Valve to remove “off topic” review bombs from Steam user scores
Valve have finally admitted that ‘review bombing’ on Steam (leaving swarms of negative reviews for questionable reasons) is a big enough problem to have a human clean things up from time to time. According to today’s store blog post, when a large, anomalous cluster of score-demolishing reviews happens, Valve will have “a team of people” investigate. If they decide that the reasons stated during that period are spurious enough to be considered ‘off topic’, then that entire cluster of reviews will no longer factor into the overall score, and the developer will be informed, though no reviews will be removed. Of course, this all hinges on Valve’s definition of ‘off topic’.