The roll-out of Steam Tags has been full of highs and lows. It seems like for every funny or useful tag attached to a game, there’s been a lot more that are mean-spirited or judgmental. It’s been called out as a major failing of the system. Now, Valve’s looking to do something about it.
In an recent update post, Valve announced an update to the tagging beta that will let users report bad tags:
There is a new reporting option next to popular tags on game pages. You can click the flag icon to report a tag, which will downvote the tag. Right now there are four report reasons:
- Offensive/abusive tag
- Not appropriate for this product
- Not a helpful tag
- Spoiler
In general, tags need to be applied by more users before they will show on the popular tags section
“For You” / Recommended tags will only recommend tags that apply to multiple gamesFixed an issue where swear words would show unfiltered in some places
It’s not clear what the steps past flagging and down-voting would be but presumably some kind of moderation will be culling bad tags from the system. Steam Tags is still in beta, remember, so it’s good to see Valve responding so quickly to this issue.
Comments
6 responses to “Valve Now Letting Users Flag Steam Tags As ‘Abusive’ And ‘Spoiler’”
Wow, they implemented that pretty quick.
Probably because they knew how the whole thing was gonna go down before hand.
I’m still trying to decide if “walking simulator” is a cheeky troll or a genuinely useful tag, since a ton of games I’ve enjoyed have fallen into that category lol
it’s going to be far more interesting to see if people can end up voting by tag usefulness, i.e. seeing how many people use which tags to search for items.
tags like “RPG” and “action” seem like weak candidates for tags
“nanomachines, son” and “pixel art” seem useful.
and then there’s …
“rip-off” for game tycoon 1.5 (not GDT)
“developer bans community responses” guise of the wolf,
“overpriced” Planetary Annihilation
“region restricted”
“cheaper on amazon”, etc.
“my life was runied because of this” for garry’s incident, etc.
between knowing that there’s 43 current pixel art games on steam… and the useless “recommendation” system, the censorship seems like it will hinder what the system was built for, avoiding the problems when filtering through 700+ games on a catalog designed to paid-promote 10 games at a time.
I think one of my favourite (and also most useless) tags is “functioning toilet” http://store.steampowered.com/tag/en/Functioning%20Toilet/
From what I understand, the tags are there to help you define the more nuanced elements of a game that you like beyond mere ‘RPG’ or ‘Shooter’ so that the recommendation system can be fine-tuned for you.
Which at the moment is utterly fucking pointless if the recommendation system is only going to recommend things off your wishlist.
No shit I’ll probably like it, Steam, that’s why it’s on my wishlist. Except for when it’s something I WON’T actually buy because I’m only ‘kinda interested’ enough to play it but not pay money for it. I BUY the games I’m excited about. Show me NEW things, dammit!
At the moment, the system is failing to achieve any of its objectives for me. Oh Steam. You’re better than this, come on.