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STEAM | September 2016 - Good job doing previous stuff, let's do new stuff

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Wok

Member
mine doesn't change, I tried many times, for different games.
IDK what to think.

It just shows that BIASING the sampling of your review scores should not change the average.

YOUR review is still readable, AND computing the average score with a biased sample gives the same average as long as the game marketing is "normal".

If you take a break, and come back to think about it later on, you might see it as an okay measure against rigged reviews. There is no reason an average score should change depending on where the consumers bought the game.
 

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
mine doesn't change, I tried many times, for different games.
IDK what to think.

The text isn't going to change if the adjusted data fits within the same tier. Hover over the text and compare the actual numbers. To continue with the example of Half-Life 2:

hl2reviews1vboqc.jpg


hl2reviews2cxqif.jpg


You also said a few days ago that you don't have a Global Top Sellers button. Either something is horribly wrong with your browser or you're just not looking hard enough.
 

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t1473763943z1.png
 

Arthea

Member
It just shows that BIASING the sampling of your review scores should not change the average.

YOUR review is still readable, AND computing the average score with a biased sample gives the same average as long as the game marketing is "normal".
shouldn't?

it changed the best rated games list DRASTICALLY
because to get on it you need at least 1k+ reviews for starters, now if a game mostly was bought outside of steam - it's out, also notice that even some f2p games disappeared from that list for some reason, which shouldn't be affected by the change.
It's a mess


The text isn't going to change if the adjusted data fits within the same tier. Hover over the text and compare the actual numbers. To continue with the example of Half-Life 2:

https://abload.de/img/hl2reviews1vboqc.jpg[/IMG

[IMG]https://abload.de/img/hl2reviews2cxqif.jpg[/IMG[/QUOTE]

yeah, I get it what you and wok mean now, but that's not what I mean, though, you still can't make to show full rating in any way only on the steam page of the specific game, and not even in the rating spot.
 

Wok

Member
shouldn't?

it changed the best rated games list DRASTICALLY
because to get on it you need at least 1k+ reviews for starters, now if a game mostly was bought outside of steam - it's out, also notice that even some f2p games disappeared from that list for some reason, which shouldn't be affected by the change.
It's a mess

I have not looked at this part of the problem yet (list of best rated games).

I have only looked at individual store pages and it looks like a non-problem for that part.
 

oipic

Member
But this filter does include the key activations in the rating if you hover over it.

Ah, so indeed it does, thanks for pointing this out - that changes everything! I had only perused this via Chrome on iOS, where a tap is needed rather than a hover.

In any case, it's all a rather messy 'solution' and implementation at the moment.

What Valve have here is a people problem, and I'm not sure filters or segregation are the fix, although I'm none the wiser as to a real solution... so I guess this step is a start.
 
What Valve have here is a people problem, and I'm not sure filters or segregation are the fix, although I'm none the wiser as to a real solution... so I guess this step is a start.

Well, if Valve ever wants to hire anyone to sort through this mess, I'm down.
Since I basically can't write Steam reviews anymore, I have some extra free time.
 

oipic

Member
Vastly different sample sizes, admittedly, but No Man's Sky's figures are interesting:

uYPIbL6.png

ptX5MAv.png


Right now someone out there is very thoroughly analysing all of this.
 

Pixieking

Banned
Well, if Valve ever wants to hire anyone to sort through this mess, I'm down.
Since I basically can't write Steam reviews anymore, I have some extra free time.

Thing is, people are dicks - go look at the Depression Quest reviews for proof. The only way to really cut-down on "bad" reviews (that is, unhelpful and abusive reviews) is to have something like a 3-Strikes system. Write 3 abusive or overwhelmingly unhelpful reviews, and you have your review privileges revoked. Remove that bar after 4 or 6 months, and if the person is a dick 3 times again, revoke their review privileges for 1 year. If they're still a dick and write another 3 bad reviews, fully remove their ability to review on Steam. Forever.

Because you know what? It is a people problem, so you remove the people who are a problem. Have an independent moderation group that reviews bad/abusive reviews, so there's no complaints of bias, and you're sorted.
 

Mikurden

Member
Quick. Someone tell me how well Farming Simulator is reviewed in German!
It's nice that one can easily get this info now, if one is curious -- more granularity with the filters is a good thing! They should allow you to set these filters globally and perhaps they will (this would largely, if not entirely, address Arthea's dissatisfaction).
 

Xanathus

Member
Maybe the takeaway from all this is to just ignore all general reviews and just make your own decision based on actual gameplay videos from streamers/youtubers or reviewers who you completely 100% agree with.
 

xist

Member
If they changed this so that Steam purchases were the critical review balance for the first 6 months of release (and off Steam system keys were ignored) and then once a game hit 6 months (or maybe even a year old) all keys were weighed in equally, I'd be OK with it. After 1 year most of those games which "buy" reviews with giveaways are surely going to be old news?
 
Changes to reviews seem like a necessary evil. They were pretty much useless before because people would just shit on games or praise them because of the dumbest reasons. Now at least if people have to buy it on the steam store then the reviews there will be more honest and relevant.

They can still buy the game on steam, throw shitty review, then refund.

Refunded reviews filter needs to happen.
 
Though there might be legimate reason to leave a bad review and refund. Just to warn others not buy it.

Sure, but there's actually cases like this.
Some people seem to not be aware, but there are groups that focus on certain games/type of games to negative review bomb, some with even hundreds or thousands of users.

Here's a Kotaku article written on it a year ago: http://steamed.kotaku.com/steam-review-bombing-is-a-problem-1701088582

But if you look around you can see it happen in a number of places. These groups include people who take some kind of vendetta upon something, be it a group of GamerGaters, people who hate microtransactions in any way, shape, or form, people who go on a vendetta against certain genre of games that have popular 'shitty' entries from developers (but effect even those games that are actually good), etc. Some are just voices wanting to be heard, some are this weird growing circle of 'video game hate groups', that have found a place recently.

There's also the opposite and some shitty developers will pay to get positive review bombed on their game to try to create the illusion that it's good. That happens less, but it most certainly has happened.

I'm not suggesting anything be done about it since this is the unfortunate effect of giving anyone a platform to be a voice, putting needless restrictions on the system would either hurt legitimate customers and probably not effect the groups anyway. Again, I think the best thing to do is just raise awareness.

The times it's most obvious is when there's a page that's mostly positive reviews but people have gone out of their way to thumbs down all the positive reviews and thumbs up all the negative ones.

There's no reason to not have refunded reviews filter. They can still put it on the general reviews percentage, but at least there should be a way to filter them out. Just to make sure.
 
I think just giving people the option to filter in a huge variety of ways is great. Maybe you don't like what the default filter is but having the option to change it is great.
 

Pixieking

Banned
Though there might be legimate reason to leave a bad review and refund. Just to warn others not buy it.

Yeah, there's definitely legit reasons to review then refund, but equally, it should now be easy to introduce a filter for that. All it needs under Key Activations is a "User Refunded Reviews" category.
 
They can still buy the game on steam, throw shitty review, then refund.

Refunded reviews filter needs to happen.

Personally, I'd also like to have a min/max playtime filter.
That way you can filter out the people who dropped the game after less than an hour, which is useful for finding more detailed criticism among negative reviews.
 

Shantom

Member
shouldn't?

it changed the best rated games list DRASTICALLY
because to get on it you need at least 1k+ reviews for starters, now if a game mostly was bought outside of steam - it's out, also notice that even some f2p games disappeared from that list for some reason, which shouldn't be affected by the change.
It's a mess
You need the Overwhelmingly Positive tag to be on the highest rated list, which requires 500 reviews, not 1000. At the very top of the list even a couple of negative reviews can have a big effect on the score so of course there'll be some fluctuation because of this change, but it looks pretty much identical to the list I saw a few days ago.

Also, while this thread is talking about reviews, has anyone else noticed that random games suddenly get review bombed in China? Football Manager 2016 is the latest one I've noticed, where it has Mostly Negative recent reviews (30% Positive) because of many people leaving a negative review over the lack of a Chinese translation.
 
At this point, the last thing the review-section needs is more filters. There's already the up-vote/down-vote system, date/time filters, and now a filter to weed out all of the peasants.

By the time people finish clicking through all of their preferences, there won't be a damn review to read.
 
I'm not too bothered by the review changes given that you can still get information about key/store bought reviews if you want to. And it doesn't really matter to me if my review contributes to the overall review average of a game. A refund filter sounds like a good idea too. Ideally there would be a way to sort negative reviews based on whether the reviewer disliked the game or just had technical issues but I'm not sure how they could implement that. And I'd love it if they could get rid of the obnoxious "11/20 would X again" joke reviews but that's never happening.

Meanwhile, the Twitter dramatics have started. I don't mean to sound callous but at least one developer says he's probably going out of business because of this change. I actually went and checked his Steam store page and it turns out he has 539 Steam store purchaser reviews, 25 Steam key reviews and his default review average dropped from 49% to 47%. Both remain in the 'Mixed' category. I don't know how he figures that 2% change is supposed to spell the end of his indie dev career.

In other news, I've been gushing about Hitman over the past couple of weeks but today I ran into the dark side of the experience.

Now this doesn't come as a surprise because I obviously knew that it was always online, but it's much easier to ignore when the thing works transparently as it's supposed to. Between this game being unplayable and Overwatch being down for Tuesday maintenance, I couldn't play anything today. Now I'm not going to flip my shit over not being able to play a game for a few hours but it is annoying when this happens. And of course it always brings up the question of how the publisher has implanted a time bomb into this game which will eventually render it useless in a few years.
 

Arthea

Member
You need the Overwhelmingly Positive tag to be on the highest rated list, which requires 500 reviews, not 1000. At the very top of the list even a couple of negative reviews can have a big effect on the score so of course there'll be some fluctuation because of this change, but it looks pretty much identical to the list I saw a few days ago.

Also, while this thread is talking about reviews, has anyone else noticed that random games suddenly get review bombed in China? Football Manager 2016 is the latest one I've noticed, where it has Mostly Negative recent reviews (30% Positive) because of many people leaving a negative review over the lack of a Chinese translation.

oh yeah, I keep forgetting that valve changed it to 500 some time ago already. As for pretty much identical? lol no
for example Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes was in the top 1-2-3 positions for months now, it's not even in top ten now, Tasmanian Tiger was not in top ten, it's top 4 now, Bit Blaster dropped from top ten.
If you check games that gained positions basically these are steam bought, as The Witcher 3 expansion pass or Tasmanian Tiger.

losing only 119 reviews (according to steam) lost Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes top positions. That's less than 5% of reviews.

BattleBlock Theater for example, which was in top 10 for a long time too, sometimes even in top 3, now is not even int the top 30! And according to steam it lost only 14 reviews, now how that works I wonder.
The same is true for Stardew Valley, with negligible lost reviews and Eternal Senia, which is a free game!

The biggest punch got Hook, over 225 lost reviews, it's so far from the top, like hardly in top 100.

So let's not pretend nothing changed at all.

edited:
almost forgot - freaking Nekopara is now almost in top ten of steam games *thoroughly disgusted
while I can't even see Higurshi ch.1 in the top list anymore.
planetarian also lost all relevance according to steam.
 

Annubis

Member
Divinity Original Sin 2
Finally realized how to get my key.
For anyone with the same issue as me, you have to go in "Your Choices & Input" and select Steam before you get a key. Not directly in "Product Keys".

freaking Nekopara is now almost in top ten of steam games *thoroughly disgusted

Nekopara is a good product.
 

Shantom

Member
oh yeah, I keep forgetting that valve changed it to 500 some time ago already. As for pretty much identical? lol no
for example Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes was in the top 1-2-3 positions for months now, it's not even in top ten now, Tasmanian Tiger was not in top ten, it's top 4 now, Bit Blaster dropped from top ten.
If you check games that gained positions basically these are steam bought, as The Witcher 3 expansion pass or Tasmanian Tiger.

losing only 119 reviews (according to steam) lost Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes top positions. That's less than 5% of reviews.

BattleBlock Theater for example, which was in top 10 for a long time too, sometimes even in top 3, now is not even int the top 30! And according to steam it lost only 14 reviews, now how that works I wonder.
The same is true for Stardew Valley, with negligible lost reviews and Eternal Senia, which is a free game!

The biggest punch got Hook, over 225 lost reviews, it's so far from the top, like hardly in top 100.

So let's not pretend nothing changed at all.

edited:
almost forgot - freaking Nekopara is now almost in top ten of steam games *thoroughly disgusted
while I can't even see Higurshi ch.1 in the top list anymore.
planetarian also lost all relevance according to steam.

As I said, I checked a few days ago and the positions were pretty much as they are now. Ty was top 3 then, dunno why, but it was. Keep Talking was in the Humble Monthly and was on sale on Steam so it lost quite a few positions due to that, and it's actually been helped by the changes, as their Steam reviews are better than their key activation reviews. The same applies to Hook. Stardew seems to be dragged down to recent reviews 'only' being 96% positive. Bit Blaster has lost a couple of places due to the changes, but that's expected, since there has to be some losers, and the main cause of its fall is 2 or 3 negative reviews within the last few weeks, that's all it takes when we're talking about the difference between 98.5% and 98.2%.
 

Arthea

Member
As I said, I checked a few days ago and the positions were pretty much as they are now. Ty was top 3 then, dunno why, but it was. Keep Talking was in the Humble Monthly and was on sale on Steam so it lost quite a few positions due to that, and it's actually been helped by the changes, as their Steam reviews are better than their key activation reviews. The same applies to Hook. Stardew seems to be dragged down to recent reviews 'only' being 96% positive. Bit Blaster has lost a couple of places due to the changes, but that's expected, since there has to be some losers, and the main cause of its fall is 2 or 3 negative reviews within the last few weeks, that's all it takes when we're talking about the difference between 98.5% and 98.2%.

I checked too and they weren't, so what now? I used to check on constant basis, btw, won't need to do that anymore, or so it would seem.
 

Boss Doggie

all my loli wolf companions are so moe
new indie games don't get discounts on sales right? I know major published games do even for a paltry, but indies?
 

Shantom

Member
Did anyone here buy Pac Man CE2? I'm worried over the control issues that have been brought up in a couple of reviews. I'm on an XB1 controller on W10, so it's pretty likely if there's issues I'll have them.
I checked too and they weren't, so what now? I used to check on constant basis, btw, won't need to do that anymore, or so it would seem.

I can only say what I saw, so I'll drop it I guess.
 

Ozium

Member
Did anyone here buy Pac Man CE2? I'm worried over the control issues that have been brought up in a couple of reviews. I'm on an XB1 controller on W10, so it's pretty likely if there's issues I'll have them.

yes but I use a 360 controller on W10
 
I'm really looking forward to the remastered versions of Bioshock 1 and 2. I never played 2, and I've tried to play 1 a few times but I always run into some crashes or audio issues.
 

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
How well do the games run on Steam? I heard some issues where some of the games can't boot up in full-screen, but I may have misread that or may be remembering it incorrectly.

King's Quest Collection and Space Quest Collection aside, the classic games are literally the GOG versions, down to being DRM-free.
 
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