Steam users spot leaked new ‘helpfulness system’ that filters out useless PC game reviews — is Valve finally addressing the problem?
Rejoice, PC gamers: Steam reviews may actually be helpful soon.
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With its user-friendly interface, smooth performance, diverse array of community features, and frequent game deals, Valve’s gaming clientSteamhas been the platform of choice for PC gamers for just over two decades now. Issues with it have been improved substantially over time with big additions and updates, but one that’s largely gone unaddressed is Steam’s game review system and how it’s often exploited, resulting in genuinely helpful user reviews being flooded beneath an ocean of pointless joke posts. That may be about to change, however.
On Tuesday morning, Steam users filtering game reviews from other playersnoticed a new option to use a “new helpfulness system” toggle. When ticked, this would display reviews that were reasonably detailed and thorough, and only ones that were rated highly enough to appear under the existing “Most Helpful” filter. The option was disabled by Valve a few hours later — indicating that it was pushed live erroneously, and likely before its completion — but even so, it appears this helpfulness system is the company’s answer to the aforementioned problem.
“So far it’s doing a good job. Valve doesn’t need to do much to stop lazy Steam users who spam unfunny or copy/pasted memes,“wroteone Reddit user investigating the system’s efficacy before it was taken offline. “It seems to filter in helpful long-text reviews and filter out the rest. The helpfulness system is also on by default, that will probably kill off these pointless trend.”
Players spamming reviews that are purposeless or just meant to be funny has been an issue for a long time now, but it’s gotten particularly worse in recent years due to the introduction ofthe Steam Points and Community Awards system. Users can use Steam Points earned from purchases to bestow “awards” (emoji reactions, basically) on reviews, which then reward the reviewer with Steam Points of their own to spend on profile customization options such as animated avatars, profile pictures, backgrounds, and badges, among others.
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Unsurprisingly, this quickly gave rise to a torrent of short, low-effort reviews written to “farm” Community Awards with humor, quirkiness, or unpopular opinions (controversial reviews often get spammed with the “Jester” award that looks like a clown emoji). And as I said before, these useless posts often drown out useful ones thatactually evaluate the game itself, defeating the purpose of the review system in the first place.
The leak of Valve’s “new helpfulness system,” then, is a sign that it’s finally making a serious effort to rectify the issue — and at least on social media, the reception to its existence has been unanimously positive so far. “Finally! I often hit the character limit and have to remove paragraphs from my comprehensive reviews before being able to publish them, and although I often get decent amount of likes and positive feedback, it pains me to see quick and dirty written stuff getting attention,“saidone user. “That’s really cool actually, seeing the meme reviews was fun at first, but they are getting kind of repetitive now imo,“commentedanother.
Whether the system can be effectively gamed or not remains to be seen — after all, reviews being long doesn’t mean they’regood, and I’m sure award farmers will do their best to trick whatever algorithms Valve is developing with things like blocks of copypasta and other lengthy strings of text. Still, just knowingsomethingis finally being done is enough to get me excited.
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It’s worth noting that the system was enabled by default during the hours it was publicly available this morning, so it likely will be when it comes out officially, too. If that ends up being the case, there will hopefully be a significant reduction in the amount of useless Steam reviews posted on the platform.
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Brendan Lowry is a Windows Central writer and Oakland University graduate with a burning passion for video games, of which he’s been an avid fan since childhood. He’s been writing for Team WC since the summer of 2017, and you’ll find him doing news, editorials, reviews, and general coverage on everything gaming, Xbox, and Windows PC. His favorite game of all time is probably NieR: Automata, though Elden Ring, Fallout: New Vegas, and Team Fortress 2 are in the running, too. When he’s not writing or gaming, there’s a good chance he’s either watching an interesting new movie or TV show or actually going outside for once.Follow him on X(Twitter).
