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Valve Restricts Accounts of 2500 Users Who Marked a Negative Game Review Useful

669 points by rurban 4y ago

Overtonwindow 4y ago
This reminds me of a similar incident with the Apple App Store, there were so many negative reviews that rather than Apple forcing the developer to fix the issue, they just deleted all the negative reviews. I agree with the author, this makes the entire Valve review system pointless.
- ncr100 4y ago
  > the entire Valve review system pointless ... also involves what is currently happening now, the Developer is reaching out to Valve to investigate the apparent mistake by the Moderator. The system is still working on it. Question I have is, why does the system allow banning 2500 people so easily? without auditing?
  - tomovo 4y ago
    Not banned. Restricted from up- and downvoting for 30 days.
    - ncr100 4y ago
      Oh! Thanks for the correction tomovo.
- theGeatZhopa 4y ago
  May be it was fixed and then the thousands of negative reviews would be to much of a negative impact of/on a fixed product so thus have been removed?
  - Beldin 4y ago
    Basically: "Let's hide history over this egregiously bad thing because it's in the past"... In what universe is that an acceptable reason?
    - brnt 4y ago
      Russkiy mir! (Couldn't resist)
    - theGeatZhopa 4y ago
      In our universe :) It's about the process. Amazon did not incomparable a versioning for the goods they sell. It's also not feasible to have a versioning for goods, as there are old versions still in the selling. So, what solution do you propose for Amazon, the sellers and the producers? Having the bad history visible is not a solution, as that product won't be sold anymore after..
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  To play devils advocate, I'm sure the far more common case at Apple when thousands of negative reviews roll in very quickly is that some unscrupulous competitor paid a bot farm to knee cap them. Normally the anomaly detection goes off and the fake reviews are filtered. On very rare occasion, someone somewhere will get a message from a Nigerian prince which they dismiss as spam because it looked just like all those other cases which were in fact spam. oops.
- asdfman123 4y ago
  I no longer buy Amazon products based on the rating. I buy based on the rating of the rating using Fakespot. Everything is 4.5ish stars, and the worse products have more fake reviews to get there.
  - pasc1878 4y ago
    I do use the Amazon ratings. I look at the one star ones. If their complaints look reasonable and consistent then I know it is crap. The only reviews to trust are from consumer reports and which? Who buy things retail and not free from the manufactures and they have been doing this for 60 years. Even then Read the reviews carefully and the user comments.
    - chongli 4y ago
      People use bot farms to kneecap their competitors with fake 1-star reviews, so you can’t trust them either.
      - pasc1878 4y ago
        Yes but you can usually tell if a complaint is reasonable - and I see many less one star than 5 star reviews
  - tmikaeld 4y ago
    Feels very dangerous to install extensions that have full access to the contents of every site visited..
    - asdfman123 4y ago
      That’s a good point. I’m extraordinarily lazy about security. Maybe you could make one browser profile to look up products, and your usual one to buy them.
z_open 4y ago
I wish steam didn't have an effective monopoly on PC video game distribution. It was basically forced on us when CS 1.6 required it. But people will choose the option even slightly more convenient for them against ethical costs. I frequently see people here justifying chrome over Firefox due to a really small feature relative to maintaining a healthier web.
- snickerbockers 4y ago
  Steam isn't anywhere near a monopoly lol.
- FredPret 4y ago
  Devil’s advocate: Is it always unethical to buy something supplied by a monopoly? Is convenience an ethical good, especially convenience delivered on a mass scale?
  - akira2501 4y ago
    > Is it always unethical to buy something supplied by a monopoly? Never, it's just unethical to operate one. > Is convenience an ethical good I feel like this could only be true if your life was in actual danger when lacking that convenience. This is possibly the wrong question anyways, I'd ask if the externalized costs of that convenience are small enough to justify the imputed good of the service. Which is why we can tolerate natural monopolies where collective safety is involved, such as electrical distribution, but shouldn't where it isn't, such as video game distribution. > especially convenience delivered on a mass scale? What special ethical properties does this provide?
    - wvenable 4y ago
      > Never, it's just unethical to operate one. Is it? If you simply have no competition, you're running a monopoly. That doesn't seem like an unethical situation.
      - diffeomorphism 4y ago
janosdebugs 4y ago
Is there any independent confirmation of this? The screenshots in the post are less than informative.
FreakLegion 4y ago
The review in question: AVOID omega double thumbs DOWN This game installs some random low reputation anti cheat from japan that I have noticed some very strange behaviors from. First it maintains running even when the game is closed, including tray icons. Also it starts on boot up regardless of boot up settings. It seems to be sending some packets of data to japan IPs while the game has already been closed. If you made the mistake of installing this very suspicious application it took me some time to discover all the traces of it on my PC but I believe I have completely removed it. first uninstall the warlanders game from steam. Check to make sure that C:\Program Files\SentryAntiCheat is gone, not just empty open a commandline and run C:\Program Files\SentryAntiCheat\setray.exe --unins2 just to make sure search your whole PC for ses.exe and setray.exe. Delete any traces that occur Then go here: C:\Users(put your username here)\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Sentry Anti-Cheat Notification.lnk <- delete that finally I searched quite a bit in the registry and mostly everything in the registry is gone relating to this AC. However there still is an entry so get rid of that Win+R button type regedit.exe then navigate to this section: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\SentryAntiCheat <- right click that and press remove then confirm (From https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198128363815/recommended/1675900/ https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198128363815/recomm..., where they failed to purge it from the page source.)
- mcintyre1994 4y ago
  Based on that I’d guess an algorithm or maybe even person wrongly marked this as instructions for disabling anti-cheat software, without realising that it’s instructions for doing that after removing the game.
  - rasz 4y ago
    Most likely cheap idiot contractors. Looks like whoever is managing moderation sucks at their work or doesnt care.
    - somenameforme 4y ago
      It says on the page, "This review has been banned by a Steam moderator..." Probably not even a contractor, but just a volunteer. And now Valve is taking a significant PR hit because of their ineptitude. You get what you pay for.
xlii 4y ago
> all those 2439 people (...) got their accounts restricted for 30 days, during this time none of them can up- or downvote any Steam reviews at all In my opinion that's rather mild restriction and I'm wondering how come this surfaced with such, IMO limited, impact.
- manojlds 4y ago
  It's a slippery slope.
- psd1 4y ago
  It's mild compared to other punishments, but severe for the action of voting on a review For me the salient factor is what this is a rare occurrence. If you operate at scale you're going to occasionally do the wrong thing. Is this one wrong incident, or the tip of the iceberg? I don't see any reason to get the pitchforks out just yet.
- LelouBil 4y ago
  I remember seeing on Reddit a while ago that this kind of thing happens in case your account was compromised or fake. Since the review was removed as spam, if it actually was that would mean there's a good chance of the accounted upcoming it being compromised or fake. It happened to some other users after a review changed text completely I think.
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  Because of the chilling effect. Its right there in the article. Plus, people like to see evidence of what a shitty company Valve has become.
bullen 4y ago
Has anyone followed the Dark and Darker events yesterday: The studio got sued and Valve removed their game from Stream a few weeks ago. They then made a torrent and spread it through discord yesterday. But discord does not allow torrents to be posted, so now discord redirects to twitter. When the legal system turns against you, technology used by criminals become the only last resort. If Elon saw this he would announce the twitter app store in seconds. XD
- Asooka 4y ago
  Downloading via torrents, or specifically breach of copyright, is not a criminal activity in the USA or Europe AFAIK.
maxlin 4y ago
The output from this incident doesn't seem useful for anyone tbh. -Just deleting the comment isn't right. But it was up for a long time so saying this renders the comment system useless isn't true. Snuffing out speech at inception would be infinitely worse from ethics and pragmatic standpoints. -"2500 accounts banned" here means just related to that specific game's community, temporarily. Chances are a dozen or fewer of those might have even noticed that trying to contribute to that specific niche forum in normal situation. -Comments on the anti-cheat seem just FUD. It seems to run like any other anti-cheat, leaving stuff in registry is what almost any software does even after uninstalled. And it doesn't seem to have run unless the games' active besides due to a bug during beta. At worst the "hope they change to a more reputable anti-cheat vendor" kind of talk runs towards a situation where one ("the"?) big vendor's anti-cheat software (which is a rootkit from a permissions standpoint) gets so juicy a target it gets hacked and million gamers get their PC bricked at worst. If we wanted useful talk on anti-cheat it should first target things like Riot's Vanguard. Other developers don't need their anti-cheat to run as deep which, if something should cause some stress in PC users by default. This also kills Riot's game's accessibility on linux to the cradle, which should not be considered to only to harm Riot's business. Some also noted it as a negative that the anti-cheat has a tray icon. Developer starts to debate if the software should even have one if it just causes users to FUD themselves instead or increasing feeling of trust and control. I wonder what would be the right way to handle this without resorting to pointless rigamaroles. Maybe some kind of pre-comment disclaimer from valve administrator to the comment after a short investigation to the anti-cheat solution clearing the FUD (if it was grossly breaking GDPR or such I don't think the game or the company could stay up long)
- michaelmrose 4y ago
  People's computers are used for everything from doing everything from earning money, banking, managing their life, their money, their future. Video games by contrast are about as important as a flea on your dogs ass. It is profoundly weird to put the former at even slight risk for the latter. The fact that we are attempting to normalize this doesn't make it normal or sane. Running always on software when the game isn't running and talking to resources on the internet is incredibly suspicious. The presence of the tray icon isn't causing users to "FUD" themselves. It is rather making this suspicious behavior—running continually—more obvious. The fact that you seem to think its just ordinary stupidity like leaving crap littered around your filesystem doesn't make it less concerning. People wouldn't be fishing around for traces of it to eliminate like purging a piece of malware if it weren't already acting like malware. If it was initially due to a bug that would be a fine time to communicate with users. The right way to handle this is to say sorry we screwed up we wont punish people for liking a review in the future. If any aspect of the review is inaccurate the logical response is to have valve or the dev respond to this. If it really really doesn't belong you remove it. There is no scenario where you randomly ban people from reviewing it for voting the wrong way. > if it was grossly breaking GDPR or such I don't think the game or the company could stay up long How exactly do you propose that would happen? How would people learn their rights are being violated? Lastly this is your only comment on this site and it seems to be a tad slanted. Do you work for a party involved in this?
frou_dh 4y ago
It's seems like an anachronism that Steam games are able to install random junk on your system. Those game installers should be completely standardised and most importantly sandboxed. Similarly, IMO it feels shoddy when Steam acts as a "launcher for another launcher" when starting a game.
- tempodox 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - dbeley 4y ago
    That's not true, games without DRMs installed through Steam can be launched without having Steam running. It all depends on the publisher's policy, Valve is just complying.
    - moffkalast 4y ago
      In fact sometimes it's required to do that for modded installs, because Steam can't be convinced to launch anything without force updating first anymore and breaks everything if you're not eternally vigilant. sigh I've resigned myself to mostly just buying anything I want to mod from GoG unless it has full Workshop integration.
  - Farbklex 4y ago
    Except that it is actually useful and pioneered a bunch of user friendly features that no one else bothered to implement.
    - hinata08 4y ago
      It's not up to them to decide what user want. There should be this thing called 'Free Market', where you don't have to buy whatever stupid improvement is pushed onto the folks. But this platform was awesome for independent developers, who could use it to sell their game, get payments, do the license management, anti-piracy, some amount of support, and even make the installation straightforward for the user (so less support to offer) I can totally get why developers would use Steam to retail their games But let's not forget that clients can be a nuisance, and won't work if they just push features with no value. Games for Windows Live was a nightmare, for exemple
LeoPanthera 4y ago
This headline is a bit misleading. "Restricts accounts" just means they can't write reviews, and even then, only for 30 days.
- t0bia_s 4y ago
  So it's perfectly fine to censor users for limited time just for purpose of rise up sales? Misleading reviews are basically definition of fraud and wont make game any better.
- Nicksil 4y ago
  >just means they can't write reviews So, restricted.
- KomoD 4y ago
  It's not misleading, restricted is correct
- usrusr 4y ago
  "Restrict" is a 100% true description of what happened, there isn't the tiniest bit wrong about it. It's just your (our, I was afflicted by it myself) expectation that harsher measures are sugarcoated by deliberately inaccurate PR language. We can't blame the headline for our implicit expectation of incorrectness and neither can we blame the company responsible for a perceived lack of PR lies.
- optionalsquid 4y ago
  That's the term Valve themselves use when sanctioning accounts: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4F62-35F9-F395-5C23 https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4F62-35F9-F395-5C...
realworldperson 4y ago
[dead]
qwery 4y ago
The user that posted the review had their account returned to normal [0] around the time this was posted. They were told by Steam support that their "account was locked for promoting or posting malicious content" but the message didn't explicitly mention the review. Their review is still "banned" though. Steam support adds "We've gone ahead and removed the lock. In the future, please make sure you are not spamming or advertising" which makes it sound like it wasn't just the review they had a problem with. But trying to read into support agent messages is like reading tea leaves... [0] https://steamcommunity.com/app/1675900/discussions/0/6980058383072286962/?ctp=5#c6980058383076545327 https://steamcommunity.com/app/1675900/discussions/0/6980058...
- voytec 4y ago
  If the review is banned, it seems that the review in question was the reason for ban/lock. I wouldn't read into "please make sure you are not spamming or advertising". They could write "please make sure you are not harming anyone" and it would not suggest that the user attempted to do so. It's just a trashy, corporate replacement for "we fucked up and we're sorry".
  - qwery 4y ago
    > If the review is banned, it seems that the review in question was the reason for ban/lock.\nI wouldn't read into "please make sure you are not spamming or advertising". Having said that, (that is what I said), the message was convincingly human for a support agent response. They didn't need to use so many words. [+also] > They could write "please make sure you are not harming anyone" and it would not suggest that the user attempted to do so. It would though, that's why they write things like that. The point is to reinforce that the recipient is/was at fault. They don't talk about specifics. It "makes it sound like it wasn't just the review they had a problem with". [+also] it didn't say "After careful consideration we've decided to uphold the original decision. We recognise that this may be distressing to you. xoxox YoursTubey"
    - TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
      There's always more to these stories. Always. And the full details almost never come to light.
squarefoot 4y ago
Although in a different context (negative reviews backfiring), this brought to mind something happened a while ago. https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/03/21/gaming-the-system-how-a-gaming-journalist-lost-his-job-over-a-negative-review/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/03/21/gaming-the-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Gerstmann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Gerstmann
mabbo 4y ago
Valve benefits from having lots of people give honest reviews and marking reviews helpful. But now I'm not going to participate at all, for fear of losing access to all of my games. I'm sure many others will do the same. I wonder if it was worth it.
- usrusr 4y ago
  The article is quite clear about nobody losing access to their games. They were blocked from write access to the review system for a while, that's it.
  - doetoe 4y ago
    I think the point is that they showed they may sanction you for unpredictable reasons, without justification.
duckqlz 4y ago
I don’t think that the anti cheat was doing anything shady. It’s pretty much industry standard to have the anticheat start from the registry and run in the background as a service. While I’m not advocating the general shadiness of anticheat software this doesn’t stand out as a particularly interesting case. Valorant is a great example once installed their anticheat is so pervasive I wouldn’t be surprised if a full OS reinstall didn’t wipe it. Then there is fortnite who advertises to use easy’s anti cheat solution on their splash screen (and they do) but then have multiple obfuscated and hidden running processes made by battleeye. Battle eye not only hides itself from the screen ask manager it also installs as a separate package which doesn’t uninstall with fortnite. I mean the games are free and very fun so it’s hard to be mad. I just heavily segregate my gaming pc from anything else on my network . I never browse the web on it or do anything but game and that makes me feel 1% better about the Orwellian nightmare of spy software sitting within it.
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  Have you considered using Nvidia Geforce Now? I switched to it when Fortnite became unavailable on Macs and I'll never go back to a physical gaming rig. It works so well, and there are no fans screaming. But not every game is available on it.
xg15 4y ago
I think you could sum up the entire discussion about anti-cheat sort of like this: We're currently at a point where game publishers expect to be able to install rootkits on their customers's PCs. This is seen as basically an industry standard security practice and general requirement for publishing. I think it's not quite unlike the situation with DRM in movies or ads and tracking on the web. In too many parts of tech, hostile behaviour has been normalised as "standard business practices".
- nokya 4y ago
  The problem I see with anti-cheat technology is that editors are also forcing these rootkits on games that can be played solo (either solo exclusively or multiplayer games with solo campaigns). While I can fully understand being forced to run anti-cheat technology on my PC to play online games, I find it totally unacceptable and unethical to have this kind of software forced upon me for games I exclusively play solo. I consider myself lucky to not need to worry at all about the financial cost of my hobby, I value gaming so much that I would even pay double for some of the games I played. But installing a rootkit on my PC is out of the question. Personally, until editors accept to treat their honest customers as honest customers (at least the solo players), I will not behave "honestly" and will keep using "alternative" ways to acquire games.
- kmod 4y ago
  While I'm with you on being against dark patterns and unethical behavior, anti-cheat feels different in that it seems pretty honestly an effort to make the game better for players (the non cheaters, at least). I haven't seen any arguments that anti-cheat is being used in the interests of the company over the user, it's all that people don't like the technology that's required to do this. So I think it's pretty different from DRM which is pretty clearly an interest misalignment. At the day yes no one likes this software, but people like gaming with cheaters even less. Just like how we don't like being subject to social media moderation, but we dislike spam even more. I think we can't rule out that these companies (in these instances) are trying to give us what we want even if the means are a bit unseemly.
irdc 4y ago
I don’t believe that what Valve is doing here, deleting a negative customer review of a good or service for sale, is even allowed under the EU e-Commerce directive. Edit: sure looks like it: https://www.loganpartners.com/legal-aspects-of-customer-reviews-search-rankings/ https://www.loganpartners.com/legal-aspects-of-customer-revi...
Xeoncross 4y ago
I've often wondered about escrow for cheat detection. I'll put $10, $100, $1000 up to enter the player pool at that X level. If someone catches me cheating and can provide evidence via game replays then they can submit it to a group that reviews and then the money is awarded to them. No bans, if I want to play again then I have to pay again or go back to the public level. In my experience, it's always the free product/game/saas tiers that have the abuse. Money is a great curb on bad behavior. Not perfect, but drastically reduces the pool of bad actors.
- deweller 4y ago
  This is a great use case for programmable money. A smart contract on a blockchain such as an Ethereum layer 2 chain could handle this openly and verifiably.
- WhiteDawn 4y ago
  Counterstrike through the ages used to be a paid product. After a ban your whole account was locked down, so in a practical sense it used to always have a 20-50 “escrow” fee to join the pool of legitimate players. Even today the cs:go “prime” status does a similar thing. It doesn’t seem to affect the number of cheaters in any way, if anything it leads to incentives of account stealing and underground exchanges of steam acc/keys. Personally I feel the cheating issue is more of a side effect of games moving away from dedicated servers with communities and towards global matchmaking. There used to be well run servers that would quickly kick-ban cheating players and have a social construct that incentivizes playing nice to keep access to the good servers. Not that practical today with all the battle royals and as with any “government” there is abuse and corruption, it wasn’t perfect but I do miss the days of servers that always had a admin online to shutdown cheaters and rules around minimum pings and bare-minimum sportsmanship in the voice chat.
  - Xeoncross 4y ago
    Setting a $500 entry fee would quickly shrink the global pool to about the size of a dedicated server. Not that local server wouldn't still be an option as well if someone (or a group) wanted to run it. For people that just walk into the game though, I wouldn't mind paying to instantly have a well-curated global community without having to vet each server trying to find the good ones. Again though, for kids with more time I think there is room for both.
tantalor 4y ago
Simpler solution: avoid Windows
ChoGGi 4y ago
Something to keep an eye on for now, but it's Valve afterall. I think I'll dread the day Gabe steps down.
VLM 4y ago
Its 2023 all online reviews are hot garbage.
yarg 4y ago
> and the game's sales page removed until the claims were investigated by Valve, but this is not a perfect world. However, things didn't end there. Valve's response has not been ideal, but punishment before investigation isn't any better.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rldjbpin 4y ago
feels like people are reading too much into this. it appears to be an oopsie by the ml system filtering for scam posts a la youtube. it is also possible that the support ticket response is an automated one and not written after manual review.

669 points by rurban 4y ago

This reminds me of a similar incident with the Apple App Store, there were so many negative reviews that rather than Apple forcing the developer to fix the issue, they just deleted all the negative reviews. I agree with the author, this makes the entire Valve review system pointless.

ncr100 4y ago
> the entire Valve review system pointless ... also involves what is currently happening now, the Developer is reaching out to Valve to investigate the apparent mistake by the Moderator. The system is still working on it. Question I have is, why does the system allow banning 2500 people so easily? without auditing?
- tomovo 4y ago
  Not banned. Restricted from up- and downvoting for 30 days.
  - ncr100 4y ago
    Oh! Thanks for the correction tomovo.
theGeatZhopa 4y ago
May be it was fixed and then the thousands of negative reviews would be to much of a negative impact of/on a fixed product so thus have been removed?
- Beldin 4y ago
  Basically: "Let's hide history over this egregiously bad thing because it's in the past"... In what universe is that an acceptable reason?
  - brnt 4y ago
    Russkiy mir! (Couldn't resist)
  - theGeatZhopa 4y ago
    In our universe :) It's about the process. Amazon did not incomparable a versioning for the goods they sell. It's also not feasible to have a versioning for goods, as there are old versions still in the selling. So, what solution do you propose for Amazon, the sellers and the producers? Having the bad history visible is not a solution, as that product won't be sold anymore after..
IIAOPSW 4y ago
To play devils advocate, I'm sure the far more common case at Apple when thousands of negative reviews roll in very quickly is that some unscrupulous competitor paid a bot farm to knee cap them. Normally the anomaly detection goes off and the fake reviews are filtered. On very rare occasion, someone somewhere will get a message from a Nigerian prince which they dismiss as spam because it looked just like all those other cases which were in fact spam. oops.
asdfman123 4y ago
I no longer buy Amazon products based on the rating. I buy based on the rating of the rating using Fakespot. Everything is 4.5ish stars, and the worse products have more fake reviews to get there.
- pasc1878 4y ago
  I do use the Amazon ratings. I look at the one star ones. If their complaints look reasonable and consistent then I know it is crap. The only reviews to trust are from consumer reports and which? Who buy things retail and not free from the manufactures and they have been doing this for 60 years. Even then Read the reviews carefully and the user comments.
  - chongli 4y ago
    People use bot farms to kneecap their competitors with fake 1-star reviews, so you can’t trust them either.
    - pasc1878 4y ago
      Yes but you can usually tell if a complaint is reasonable - and I see many less one star than 5 star reviews
- tmikaeld 4y ago
  Feels very dangerous to install extensions that have full access to the contents of every site visited..
  - asdfman123 4y ago
    That’s a good point. I’m extraordinarily lazy about security. Maybe you could make one browser profile to look up products, and your usual one to buy them.

z_open 4y ago

I wish steam didn't have an effective monopoly on PC video game distribution. It was basically forced on us when CS 1.6 required it. But people will choose the option even slightly more convenient for them against ethical costs. I frequently see people here justifying chrome over Firefox due to a really small feature relative to maintaining a healthier web.

snickerbockers 4y ago
Steam isn't anywhere near a monopoly lol.
FredPret 4y ago
Devil’s advocate: Is it always unethical to buy something supplied by a monopoly? Is convenience an ethical good, especially convenience delivered on a mass scale?
- akira2501 4y ago
  > Is it always unethical to buy something supplied by a monopoly? Never, it's just unethical to operate one. > Is convenience an ethical good I feel like this could only be true if your life was in actual danger when lacking that convenience. This is possibly the wrong question anyways, I'd ask if the externalized costs of that convenience are small enough to justify the imputed good of the service. Which is why we can tolerate natural monopolies where collective safety is involved, such as electrical distribution, but shouldn't where it isn't, such as video game distribution. > especially convenience delivered on a mass scale? What special ethical properties does this provide?
  - wvenable 4y ago
    > Never, it's just unethical to operate one. Is it? If you simply have no competition, you're running a monopoly. That doesn't seem like an unethical situation.
    - diffeomorphism 4y ago

janosdebugs 4y ago

Is there any independent confirmation of this? The screenshots in the post are less than informative.

FreakLegion 4y ago

The review in question: AVOID omega double thumbs DOWN This game installs some random low reputation anti cheat from japan that I have noticed some very strange behaviors from. First it maintains running even when the game is closed, including tray icons. Also it starts on boot up regardless of boot up settings. It seems to be sending some packets of data to japan IPs while the game has already been closed. If you made the mistake of installing this very suspicious application it took me some time to discover all the traces of it on my PC but I believe I have completely removed it. first uninstall the warlanders game from steam. Check to make sure that C:\Program Files\SentryAntiCheat is gone, not just empty open a commandline and run C:\Program Files\SentryAntiCheat\setray.exe --unins2 just to make sure search your whole PC for ses.exe and setray.exe. Delete any traces that occur Then go here: C:\Users(put your username here)\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Sentry Anti-Cheat Notification.lnk <- delete that finally I searched quite a bit in the registry and mostly everything in the registry is gone relating to this AC. However there still is an entry so get rid of that Win+R button type regedit.exe then navigate to this section: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\SentryAntiCheat <- right click that and press remove then confirm (From https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198128363815/recommended/1675900/ https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198128363815/recomm..., where they failed to purge it from the page source.)

mcintyre1994 4y ago
Based on that I’d guess an algorithm or maybe even person wrongly marked this as instructions for disabling anti-cheat software, without realising that it’s instructions for doing that after removing the game.
- rasz 4y ago
  Most likely cheap idiot contractors. Looks like whoever is managing moderation sucks at their work or doesnt care.
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    It says on the page, "This review has been banned by a Steam moderator..." Probably not even a contractor, but just a volunteer. And now Valve is taking a significant PR hit because of their ineptitude. You get what you pay for.

xlii 4y ago

> all those 2439 people (...) got their accounts restricted for 30 days, during this time none of them can up- or downvote any Steam reviews at all In my opinion that's rather mild restriction and I'm wondering how come this surfaced with such, IMO limited, impact.

manojlds 4y ago
It's a slippery slope.
psd1 4y ago
It's mild compared to other punishments, but severe for the action of voting on a review For me the salient factor is what this is a rare occurrence. If you operate at scale you're going to occasionally do the wrong thing. Is this one wrong incident, or the tip of the iceberg? I don't see any reason to get the pitchforks out just yet.
LelouBil 4y ago
I remember seeing on Reddit a while ago that this kind of thing happens in case your account was compromised or fake. Since the review was removed as spam, if it actually was that would mean there's a good chance of the accounted upcoming it being compromised or fake. It happened to some other users after a review changed text completely I think.
jeremyjh 4y ago
Because of the chilling effect. Its right there in the article. Plus, people like to see evidence of what a shitty company Valve has become.

bullen 4y ago

Has anyone followed the Dark and Darker events yesterday: The studio got sued and Valve removed their game from Stream a few weeks ago. They then made a torrent and spread it through discord yesterday. But discord does not allow torrents to be posted, so now discord redirects to twitter. When the legal system turns against you, technology used by criminals become the only last resort. If Elon saw this he would announce the twitter app store in seconds. XD

Asooka 4y ago
Downloading via torrents, or specifically breach of copyright, is not a criminal activity in the USA or Europe AFAIK.

maxlin 4y ago

The output from this incident doesn't seem useful for anyone tbh. -Just deleting the comment isn't right. But it was up for a long time so saying this renders the comment system useless isn't true. Snuffing out speech at inception would be infinitely worse from ethics and pragmatic standpoints. -"2500 accounts banned" here means just related to that specific game's community, temporarily. Chances are a dozen or fewer of those might have even noticed that trying to contribute to that specific niche forum in normal situation. -Comments on the anti-cheat seem just FUD. It seems to run like any other anti-cheat, leaving stuff in registry is what almost any software does even after uninstalled. And it doesn't seem to have run unless the games' active besides due to a bug during beta. At worst the "hope they change to a more reputable anti-cheat vendor" kind of talk runs towards a situation where one ("the"?) big vendor's anti-cheat software (which is a rootkit from a permissions standpoint) gets so juicy a target it gets hacked and million gamers get their PC bricked at worst. If we wanted useful talk on anti-cheat it should first target things like Riot's Vanguard. Other developers don't need their anti-cheat to run as deep which, if something should cause some stress in PC users by default. This also kills Riot's game's accessibility on linux to the cradle, which should not be considered to only to harm Riot's business. Some also noted it as a negative that the anti-cheat has a tray icon. Developer starts to debate if the software should even have one if it just causes users to FUD themselves instead or increasing feeling of trust and control. I wonder what would be the right way to handle this without resorting to pointless rigamaroles. Maybe some kind of pre-comment disclaimer from valve administrator to the comment after a short investigation to the anti-cheat solution clearing the FUD (if it was grossly breaking GDPR or such I don't think the game or the company could stay up long)

michaelmrose 4y ago
People's computers are used for everything from doing everything from earning money, banking, managing their life, their money, their future. Video games by contrast are about as important as a flea on your dogs ass. It is profoundly weird to put the former at even slight risk for the latter. The fact that we are attempting to normalize this doesn't make it normal or sane. Running always on software when the game isn't running and talking to resources on the internet is incredibly suspicious. The presence of the tray icon isn't causing users to "FUD" themselves. It is rather making this suspicious behavior—running continually—more obvious. The fact that you seem to think its just ordinary stupidity like leaving crap littered around your filesystem doesn't make it less concerning. People wouldn't be fishing around for traces of it to eliminate like purging a piece of malware if it weren't already acting like malware. If it was initially due to a bug that would be a fine time to communicate with users. The right way to handle this is to say sorry we screwed up we wont punish people for liking a review in the future. If any aspect of the review is inaccurate the logical response is to have valve or the dev respond to this. If it really really doesn't belong you remove it. There is no scenario where you randomly ban people from reviewing it for voting the wrong way. > if it was grossly breaking GDPR or such I don't think the game or the company could stay up long How exactly do you propose that would happen? How would people learn their rights are being violated? Lastly this is your only comment on this site and it seems to be a tad slanted. Do you work for a party involved in this?

frou_dh 4y ago

It's seems like an anachronism that Steam games are able to install random junk on your system. Those game installers should be completely standardised and most importantly sandboxed. Similarly, IMO it feels shoddy when Steam acts as a "launcher for another launcher" when starting a game.

tempodox 4y ago
[flagged]
- dbeley 4y ago
  That's not true, games without DRMs installed through Steam can be launched without having Steam running. It all depends on the publisher's policy, Valve is just complying.
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    In fact sometimes it's required to do that for modded installs, because Steam can't be convinced to launch anything without force updating first anymore and breaks everything if you're not eternally vigilant. sigh I've resigned myself to mostly just buying anything I want to mod from GoG unless it has full Workshop integration.
- Farbklex 4y ago
  Except that it is actually useful and pioneered a bunch of user friendly features that no one else bothered to implement.
  - hinata08 4y ago
    It's not up to them to decide what user want. There should be this thing called 'Free Market', where you don't have to buy whatever stupid improvement is pushed onto the folks. But this platform was awesome for independent developers, who could use it to sell their game, get payments, do the license management, anti-piracy, some amount of support, and even make the installation straightforward for the user (so less support to offer) I can totally get why developers would use Steam to retail their games But let's not forget that clients can be a nuisance, and won't work if they just push features with no value. Games for Windows Live was a nightmare, for exemple

LeoPanthera 4y ago

This headline is a bit misleading. "Restricts accounts" just means they can't write reviews, and even then, only for 30 days.

t0bia_s 4y ago
So it's perfectly fine to censor users for limited time just for purpose of rise up sales? Misleading reviews are basically definition of fraud and wont make game any better.
Nicksil 4y ago
>just means they can't write reviews So, restricted.
KomoD 4y ago
It's not misleading, restricted is correct
usrusr 4y ago
"Restrict" is a 100% true description of what happened, there isn't the tiniest bit wrong about it. It's just your (our, I was afflicted by it myself) expectation that harsher measures are sugarcoated by deliberately inaccurate PR language. We can't blame the headline for our implicit expectation of incorrectness and neither can we blame the company responsible for a perceived lack of PR lies.
optionalsquid 4y ago
That's the term Valve themselves use when sanctioning accounts: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4F62-35F9-F395-5C23 https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4F62-35F9-F395-5C...

realworldperson 4y ago

[dead]

qwery 4y ago

The user that posted the review had their account returned to normal [0] around the time this was posted. They were told by Steam support that their "account was locked for promoting or posting malicious content" but the message didn't explicitly mention the review. Their review is still "banned" though. Steam support adds "We've gone ahead and removed the lock. In the future, please make sure you are not spamming or advertising" which makes it sound like it wasn't just the review they had a problem with. But trying to read into support agent messages is like reading tea leaves... [0] https://steamcommunity.com/app/1675900/discussions/0/6980058383072286962/?ctp=5#c6980058383076545327 https://steamcommunity.com/app/1675900/discussions/0/6980058...

voytec 4y ago
If the review is banned, it seems that the review in question was the reason for ban/lock. I wouldn't read into "please make sure you are not spamming or advertising". They could write "please make sure you are not harming anyone" and it would not suggest that the user attempted to do so. It's just a trashy, corporate replacement for "we fucked up and we're sorry".
- qwery 4y ago
  > If the review is banned, it seems that the review in question was the reason for ban/lock.\nI wouldn't read into "please make sure you are not spamming or advertising". Having said that, (that is what I said), the message was convincingly human for a support agent response. They didn't need to use so many words. [+also] > They could write "please make sure you are not harming anyone" and it would not suggest that the user attempted to do so. It would though, that's why they write things like that. The point is to reinforce that the recipient is/was at fault. They don't talk about specifics. It "makes it sound like it wasn't just the review they had a problem with". [+also] it didn't say "After careful consideration we've decided to uphold the original decision. We recognise that this may be distressing to you. xoxox YoursTubey"
  - TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
    There's always more to these stories. Always. And the full details almost never come to light.

squarefoot 4y ago

Although in a different context (negative reviews backfiring), this brought to mind something happened a while ago. https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/03/21/gaming-the-system-how-a-gaming-journalist-lost-his-job-over-a-negative-review/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/03/21/gaming-the-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Gerstmann https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Gerstmann

mabbo 4y ago

Valve benefits from having lots of people give honest reviews and marking reviews helpful. But now I'm not going to participate at all, for fear of losing access to all of my games. I'm sure many others will do the same. I wonder if it was worth it.

usrusr 4y ago
The article is quite clear about nobody losing access to their games. They were blocked from write access to the review system for a while, that's it.
- doetoe 4y ago
  I think the point is that they showed they may sanction you for unpredictable reasons, without justification.

duckqlz 4y ago

I don’t think that the anti cheat was doing anything shady. It’s pretty much industry standard to have the anticheat start from the registry and run in the background as a service. While I’m not advocating the general shadiness of anticheat software this doesn’t stand out as a particularly interesting case. Valorant is a great example once installed their anticheat is so pervasive I wouldn’t be surprised if a full OS reinstall didn’t wipe it. Then there is fortnite who advertises to use easy’s anti cheat solution on their splash screen (and they do) but then have multiple obfuscated and hidden running processes made by battleeye. Battle eye not only hides itself from the screen ask manager it also installs as a separate package which doesn’t uninstall with fortnite. I mean the games are free and very fun so it’s hard to be mad. I just heavily segregate my gaming pc from anything else on my network . I never browse the web on it or do anything but game and that makes me feel 1% better about the Orwellian nightmare of spy software sitting within it.

jeremyjh 4y ago
Have you considered using Nvidia Geforce Now? I switched to it when Fortnite became unavailable on Macs and I'll never go back to a physical gaming rig. It works so well, and there are no fans screaming. But not every game is available on it.

xg15 4y ago

I think you could sum up the entire discussion about anti-cheat sort of like this: We're currently at a point where game publishers expect to be able to install rootkits on their customers's PCs. This is seen as basically an industry standard security practice and general requirement for publishing. I think it's not quite unlike the situation with DRM in movies or ads and tracking on the web. In too many parts of tech, hostile behaviour has been normalised as "standard business practices".

nokya 4y ago
The problem I see with anti-cheat technology is that editors are also forcing these rootkits on games that can be played solo (either solo exclusively or multiplayer games with solo campaigns). While I can fully understand being forced to run anti-cheat technology on my PC to play online games, I find it totally unacceptable and unethical to have this kind of software forced upon me for games I exclusively play solo. I consider myself lucky to not need to worry at all about the financial cost of my hobby, I value gaming so much that I would even pay double for some of the games I played. But installing a rootkit on my PC is out of the question. Personally, until editors accept to treat their honest customers as honest customers (at least the solo players), I will not behave "honestly" and will keep using "alternative" ways to acquire games.
kmod 4y ago
While I'm with you on being against dark patterns and unethical behavior, anti-cheat feels different in that it seems pretty honestly an effort to make the game better for players (the non cheaters, at least). I haven't seen any arguments that anti-cheat is being used in the interests of the company over the user, it's all that people don't like the technology that's required to do this. So I think it's pretty different from DRM which is pretty clearly an interest misalignment. At the day yes no one likes this software, but people like gaming with cheaters even less. Just like how we don't like being subject to social media moderation, but we dislike spam even more. I think we can't rule out that these companies (in these instances) are trying to give us what we want even if the means are a bit unseemly.

irdc 4y ago

I don’t believe that what Valve is doing here, deleting a negative customer review of a good or service for sale, is even allowed under the EU e-Commerce directive. Edit: sure looks like it: https://www.loganpartners.com/legal-aspects-of-customer-reviews-search-rankings/ https://www.loganpartners.com/legal-aspects-of-customer-revi...

Xeoncross 4y ago

I've often wondered about escrow for cheat detection. I'll put $10, $100, $1000 up to enter the player pool at that X level. If someone catches me cheating and can provide evidence via game replays then they can submit it to a group that reviews and then the money is awarded to them. No bans, if I want to play again then I have to pay again or go back to the public level. In my experience, it's always the free product/game/saas tiers that have the abuse. Money is a great curb on bad behavior. Not perfect, but drastically reduces the pool of bad actors.

deweller 4y ago
This is a great use case for programmable money. A smart contract on a blockchain such as an Ethereum layer 2 chain could handle this openly and verifiably.
WhiteDawn 4y ago
Counterstrike through the ages used to be a paid product. After a ban your whole account was locked down, so in a practical sense it used to always have a 20-50 “escrow” fee to join the pool of legitimate players. Even today the cs:go “prime” status does a similar thing. It doesn’t seem to affect the number of cheaters in any way, if anything it leads to incentives of account stealing and underground exchanges of steam acc/keys. Personally I feel the cheating issue is more of a side effect of games moving away from dedicated servers with communities and towards global matchmaking. There used to be well run servers that would quickly kick-ban cheating players and have a social construct that incentivizes playing nice to keep access to the good servers. Not that practical today with all the battle royals and as with any “government” there is abuse and corruption, it wasn’t perfect but I do miss the days of servers that always had a admin online to shutdown cheaters and rules around minimum pings and bare-minimum sportsmanship in the voice chat.
- Xeoncross 4y ago
  Setting a $500 entry fee would quickly shrink the global pool to about the size of a dedicated server. Not that local server wouldn't still be an option as well if someone (or a group) wanted to run it. For people that just walk into the game though, I wouldn't mind paying to instantly have a well-curated global community without having to vet each server trying to find the good ones. Again though, for kids with more time I think there is room for both.

tantalor 4y ago

Simpler solution: avoid Windows

ChoGGi 4y ago

Something to keep an eye on for now, but it's Valve afterall. I think I'll dread the day Gabe steps down.

VLM 4y ago

Its 2023 all online reviews are hot garbage.

yarg 4y ago

> and the game's sales page removed until the claims were investigated by Valve, but this is not a perfect world. However, things didn't end there. Valve's response has not been ideal, but punishment before investigation isn't any better.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

rldjbpin 4y ago

feels like people are reading too much into this. it appears to be an oopsie by the ml system filtering for scam posts a la youtube. it is also possible that the support ticket response is an automated one and not written after manual review.