Marks reviews off topic that are not.
I’ve been criticizing Valve’s opinions on handling…let’s call them review bursts. I don’t like calling them review bombs because that term has become somewhat synonymous with “off-topic review” and labeling bursts of negative reviews has an immediate effect of delegitimizing them. In my opinion at least.
As someone who initially supported Valve’s system for flagging off-topic reviews, I’ve grown more critical of them in the last few years. Mostly because Valve’s decision making, as is common in this industry, has grown steadily more nonsensical.
It made sense when they marked hundreds of positive reviews saying “based dev” for Factorio as off-topic, it had nothing to do with the game. The same can’t be said for the hundreds of reviews of Superhot VR by people angry that actual content from the game was removed. You literally can’t get less off-topic than reviewing a game based on the content in-game. Or content removed, to be specific.
And I said the same thing with War Thunder, where the tidal wave of reviews came from players upset at Gaijin Entertainment’s treatment of their playerbase and the gradual degradation of the game’s reward system and monetization. Once again, you can’t get less “off-topic” than talking about the game’s monetization system, a core part of the gameplay.
Cue in today’s topic; Naraka: Bladepoint and Valve once again screwing up with applying an off-topic label where it doesn’t apply. Naraka has had over three thousand negative reviews pulled from its score over the last few days because players are pissed.
Why? Because the game went free to play on July 13 and the player base went from a 90k peak to over 250k players. Also people are upset that the game is asking people to disable HVCI in order to install.
HVCI is “hypervisor-protected code integrity.” It’s a memory security thing. As per Microsoft’s website:
Memory integrity is a critical component that protects and hardens Windows by running kernel mode code integrity within the isolated virtual environment of VBS. Memory integrity also restricts kernel memory allocations that could be used to compromise the system, ensuring that kernel memory pages are only made executable after passing code integrity checks inside the secure runtime environment, and executable pages themselves are never writable.
Naturally people are wary about turning off critical security components in order to install a free to play Chinese game. Are some of the reviews a hair xenophobic? Sure. Are reviews complaining about suspicious anti-cheat software off topic? No.
If I had to guess, I assume this is Valve doing things in their usual fashion. Lazily. It wouldn’t shock me if the entire off-topic system was completed automated at this point, given Valve loves automating processes they could easily do themselves. But it’s not a good outcome, it means any time the customer base feels strongly about something Valve’s system is just going to swoop in and kill it.
Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.
MMO Fallout 