The Awful State of Steam

[Jon the VGNerd 885]

I'll give you folks a pretty long paragraph explaining a gaming platform which showcases an example on what happens when a popular platform like Steam becomes too popular for its own good. And that is Valve's own "moderation team", which is essentially run by bots that lack any and all basic human behavior, along with not being able to tell right from wrong when it comes to handling reports. Yeah, most folks would tell others to "report, block and move on", except 99% of the time it will never work. Why? Because reports are never looked into. At all. Even Reddit moderators would respond to reports much quicker than Steam... which really is saying something.

Yes, you can ignore these trolls. However, those are basically slaps on the wrists because trolls who have deliberately caused one trouble after the next somehow managed to get away, regardless of how many reports sent against them. You could report them dozens, maybe hundreds, of times, but the moderators at Valve are not interested in looking into reports, nor are they bothered to take any form of action. Oh sure, you can go to Steam Support and tell them what's going on, even provide screenshots as solid evidence. The reponse? They'll claim that they will "investigate", but in actuality, they will not take any form of action and just close the ticket nonchalantly. In other words, they're not at all interested in seeing your screenshots of offending users; they'll instead tell you to report, but they will never look into said reports, nor will they use their hammer except on their victims, go figure.

And Steam has its own forums which, to put it simply, is a complete dumpster fire. A free-for-all, if you will. Gatekeepers, keyboard warriors, backseat moderators, you name it. And unfortunately, they reign supreme. Yes, they get banned, but they're considered to be much less severe compared to harsher, unfair bans. Sure, you can try to appeal for the wrongful ban, but sadly, 99% of responses are "the ban was applied correctly"; no matter how honest you can be, Support will deliberately turn a cold shoulder on you. Really goes to show the lack of honesty from Valve themselves.

Oh sure, they have amazing games (barring bad ones and games that are delisted) and even make new friends, but dive deeper into the underbelly and you'll definitely discover the dark side of Steam. And if you want to venture what Steam's forums look like, read at your own risk. And if you post, then heaven forbid that someone doesn't stoke the flames and get away with it because they can and they will, and reports will mean nothing to Valve. Not at all. And even if you did follow Community Guidelines and Terms of Service, don't think Valve's bots masquerading as moderators will let you off the hook. You can follow the rules as much as possible, without even breaking a single rule even, but at the end of the day is where Valve considers their own community as expendable, whether they've broken the rules or not. And if Gabe Newell were to realize that "winning by doing absolutely nothing" isn't working in his favor, he'll start bringing actual moderators that can actually do their jobs, rather than withholding all of those valuable resources he and the higher-ups have. I wouldn't be surprised if within the next decade Steam starts to show their true colors which will result in their userbase migrating to other gaming platforms on PC.

But, that's just my two cents. Normally this should've been taken to the Life Advice section, but since this is Steam we're talking about, so I thought the Media Discussion would sound more appropriate. I'll leave it up to you guys.

[ZiggWheelsManning 9,914]

Imagine if you're playing any very long Star Wars game and Steam bans you, all that effort gone with the emotions dragging  Someone caring better rescue it.  

[Espy Vibe 4,250]

2 hours ago, Jon the VGNerd said:

And Steam has its own forums which, to put it simply, is a complete dumpster fire.

The last time I looked in their forums, people were trying to "own" the devs of a game because they didn't have plans to allow players to shoot NPCs even though there are guns in the game that NPCs use.

At first, it sounds weird for the devs to decide until it's understood that the point of the game is to be a private investigator and solve crimes in an open world, where law enforcement will go to the scene but make a big mess of it and fail at bringing murderers to justice. If you had a gun and shot everyone, then there'd literally be no murders to investigate (unless you want to investigate your own murders), but idk people are incredibly adamant that they want to do that. Plus, it's funner to sneak into places and avoid security cameras (just to find out that lead is a dead end lol).

 

And, the last time I posted there (which wasn't much to begin with), it was for a different game where I was suggesting the devs give more purpose for performing stunts with cars. Basically, they had a section in the tutorial where you can perform stunts in the air but it's essentially useless to do. If it helped refuel the boost meters, gave more XP, in-game cash, etc. for longer or riskier stunts, and if the AI were performing them at all, it could encourage that feature to be used by players because then there'd be a real reason to perform them. Especially so if you were in a pinch for extra boost (there are places around the track that refuel boost, but there's more places where it's just dead) you can perform a trick to help keep the speed going.

A response I got was a nasty one where someone (not a dev, just a random person) told me that my idea was unrealistic for the cars to do. That's paraphrasing it very lightly and I got rid of the part where they attacked me as a person for no reason.

Excuse me? We're literally talking about a Hotwheels game here. HOTWHEELS! It's literally one of the most unrealistic franchises to ever exist. Let's make it as unrealistic and fun as possible, no?

I only bothered to suggest something to make the game more engaging because I noticed the devs can put extreme detail in the game. After every race, all of the cars have little fingerprints, scraped paint, and tiny dents on them. That's a HUGE attention to detail that shows that, even though there are no humans, it's as if this were the imagination of someone playing with their tiny toy cars. (They also listen to people at least, IIRC for cars they completely got rid of the lootboxes and now it's a time-based shop with in-game currency only because of criticism of the lootboxes in the first game).

That's not even getting into the obvious stuff that you'd expect out of Hotwheels. But, whatever, according to a random guy I'm basically an "idiot" for suggesting something that could make the game more fun, engaging and competitive. Even now, as the game stands doing any tricks does literally nothing other than be disorientating because the camera is tacked on in a way that will make you dizzy. Or at least it makes me dizzy.

 

In the grand scheme of things, that's probably the tamest on Steam but it's put me off of engaging with all Steam communities. If it's even worse than that then idk what to say. I'll stick to myself with singleplayer games, thanks.

Edited November 12 by A mysterious air dancer

[Jon the VGNerd 885]

Yeah, engaging on Steam on the forums is like trekking through a lot of landmines. Which is why I mentioned that Valve's moderation is absolutely abysmal and there needs to be serious changes, or Steam will slowly sink itself under. I'm just currently waiting for any skilled artist to make both the PFP and avatar artworks.

[EpicEnergy 23,173]

Sounds like YouTube demonetization, video removal, and appeal system, cause you get your videos taken down by moderation bots and your appeals are declined by moderation bots too, very rare for an actual human to look into things. Steam moderation must be bad for it to be comparable to that of YouTube and Reddit lol

And I've seen some posts on the Steam forums for several video games, there's lots of hostility in many discussions I've seen. But I don't even bother to look at the Steam forums anymore unless it's for a game guide or if I'm running into a problem in a specific game.