Steam, one of the most popular PC gaming platforms today, is having some trouble with its game rating system due to a phenomenon called "review bombing," where a number of users work together to deliberately reduce the ratings of certain games. However, Valve who owns the platform, is now implementing additional measures to battle this practice.
Aside from creating negative reviews, the review bombers also usually go to the review section and mark many negative reviews as helpful in an attempt to push them to the front page of the game. Valve is launching a new system which will be able to track helpful and unhelpful reviews, and the users who mark them as such.
According to the company, most players follow a usual pattern when it comes to using the helpful buttons, and those users who are trying to accomplish an agenda will stick out from the normal pattern.
"Of the 11 million people that have used the helpful buttons, most follow a reasonable pattern of usage," said Valve. "Typical players rate a few reviews as helpful or unhelpful while deciding whether to make a purchase. However, 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."
"This behavior is not only humanly impossible," the company added, "but definitely not a thoughtful indication of how 'helpful' each of those reviews were."
The new system that Valve is implementing will calculate the helpfulness of the reviews, taking into account the effort of those who are deliberately trying to skew the ratings. Ratings from users that follow the normal patterns of rating will be counted as normal, but the opinions of users that have made an excessive number of reviews for one game will weigh less.
