Steam Tweaks Review System to Fight Against Bots

Valve is tackling another problem that faces Steam reviews by implemented new measures against bots that are tampering with reviews.

Steam's reviews have been experiencing several changes recently as Valve looked to fight "review bombs" and other problems, but the latest change tackles the process of how reviews are reviewed. Users can mark their gaming peers' reviews as "helpful" to make the review more prominent on the game's page, a helpful tool that allows the best, most accurate reviews to stand out among the rest. However, there's a pretty apparent potential for abuse that comes through tasking bots with marking reviews as helpful or not and fudging the results.

To fix this issue, Valve is cracking down on unusual voting patterns. If you're going about your business on Steam and marking the occasional review as helpful so that you can in turn help others, you'll have nothing to worry about. But the bots that rapidly mark review after review will be less effective since their opinions will be weighted differently from human users, a process that was explained in greater detail in an announcement from Steam.

"Firstly, our system will use a new method of calculating the helpfulness of each review, taking into account the users that are trying to manipulate the system," the blog post read. "One way we're doing that is by counting the helpful ratings on reviews differently for users that are far outside the norm. Ratings from users that follow normal patterns of rating will continue to be counted the same way that they have, whereas accounts that rate an excessive number of reviews on an individual game will see the weight of each individual rating count for less and less."

Additionally, the reviews that are shown on a game's page will now closer reflect what the game's score shows.

"For example, if the game is reviewed positively by 80% of reviewers, then the ten reviews shown by default on the store page will be 80% positive, showing eight positive and two negative," the announcement continued. "This should keep the reviews shown on a game's page from being so easily manipulated by a few determined players and should more accurately represent the overall sentiment of the people playing the game."

The Steam team says there's still more to do to improve the review process, but the latest changes look like they'll be quite beneficial for promoting honest and helpful reviews.