Today, in a new update, Valve is changing the way user reviews are sorted and displayed on Steam in an attempt to hide all the joke comments and memes that flood the digital store.
It has been more than ten years nowplayers can already leave text reviews of the game on Steam. These reviews can be long or short, positive or negative, and are designed to help people decide whether they’re willing to invest their time and money in a particular game. However, in recent years Steam store page has been inundated with joke comments Those are basically useless. Now, Valve has had enough and is making some changes that may result in fewer jokes and meme comments.
On August 14, Valve released a news blog Regarding its plans to update Steam reviews to make them more helpful. Valve says the “primary goal” of Steam reviews is to “help potential players make informed decisions about games they may want to purchase.” But the current system of players voting on which reviews are “helpful” doesn’t work. As a result, Valve will start identifying “useless” comments and make them harder to see.
According to Valve, “one-word comments, comments consisting of ASCII art, or comments that are primarily funny memes and jokes” will now be considered unhelpful and will be “sorted behind other comments on the game store page.” .
How does Valve identify useless joke comments?
Valve clarified that players may still see “humorous but unhelpful” comments, but the goal is for them to appear much less frequently when people just want to learn more about the game. The company says that for those who like these silly comments but still want to see them, you can turn on an option.
So how will Valve identify unhelpful comments? The company says that using Steam moderators, user reports and some “machine learning algorithms,” comments will be marked as useless.
“Our team has found that a lot of unhelpful comments are easy to spot,” Valve said. “So we’re targeting those first. This is an ongoing work and it may take our team quite some time to evaluate existing comments and Newly posted comments.
You may be wondering, why are you leaving these useless comments? Valve says it’s found that “many players want to express their opinions about the game,” but they don’t always have the words to do so. Therefore, it says these silly comments are still “valuable data,” even if they aren’t traditional comments.
So be it. You can still do your stupid reviews, but now people don’t have to scroll through 200 reviews making the same joke just to see if the game is any good. This seems like a smart change, and one that’s long overdue.
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