Valve tweaks Steam user review system again

Last week’s changes to the Steam user review system came with pros and cons and Valve has made a few more tweaks.

Reviews by users who purchased the game outside of Steam will now be shown by default, but Steam users now have the option to hide these and the system will remember your preference to keep them hidden.

Simply put, if you don’t want to risk reading reviews from users which may have been paid or encouraged to post positive reviews, keep them hidden.

Although all reviews will show no matter where the reviewer purchased the game, only reviews from Steam customers will impact the score so there’s no change there.

Another change which has been requested by developers is the colour of the “Mixed” text as it was apparently “inconsistent”. Now it’s what they describe as a yellow/tan colour,

Sorting reviews of a particular reviewer will now be done in chronological order instead of “helpful”. This means that smaller games won;t find their reviews shunted down by larger releases which have a bigger audience.

Valve is still working on the system, especially when it comes to helpful reviews which were giving “unpredictable” results. Therefore. they are currently working on resolving this by taking more factors into account when showing the more helpful user reviews. A beta will apparently be “rolling out soon”.

Source: Steam.