Steam histograms to combat review bombs

https://www.polygon.com/2017/9/19/16…atch-pewdiepie

Histograms seems like a good move to me. Should help identifying both positive and negative sabotage,

pibbur who won't comment on the other issues.

Review bombing is not wrong.

Well, I would certainly like to know if a high/low score may be the result of bombing.

pibbur who to avoid bias refuses to review himself.

Yes, the various antics that lead to this sort of thing are best ignored, but I agree that the histograms are useful. Very easy to spot spikes of activity that might be suspicious and misleading. It's a feature I would use.

The graph is pretty neat but not for countering review bombings. Anyone who's too lazy to even read reviews (and thus discover the bombing) isn't going to read past the two ratings at the top of the page anyway. They sure aren't going to go down, open the graph, and contemplate it's spikes.

It is a nice way to check ratings over a certain date range, though. Just drag your mouse over the range and you've got it. Very handy for games that aren't getting a lot of recent reviews, making the 'last 30 days' pretty wild. (It would be even better if we had a drop down list of the dates patches were released, though.)

Anything goes to spur sales.
The resuming in good reviews is not a good sign by itself.

Crowdfunded products are going to show a boom of positive reviews at initial release as crowdfunders want to channel as much resources as possible toward the product and negative reviews will not do that.
Later, the final release of the product might come with a bombing of negative reviews, as the product fails to deliver as promised.
And then, positive reviews might pick up as it spurs sales. People with negative reviews will move on, they have made their opinion known and beside, the expression of new negative views requires to buy the product.

Buying a product to drop a positive review might lead to two or three products bought as a consequence. A kind of priming the pump.

Buying a product to drop a negative review must not lead to an increase in sales or it fails.

Crowdfunded products: boom of positive reviews at start, bombing of negative reviews at final release, and finally, positive reviews picking up to push for sales.

Double standard people who cant even admit and stand that positive reviews are expected to spur sales while negative reviews are expected to reduce sales.
Infinite growth all the way.

Your usage of "bombing" above leads me to believe you are not using it correctly in relation to what steam is trying to combat.

They want to stop 50 negative reviews of a game in one day because a game developer connected with the studio hit a puppy on the way to work 6 months after release.
Or they patched in a nerf…..

They are not referencing a natural decline.

I was just talking about seeing this in the Nier Automata news thread

There seems to be a few distributors trying to fight negative reviews these days: Netflix has removed reviews entirely; Amazone peridiocally removes negative removes.

The fact is they exist for reason.

I once bought a DVR based on the fact it works without any sort of subscription and had a 1TB hard drive. The reviews for it were excellent. When I got it home I found it could only record one channel at a time, which you had to watch and the software was straight out of 1992.

The fact is, reviews are the only way consumers have of letting other consumers know. Another thing about about downvotes - they're votes - they are an indicator of how much interest your product has generated.

For example, if you did a poll asking how much you like a commercial interrupting your favourite TV Show you can gauge how much your commercial got noticed. Annoying commercials are a time honored tradition for that reason.

Review bombing by definition means putting in fake reviews in order to bring down a score and hurt sales. Publisher X raises the price of a game in some regions for whatever reason. People in that region go back through all their games published by X and give them all negative reviews, even for games they actually loved.

If you're actually reading reviews then it will be pretty obvious what's going on when it's happening. 8 months later, the game will just have a lower score overall and the only way you'll have of knowing what happened is if you show the graph, filter by the date range, then read those reviews. I have a lot of trouble believing anyone would go to that trouble.

Originally Posted by Lucky Day
The fact is, reviews are the only way consumers have of letting other consumers know. Another thing about about downvotes - they're votes - they are an indicator of how much interest your product has generated.

The platform is meant to sell, the review system is designed to support sales.
On Steam, there is no poor products, therefore no good products. Only products that sell and products that sell less.

All interest does not translate in an incentive to buy. A product collecting negative reviews does not go the way of increasing sales.

Negative reviews are being filtered out as they are not material for increasing sales.

As so often with people with double standards, they use exceptionalism to introduce a bias to distort common situations.
Because, exceptionnally, a product might be punctually flagged with a high amount of negative reviews uncaused by the product, therefore peaks in negative reviews must be ignored.

That is dismissing that negative reviews are caused variously, including by the reception of a poor product.
There is also no direct means to distinguish between bombings of negative reviews, negative reviews might happen because a dev broke his promise, had an unethical professional behaviour, had an extra professional poor behaviour…

Originally Posted by Wisdom
what steam is trying to combat.

Steam is trying to combat anything that could curb down sales. As it is a habit for people coming from double standards culture, they do it under the cover of exceptionalism.

There is nothing natural in the process, only man made stuff.

Ah. I see what you are saying now.
I partially disagree tho. If steam really didnt want negative reviews they would remove the positive and negative votes and just have a single review headline.
A review bomb is NOT the same as negative reviews.
I do understand the need for steam to get revenue and all that, but saying every game is happy happy would not achieve that.

No.

Steam do not have to forbid negative reviews as long as they can dilute the weight of negative reviews. This is what this tool is designed to provide. It is one of the many tricks that keep adding.
The removal of negative reviews also means the removal of positive reviews. No negative reviews, no credible positive reviews.

A bombing of negative reviews was never considered as negative reviews only.
A bombing of negative reviews is a peak in negative reviews that can be triggered by multiple causes, including causes related to the quality of the product.
As so often with double standard people, the case of exceptionalism was made to dismiss the common cases.

Contrary to what the article implies, bombings of negative reviews very seldom happen because devs had some extra professional behaviour that players want to condemn.
There are mostly linked with product quality issues.

Pretty good article at gamesindustry.biz -- Blizzard knuckles down on community as Valve fiddles. Couple excerpts:

"A few graphs won't fix review bombing and abuse; if Valve wants tips, it could look to the tough decisions and hard work Blizzard is doing on Overwatch"

"It's taken a while, but Valve has finally decided that perhaps it's not a particularly good thing for its Steam retail platform to be an effective vector for online hate mobs to attack game creators' livelihoods, and has taken exactly the kind of firm, decisive action we've come to expect of the company; it's added some graphs to the interface. Nothing's going to top the sheer shade of Gamasutra's headline on this topic - "Steam considers preventing review bombs, adds graphs instead" - which perfectly sums up the exasperation so many developers feel with the service at this point. "We're aware of the problem, and doing as little as humanly possible to fix it" is in many ways the worst response the company could have conjured."

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Really, I only see one way to fix this: drop the review summaries completely. Make people go down and actually read others' opinions instead of giving them the shortcut. Review-bomb reviews tend to either be super short or will be honest enough to actually say they are slamming the game for something entirely irrelevant to the game. Then you just have to deal with the tendency for review bombers to up-vote each other's bogus reviews.

Originally Posted by Zloth
Review bombing by definition means putting in fake reviews…

From my point of view, those aren't fake.
I do recommend MGS5 for example alway suggesting to keep it offline all the time, but thumbed it down because of forced Narnia patch that was released after all "victims" bought the game.

The patch introduced automatic stealing your singleplayer ress into multiplayer even if you don't play multiplayer (that's why Narnia as ress got moved into nonexisting realm) and added pay2cheat microtransactions.

Review bombing is just a form of protest against horrible CEOs. And where is the best place to protest? I don't think it's on Codex.

Till gamers don't get an union that'll strike against scams or something, review bombing is needed. If VA could, we should to:
http://www.pcgamer.com/voice-actors-…eogame-strike/

Originally Posted by joxer
From my point of view, those aren't fake.
I do recommend MGS5 for example alway suggesting to keep it offline all the time, but thumbed it down because of forced Narnia patch that was released after all "victims" bought the game.

The patch introduced automatic stealing your singleplayer ress into multiplayer even if you don't play multiplayer (that's why Narnia as ress got moved into nonexisting realm) and added pay2cheat microtransactions.

Review bombing is just a form of protest against horrible CEOs. And where is the best place to protest? I don't think it's on Codex.

Till gamers don't get an union that'll strike against scams or something, review bombing is needed. If VA could, we should to:
http://www.pcgamer.com/voice-actors-…eogame-strike/

Malicious reviews for malicious games Fair enough.

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I don't really like the idea of "solving" review bombing - what would that even mean?

That's why I tend to approve of the histograms. No-one's opinion is being censored, but it allows us to view the information in such a way that might reveal certain patterns of behavior, and make a more informed decision.

Originally Posted by Zloth
Really, I only see one way to fix this: drop the review summaries completely. Make people go down and actually read others' opinions instead of giving them the shortcut. Review-bomb reviews tend to either be super short or will be honest enough to actually say they are slamming the game for something entirely irrelevant to the game. Then you just have to deal with the tendency for review bombers to up-vote each other's bogus reviews.

There is nothing to be fixed. The function can be improved (as it is shown), it works as designed.

Irrelevant to products has yet to be proven. That is the path of exceptionalism. In exceptional cases, review bombings have nothing to do with the product. In common cases, they are caused by the product itself.

Originally Posted by joxer
From my point of view, those aren't fake.
I do recommend MGS5 for example alway suggesting to keep it offline all the time, but thumbed it down because of forced Narnia patch that was released after all "victims" bought the game.

The patch introduced automatic stealing your singleplayer ress into multiplayer even if you don't play multiplayer (that's why Narnia as ress got moved into nonexisting realm) and added pay2cheat microtransactions.

There is no time to waste on that fake/real stories: they gained volumes as double standards was engraved as a constitutional principle. Since freedom had not to be freedom, people had still to distinguish between what they call freedom and what they call freedom, real and false etc

A review praising a crowdfunded product in order to channel money to it is no faker or realer than a review pointing out that devs renegated on their promises, introduced elements that ruins the product or change the direction of the product.

Positive reviews encourage sales. Negative reviews discourage sales. You can not get positive reviews without negative reviews. Steam aim to sell. Steam see as a means to disqualify negative reviews and emphasize positive reviews.
Not much else to see.