Valve two years ago user reviews system, as well as the impact of such reviews on the rating of games. This was done, in particular, to solve problems with the "attack" on the rating. The term "attack" refers to the publication of a large number of negative reviews in order to lower the rating of the game.
According to the developers, the changes should give each player the opportunity to speak about a particular game and its purchase. As a result, this will lead to the formation of a rating that can tell buyers whether they like the game or not.
Since the introduction of the changes, Valve, according to company representatives, has tried to listen to both the opinions of the players and the feedback from the developers. Both the former and the latter are aware of the benefit or harm that negative reviews can cause, and in some situations this tool is still used.
Valve has been developing analysis tools that allow you to follow reviews. After the data and user opinions were received and studied, Valve came to the conclusion that they were ready for new changes.
The main change is the introduction of a monitoring system for off-topic reviews in order to exclude them from the overall rating. Such reviews are considered those in which the arguments "do not affect the desire to buy this product in any way." Well, since there are no “correct” arguments, reviews of this type will not be taken into account in the rating.
For example, reviews that are somehow related to DRM will no longer be taken into account. On the other hand, the reason for the negative reviews will be given. That's what : “Strictly speaking, they are not part of the game, although they disturb some players, so we decided that these were off-topic complaints. In our opinion, most Steam users are not interested in such questions, so the rating of the game according to reviews will be more accurate without them. Moreover, we believe that players who are interested in DRM are often willing to carefully check the game before buying, so we decided to leave even reviews from off-topic attacks in the public domain. From them you will find out whether the reason for negative reviews is important to you.
The company understands that players may be interested in a relatively wide range of issues and there will be a very ghostly line between “on topic” and “off topic” reviews. In order to understand where is good and where is bad, the company introduced a system for monitoring negative reviews. It recognizes any type of unusual activity in real-time overviews of all games on Steam. At the same time, the system “does not try to find out the reason” for the occurrence of an unusual situation.
As soon as such activity is identified, Valve employees are notified and begin to investigate the problem. According to the developers, the system has already been tested in practice, by checking the entire history of Steam reviews. The result is that many reasons were found for why something unusual happened. Moreover, there were not so many attacks with “off-topic” reviews.
When the moderation team determines that the activity detected by the monitoring system is related to such an attack, work begins to level the influence of the "review bomb". So, the time interval of the attack is noted. Reviews during this time are not taken into account when calculating the rating of the game. Well, no one deletes the reviews themselves, they remain inviolable.
If desired, the user can always refuse the new system. There is an option in the store settings that, as before, takes into account all reviews when ranking the game.
One of the clearest examples of the “attack with reviews” is following the departure of Metro Exodus from Steam in favor of an exclusive placement on the Epic Games Store. The placement period is valid until February 2020. The creators of the game most likely had good reasons for doing so, but they were not understood by the players. They began to leave not only negative reviews, but also put dislikes under trailers on YouTube, as well as complaints and claims wherever possible.
The chart above clearly shows that after a certain point, the number of negative ratings increased very sharply. This moment is the departure of the third part of Metro from Steam. And if before the "Very positive" reviews there was an overwhelming majority - more than 80%, then after them it became many times less, negative reviews began to prevail.
Source: habr.com