigns, Valve states that He has developed a tool to identify periods of time when an on-the-fly bombardment occurs, which informs employees who are then responsible for the bursts. investigate. Once the investigation is complete, Valve will mark the period during which the incident started and will remove any exam activity that occurs after impacting the overall exam score. It will also clearly indicate which comments see their notes removed from the overall calculation.

The bomb exam has become a common tactic for dissatisfied surfers to record their dissatisfaction with a particular product on the internet. But, in some cases, it is also used as a bad faith tactic to retaliate against a company or public figure associated with that company, usually on a verbalized political position online or on a controversy that does not headlines, unrelated to the actual product. Nevertheless, gather enough like-minded people and you can reduce the level of popularity of a product, dissuade people from buying it, or at least steer the discussion at its own pace. Sites such as Rotten Tomatoes have begun to adapt to mitigate the influence of such campaigns by removing the possibility of leaving comments or scores on movies before they are released.

Two years ago, Valve set up a new system after the criticism of an independent video game bombed Fire picket. The company released a chart showing the ratio of positive and negative reviews, allowing buyers to see if there was a suspicious rise in negative numbers over time, designed to indicate whether a recent controversy or a news event was the cause of the problem. sudden rise. As The edgeAdi Robertson pointed out at the time that it was essentially up to the buyers to make the decision.

But there are still problems with this new modified approach. Valve admits that the bona fide critics who were posted during the incident risk losing their scores alongside critics in bad faith, adding that it "is not possible for us to read each criticism." Valve will also allow users to disable features. "There is now a check box in your Steam Store options where you can choose to include off-topic revision bombs in all of the review notes you see," reads the blog. Valve's approach is unclear if some of its most active users – the very ones who can participate in bombing campaigns – can simply forgo the steps society is taking to combat them.

Nevertheless, by investigating review campaigns and removing spurious off-topic reviews, Valve takes a more proactive approach to moderating its platform against the non-routing strategy that caused it to fail. the past. Earlier this month, after a strong online reaction, Valve decided to remove the Steam page from the developing game that glorified rape and violence against women, saying the game's distribution was causing " unknown costs and risks ".

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