Steam Addresses 'Review Bombs' Problem
User reviews for games on Valve's Steam platform has long been subject to manipulation for years now. One of the more insidious means by which abusers game the review system is by "review bombing," a practice that Valve could finally have a good solution against.
"Review bombing" is a method by which groups of Steam account holders bump up a review of a game to the top of the reviews list by voting it as "this was helpful" as many as tens of thousands of times, as Steam described in their assessment.
"We found a small set of users on the far extreme that are clearly trying to accomplish something quite different from normal players, and are rating more than 10,000 reviews as helpful or unhelpful on a single game," Steam's administrators noted.
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Moreover, these users also tend to be the same ones to rate up all negative reviews and rate down positive reviews, or vice versa as it suits them to manipulate the reviews shown on a game's listing page.
One change that Valve is making is to make the top ten reviews representative of how the game was voted by its overall player base. In the example given by Engadget, a game may have 80 percent of its players giving it a positive review.
The top ten reviews for that game, then, will now be positive reviews for eight out of ten of the top slots, to reflect the 80 percent of upvotes from the community.
The upvotes or downvotes of a player will also start to affect the rank of reviews less, the more these votes are used. Typical players will usually mark a handful of reviews as helpful or not helpful, then leave it at that — those votes will have their full effect on the ranks of those reviews.
Users who tend to abuse the system, like those who vote on a game's reviews 10,000 times or more, will now find that each additional vote past a certain threshold will have less and less effect on the rank of reviews.
