The North American giant explains how it has been involved during 2019 with what they claim has been a total of 44 cases where they have had to intervene.
The bombing review seems to have arrived to stay. This attitude, increasingly widespread in web portals of any kind (especially rating aggregators such as Metacritic and official stores like Steam), is based on mass scoring an extremely low score to a video game, usually because of an event that has generated disagreement in the community. Valve has explained how they acted and what they plan to do to continue dealing with it on Steam.
How to identify anomalous reviews on Steam: 44 performances in 2019
“In March (of 2019) we published some new features to help mitigate the effect of the bombing of off-topic reviews, which are coordinated efforts to negatively affect the review score for reasons unrelated to the possibility of future players enjoy the game, ”they begin by saying.
Report of an Reviews bombing on Steam in 2015: a widespread practice
“User reviews are systematically one of the most used features of the store, generating as many visits to pages as the search function, so it is important that they are accurate and reliable. As part of a new process, our team uses a combination of developer tools and comments to identify anomalous review activities, ”they add.
“Once we have identified a possible bombardment of reviews, we meet to investigate what happened and discuss whether the review activity should be described as off-topic (something we have done 44 times so far). If so, reviews made within those off-topic periods are excluded by default from the review score (a setting that customers can change if they wish), ”they conclude.
In this article we review Valve's plans with Steam for 2020.
More cases of review bombing: frequent bombing in 2019
The most recent review bombing in Metacritic has been Warcraft III: Reforged, where players complained altogether about the current bugs and errors of the title. Blizzard has had to apologize.
It is not the first time that Valve tries to combat the bombardment of Reviews or review bombing. In November 2017, they already published a statement showing this purpose, although the situation was far from what it is now. It also happened with Borderlands 3, Death Stranding or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, among many others.
We can list a multitude of cases corresponding only to last year. In addition, the reasons are sometimes, alien to the quality of a video game. It may simply be because a title does not come out on the desired platform but instead remains in a specific system, such as the Astral Chain on Nintendo Switch, bombed last September.
