Steam's Community SUCKS? - The Know

did i miss something about Dragoncon?

Lol, they've already closed comments on that article. XD I've have the small issues with people on Steam like on ANY internet community, but honestly I've had MANY issues with the steam volunteer community moderators. Some of them are absolute trolls who bash, get pissy if you disagree with them, and then ban you when you ask them not to be assholes.

Is that really the only reason he gave for Steam sucking? People being "mean"? Ooooh boy...

I hear the closing time song every night at my work goddamn muzak

I'm gonna go out and be the voice of controversy here and say... The guy isn't wrong.

His reasoning isn't entirely right either, though. See, the things is, the problem goes both ways. You have people downvoting out of spite, but you also have people upvoting out of spite for the first group that are downvoting. Depression Quest ring a bell, anyone? Now, I couldn't give a single flying fuck about that "Gamergate" shit, which I heard a lot of people were up in arms over towards the developer of that game, but from everything I heard and witnessed that game was an absolute pile of dog shit that should never have made it past the greenlight process, but did because almost all the upvotes seemed to be "fuck Gamergate!" and other inane shit. The fact that the woman who developed that "game" gave her own definition of rape and then only months later admitted to doing the exact behavior she defined as rape, well... Honestly, if she's a shitty person or not has no bearing on the discussion, the product she supplied was awful.

At the same time, the comment that Lawrence made about having moderators making a community feel "plastic" because of there always being "a nanny there to slap somebody in the back of the head for doing something wrong" is patently ridiculous. That's called a society, and the "nanny" is known as the police force and the rule of law.

Basically, for your tl;dr perusal: moderate useless reviews, ones that offer no information in either direction, but leave even the outright cruel ones as long as they provide good info to potential buyers.

Steam has it's ups and downs, the community is savage when they have a reason to be for example a very very horrible game and many more. But you have to really be actively looking for it to spot trolls. In-game trolls are a different matter and mostly tolerable.

Gaming communities like this tend to attract the trolls to the actual site, but you thankfully don't often run into them in game. I remember trying to use the Blizzard run community site for WoW and the forums there are a train wreck half the time. So I don't think Valve can necessarily police their site easily even if they do reverse their previous stance, but doing so little is not that good for their reputation as a reputable site. Just to clarify, I haven't actually used Steam since Empire Total War came out and I was so against the idea of using a third party app for a game that I never opened it past what was required to play the game, so I have no idea if my opinion is actually based on actual information or on everything I've heard about the Steam community from things like the paid mod thing.

So as a steam user, I really think the community is quite good. You can validate a review by looking at both playtime, and if others thought the review was helpful. Regardless, the whole point of user reviews is to make it so that I (The user) don't waste money on a poorly made/over priced product. Sure there are trolls, mean people, and people giving untrue information about any given game, but its up to me to make the assessment as to if their information is valid.

PS: As an ex-league player, Riot games is perhaps the most abysmal company at moderating their community. I'd rather put a campfire out with my face than sit in a room chatting with a group of people made up of average league players.

I see it's a slow Monday.

Gus had a good quote about communities, (paraphrasing) when people can say whatever they want, your going to hear shit you don't want to hear!

I agree with you guys in that the community should moderate the community. It seems to work well with the RT community

I disagree completely. I don't think it needs moderation. People need to learn to moderate themselves (wishful thinking I know) but who draws the line at where something is crosses the line? If you don't like someone says or it is unhelpful ignore it. Now for trolling that should be easy enough to counter act without getting humans involved at all but saying the community is toxic because it's not just bunny and rainbows all the time is goofy. The point of the reviews is for the community to point out flaws which it does and if the flaws it points out don't matter to you than they should be easy to ignore. What we need to get rid of is this ranking system from Overwhelmingly Negative to Overwhelmingly Positive because it's an incredibly easy system to exploit and that's what most people look at first if anything else at all.