News Borderlands 2 review-bombing triggers Steam protections

If I had foreseen Steam losing its grip on PC gaming I really wouldn’t have bothered with any of it. I’m fairly certain those investing £1,000’s in items etc wouldn’t have too.

I think you are similar to 95% of my Steam friends who also just want to play games with friends and forget the bells and whistles that Valve adds on.

My biggest gripe with Steam not being the golden chalice any more is the friends being split over many clients.

 

I'm fairly certain anyone spending £1,000s on cosmetic badges for a videogame shop frontend program have other things to worry about.

 

Yeah, that would indicate a symptom of a much larger problem.

Or very big pockets.

 

If you have some hours to kill and want to lose your faith in humanity:
Google Gamification of shopping

A real one? No.
A contrived one? Yes, because the c***s at Valve gated max friend list size behind it.

 

A gated friends’ list is pointless now seeing as all our friends will be on 37 different clients anyway.

We’ll spend the rest of our lives having cheap meaningless gaming sessions with randoms. They may become friends. But then they will get lost on client 38 or somewhere else in the bottomless pit of clients, clients, clients ...

Consoles survive with 1 social hub each. Maybe this was the plan all along - to butcher the PC Master-Race.

 

Come to think of it I can't say i've ever read any user reviews of games on Steam.

 

For me they are an absolute must have as they are by far the easiest place to find out if a game has technical issues, especially with game reviews often neglecting to mention bugs and such (or worse, companies deliberately sending out console versions for review to stop reviewers from mentioning any technical issues on PC).

Sure, one could google to find out if a game has its own forum somewhere and so on, but why bother if its right there on the store page?

 

True enough.

It may just be a side effect of me buying games, generally, long after their release so they've usually been patched by then.

Unless it's a Bethesda game but then the modding community patches them very quickly

 

Well if this is the first time it has occured, it happened for the second time the very next day with Space Engineers when they released a DLC. There were a huge number of negative reviews on the game itself instead of the DLC and within 12 hours or so they were all gone and the rating was restored to normal. Or maybe it didn't I didn't see that notice. Maybe, just maybe, it was Keen that deleted the negative reviews (assuming they can even do that). Either way something very weird happened.

I gotta say though, the Space Engineers thing was kinda funny, they are as good at reading the community as Blizzard. I was honestly expecting a "don't you guys have phones?" moment.

 

The few times I've tried to use the Steam reviews (or 'community page', ugh!) for that, the signal-to-noise has made it a waste of time. 99% complaining about lack of a feature that was already added a year ago, 0.9% complaining about a bug, and 0.% linking to an external site with a solution that was at the top of a google search for that bug. Why waste time trawling through garbage when googling is faster?

In terms of actual reviews, Steam is even worse than Amazon for transparently obvious paid reviews and brigading.

After the normal years of complaints that are required for Valve to do anything about a problem - or even acknowledge that a problem exists - they've finally started to perform some actual active moderation of reviews, as their previous 'solution' of "just have end-users perform a time-series analysis themselves in order to determine review validity" was an utter failure (due to not actually tackling the problem in the first place).
tl;dr: The seller does not have the ability to remove reviews, but Valve does, and are now actually using it.

 

I'm just wondering, anybody on here ever leave a game review on Steam? Of those has anybody left a positive review?

 

Those days are gone by now. Sadly.

 

Yeah, I guess I forgot FO76. Either that or I created an extremely effective mental block on it.

 

Yep. Two. On 'Uplink' and 'The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom'. One because I loved the game to death and the other because the Pillar of the Community badge required me to leave a review...

 

Steam's Workshop is pretty nicely done and is really easy to use with heavily modded games such as Cities: Skylines. I'd rather have all my games in one place and Steam has been that place for the last 12 years or so, alongside the physical media I still own. More clients just stick more software on my rig I could do without.

 

Actually I think I may have left one years ago.

So, yeah, it seems my memory's going.

 

I've "reviewed" about 1% of the games I own, only two have been negative (one for a particularly wonky pc port from Tecmo Koei and one for some side scrolling indie brawler with f***ed controls).

 

I think I've made two, both for achievement purposes. Neither is in any way what I'd call a useful review.
One is for Warhammer: Space Marine and is literally just the word "Chainsword." Which, in fairness, I think says all that needs saying.

 

I read recently that people do things in games to get Steam achievements. Still can't get my head around it.