Though Steam currently has one of the best review functions for all of gaming, that hasn’t stopped them from looking for ways to improve it. This started with efforts to reduce review bombing, a phenomena where a region specific issue would result in tons of negative reviews that didn’t affect most users, but has expanded beyond that. Steam is now taking a look at their helpful reviews and figuring out how to make them more representative of the public and less negative.

The issue Steam is trying to tackle is the difference between a review and a helpful review. Gamers are a funny crowd though, and a review like the one above has over 90 ‘helpful’ tags added to it. This is Steam’s biggest problem, trying to herd the community while also giving them the freedom to post however they want.

While Steam has always had a ‘sort by helpful’ option, it may have let certain reviews rise to the top even if they weren’t all that helpful. For instance, a game that was review bombed or released bad press might find itself getting a wave of negative reviews. In times like this, users are likely to mark many reviews helpful that are merely jumping on the bandwagon of negativity. Steam is trying to change that by looking at the types of ratings users give. For instance, some users go on sprees of marking either negative or positive reviews as helpful.

That means some users clearly aren’t looking to say whether a review is actually helpful or not, but that they are just trying to promote the idea that it is bad or good. Because of this, Steam is changing how a helpful tag is tallied. For users like the above, ones that mark thousands of reviews for a single title, their vote will count for less and less. For normal users, which have a history of spreading their helpful votes across games and in normal manners, the system will work traditionally.

Regardless of anything else, Steam definitively has the most complex rating system the world over, one which they constantly work to improve. Unfortunately for them, but maybe fortunately for us, many reviews might just end with someone getting beat with jumper cables, and most users might find that extremely helpful.