Re: Steam's Revising Reviews

Spalls Hurgenson  <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

From my understanding, the sort of review you suggested WILL remain
available. As Valve pointed out, some people aren't good at expressing
themselves and -honestly- I think there is some merit to a short
comment like that. Even _I_ tire of overlong reviews sometimes and a
quick, pithy comment can be a useful indicator.

I really like what Valve has done here.  The reviews they're hiding now
are pretty much the same reviews that I would occasionally go through and
downvote as unhelpful.  All the useless joke and ASCII art reviews that
get highly upvoted because apparently there's some weird minority of Steam
users that think that user reviews should be some sort of entertainment.

But I also deliberately didn't downvote the "useless" short reviews that
often didn't say anything more than "good game".  Sure they might not be
all the helpful in their description of the game, but like you said not
everyone is good at expressing themselves.  It's easy to overlook how
hard writing can be for people when you spend most of the day reading
stuff on the Internet written by people who are very good at writing.

I also don't have a problem with people posting negative reviews of games
they fundamentally aren't going to like.  So what if someone who hates
RPGs posts a negative review of an RPG?  It's an honest expression of
their honest opinion of the game.  I don't think there needs to be be
any other qualification to review a game other than to have played it.
And it's not completely useless to say a game isn't one of those rare
exceptions that non-fans of the genre can enjoy.

Really many of the things people have been complaining about in this
thread are just how user reviews are supposed to work.  It's just an
aggregrate view of a large number of people's opinions.  It just needs
those reviews to be honest so the score and reviews that filter to the
top can be meaningfully compared to other games.  It not necessary that
they all be long winded essays written by people with the right sort
of prejudices.

AFAIK, Valve considers the whole attempt to be still 'in testing';
e.g., they don't consider its initial attempt to be the perfect, and
if it's not working out they're willing to roll-back and remove it
entirely.

From what I've seen it's like day and night.  The reviews now being shown
are much more useful and all the joke reviews are gone.  Unfortunately
that's based on what I remember seeing before, as the option turn off
the new helpfulness system doesn't work.  It doesn't restore all the
old highly upvoted joke reviews and instead shows a bunch of reviews
with hardly any votes at all.

--
 l/  //   Ross Ridge -- The Great HTMU
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