It feels like it’s really getting out of hand and the language of the negative reviews seems really fake too. I just bought a game that got review bombed and it was fine. From the reviews it sounded like it was going to destroy my graphics card, corrupt my hard drive and be full of bugs. Luckily I watched some gameplay vids and it turned out none of those things were true.
I haven’t noticed it getting worse, and I think Valve is doing the best thing they can to mitigate it by way of recent reviews and the review graph. When you can see when a review bomb started, you can cross reference that date against news for that game in your favorite search engine. If the review bomb is truly frivolous, it will pass in no time at all.
The graph will also give you a note that the review behavior is unusual and that there may be review bombing going on.
I think the biggest problem is that when people are just browsing games, all that’s shown is overall and mixed reviews. They should add a similar indicator to that view of the game.
That’s good to know.
Sometimes, the only way for players to get the developer’s attention is by doing something drastic like that. Not always, but many times. Because developers and publishers think Steam Review Scores are important for game sales (and I mean, they are, but maybe not as much as they seem to think).
Sometimes this comes from players in a different language complaining about bad translation or something.
Review Bombing, the term, is almost used to discredit when people have negative sentiment for something, and does nothing to explain why players may be doing it. Sometimes it is warranted, sometimes it isn’t. But most people are going to read that term and think “Ah, its just a bunch of whiney children,” only to later feel frustrated at the things those negative reviews were talking about.
Last time I actually heard of review bombing was for Helldivers 2. So for me it feels like there hasn’t been a big public review bombing event in a long time, and reviews can filtered by country, time, and there’s warnings when there are unusual spikes.
So for me no I had forgotten about it, since it hasn’t made headlines in a while.
Nope, because review bombing doesn’t exist on steam. You have to own the game to review it. A customer leaving a negative review is not review bombing.
I believe how it works is people buy the game, write the negative review and then refund it. Review bombing is not only definitely a thing but Steam have gone to great lengths to combat it, which would be odd if it was imaginary.
It’s not just you. Customer curated content in general on steam has gone drastically downhill over the last year or two.
Like review bomb mitigation can only go so far when the company refuses to block people from writing reviews that write enough off topic reviews.
The discussion forums are the same way, its all award farming ever since they released the ability to give steam points to people.
Good thing I don’t pay attention to reviews. Half of them are people whining about things that aren’t a problem for me.
I find them really valuable. Before buying a game, I’ll skim 10 or so reviews, both positive and negative, to find what it’s good and bad at. If the negative reviews are all stuff I don’t care about and the positive reviews excite me, I’ll probably get it. But if the negative reviews consistently mention something that’ll bother me, I’ll pass.
I don’t even really read the reviews I just look at the aggregate score and if it’s overwhelmingly positive I just assume it’s fine.
I probably go and check the reviews only if it said mixed or negative.
