Valve has seen your jokes and found them wanting. Continuing an uncharacteristically talkative week for the company, the house of Steam has rolled out a new, auto-enabled user review filter that takes aim at "humorous but unhelpful" posts like "jokes, memes, ascii art" and one-word reviews.
In a new Steam blog post, Valve says "we are ready for public testing of a new system that changes the way Steam sorts user reviews on store pages with the goal of prioritizing reviews that can best help players make a purchase decision about the game. This new helpfulness system is now enabled by default, and can easily be toggled within the user review settings for each game."
Valve isn't bothered by reviews serving as jokes, and agrees that it's "often a lot of fun for existing customers of a game," but says such posts aren't terribly helpful for "making informed purchasing decisions." There's a fair argument to be made that games capable of eliciting such irreverent, lighthearted reviews are probably doing something right, but lord knows plenty of bad games get similar meme reviews too.
To that end, "reviews that are identified as being unhelpful for potential customers, such as one-word reviews, reviews comprised of ascii art, or reviews that are primarily playful memes and in-jokes, will be sorted behind other reviews on the game’s store page. That doesn't mean players won't ever see these humorous, but unhelpful posts, but it hopefully means that they’ll see them less frequently when trying to learn about a game."
Pull up a Steam store page right now and you'll find the "helpfulness" filter ticked on under the "Display" settings of user reviews. You can, of course, turn it off if you want. Let the ascii art fly. It's worth noting that recent reviews seem to be unaffected by this filter, judging from the posts I'm seeing on the Cult of the Lamb store page right now. "Hail Lamb," says one user. "Shep," intones another. "Fun," observes one cultist of few words.
A few questions come to mind here. Firstly, will this system flag negative reviews posted in protest during a review bombing? Such reviews often end up being less visible or siloed off anyway – will this filter tighten the screws further? Valve doesn't address review bombings directly in its post, but it does say that a review being positive or negative won't affect its helpfulness rating.
Earth Defense Force 6, which recently took a beating on Steam after players tripped over an Epic Games account requirement, offers a useful example, though there's been fair debate over whether this qualifies as a review bombing since it targeted an in-game hangup. Looking at the current list of lifetime reviews, eight of the top 10 are negative, and all of these eight mention the Epic Games stuff. This includes short reviews such as, "the real enemy against the EDF was Epic all along," which would probably qualify as an in-joke if somebody wanted to flag it. The two highest-rated user reviews I could find, in terms of how many people "found this review helpful," are also negative reviews skewering the Epic connection. For the record, the EDF6 devs said they are "planning changes" as a result of this feedback.
"If you've identified a review as unhelpful, why not delete the review?" Valve queries. Beyond the aforementioned fun of jokey reviews, Valve reckons "many players want to express an opinion about the game, but don't always have the words to describe their experience with the game, or aren't interested in writing much," and it doesn't want to ignore what they have to say. I'm thinking of you, Cult of the Lamb fan who just said it's "fun."
Finally, what if legit reviews are flagged as unhelpful? Valve admits "this is a work in process, and will likely take quite a while for our team to evaluate the existing reviews and newly posted reviews." However, by its measure, "a lot of the unhelpful reviews were easy to spot, so we're targeting those first."
