Summary
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. You want to play a new game that everyone is talking about, so you head to Steam to check out if it’s something you might like. You head to the game’s user reviews for some first-hand opinions, only to be greeted by dozens of jokey reviews from people that are trying very hard to be funny.
Steam’s user reviews can be a great place for fans of a game to make their opinions heard, especially when it comes tocontroversial changesora dodgy launch. However, it’s also pretty difficult to gauge exactly what a game actually plays like, as you usually have to sift through dozens of reviews filled with jokes and memes before you get to the informative stuff. Sure, a comment like “I wish gambling was real” as a review forBalatrois funny, but it’s not helpful.
Fortunately, it seems as thoughValvehas had quite enough of these joke reviews dominating the front of a game’s user reviews section, and seems to be doing something about it.First spotted by a Reddit user on the Steam subreddit, Valve looked like it was temporarily testing out a new “helpfulness system” that will let users filter out reviews to find what they want.
Steam Might Finally Be Trying To Filter Out Joke Reviews
In the image that the Reddit user shares, you can see a prompt that asks whether the user in question wants to use a new “helpfulness system,” while filtering reviews. While it doesn’t outright explains what it does, many people in the same Reddit thread have reported testing it out and getting positive results, filtering out shorter reviews designed to be funny and spam, while also prioritising longer reviews.
Unfortunately, it appears as though Valve has disabled the feature at the moment, suggesting it’s coming in a later update and wasn’t quite ready to be pushed out just yet. Still, it’s good to know that we soon might be able to easily separate the helpful reviews from the walls of weird art and copy-pasted memes.
