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Windows Central

Technology

Brendan Lowry

Steam users spot leaked new 'helpfulness system' that filters out useless PC game reviews — is Valve finally addressing the problem?

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What you need to know

On Tuesday morning, Steam users noticed a "new helpfulness system" in place for user reviews. When toggled, this system filtered game reviews so that the only ones visible were those that were fairly detailed and classified as "Most Helpful."
Valve — the creator of Steam — disabled the toggle for this system a few hours later, indicating that it's not finished yet. Still, this leak of it confirms that Valve is finally making an effort to address issues with Steam's reviewing system.
Currently, many users flood Steam store pages with low-effort reviews that are humorous, quirky, or controversial in an effort to farm Community Awards from their peers.
These "awards" are essentially emoji reactions, and give reviewers Steam Points they can spend on profile customization when given. Their introduction several years ago is largely what led to the onset of useless review spamming.

With its user-friendly interface, smooth performance, diverse array of community features, and frequent game deals, Valve's gaming client Steam has 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 players noticed 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," wrote one 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."

Valve is finally addressing bad reviews issue from r/Steam

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 of the 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 that actually 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," said one user. "That's really cool actually, seeing the meme reviews was fun at first, but they are getting kind of repetitive now imo," commented another.

At least the user behind this review on the Helldivers 2 front page is honest about why they're posting it. (Image credit: Windows Central)

Whether the system can be effectively gamed or not remains to be seen — after all, reviews being long doesn't mean they're good, 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 knowing something is finally being done is enough to get me excited.

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.