What the fuck lol. Only allowing reviews randomly? Watching this store from afar has been far more entertaining than any free game they could have given me lol
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The Epic Games Store “Ratings and Polls” update
- Thread starter dex3108
- Start date
You don't even know if a player got the games free (or a key) like on steam, this will be abused a lot by dev, just farm the game, like steam, and go way with it, no one can verified anythin, there isn't even a bad emoji, the game crash ? give it "great boss batlles"
I'm surprised to see a 5 star system when afaik the research has shown that people tend to either vote for 5 or 1 star anyway. Amazon is the only place I can think of that still uses it.
Outside of the obvious issue of busted games that aren't worth playing for two hours, I wonder how this applies to live service games. If a huge update brings my score up or down, would I be allowed to edit my review?
Not showing the total number of reviews seems really sus to me, that type of info should be readily available since people understand that 5/5 with 10 reviews is very different than 5/5 with 100 reviews. There should probably be a minimum review count like Metacritic has.
Outside of the obvious issue of busted games that aren't worth playing for two hours, I wonder how this applies to live service games. If a huge update brings my score up or down, would I be allowed to edit my review?
Not showing the total number of reviews seems really sus to me, that type of info should be readily available since people understand that 5/5 with 10 reviews is very different than 5/5 with 100 reviews. There should probably be a minimum review count like Metacritic has.
I think they're probably are doing something like your second paragraph. I'm guessing there's a cohort system where X% of players who pass the 2 hour threshold are offered a review prompt.
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Steam's most front-facing indicator of player reception is on a fresh/rotten type scale.
Epic's five-point scale is a greater departure from that.
It's the lack of written reviews that kind of trivializes this for me.
Multiple games have been reviewbombed by tankies and racists due to the developers taking a pro-Ukraine stance in the current Ukraine-Russia conflict. Most notably Cyberpunk 2077.
The reviews specifically call CDPR "liars" and "nazis" instead of saying why the reviewers think CDPR are liars and nazis (because they support Russia and actually believe Putin's bullshit that Ukraine is a fascist Nazi state). Someone could easily see the reviews at first glance and buy into the narrative that CDPR must have put racist content in their game and lied about it instead of, you know, simply supporting Ukraine and blocking sales from Russia. And while I personally think stopping sales of games in Russia is missing the point, the reason these people made these reviews is because CDPR is unequivocally supporting Ukraine.
And yes, I know there's counters to this argument - "But the reviewbombs of CP2077 when the game sucked were a good thing," "Well, anyone with a brain could tell these reviewbombs are bullshit," "Valve has been getting better at countering these reviewbombs," "The positives of reviewbombs outweigh the negatives," etc etc. I still personally think the potential for reviewbombs to push harmful narratives outweighs the positive aspects.
There's also examples on other sites, like how TLOU2 was reviewbombed for having LGBT content on metacritic. I had friends asking me "Hey why are people saying TLOU2 is so bad?" because the reviewbombs got so much attention on discussion sites and the press. It literally rocketed a vocal minority to the spotlight and made people think they were the majority even though by all account the game was a huge financial and critical success.
Randomly selecting players at a random play session will inherently favor players who player larger amounts of the game in question and are thereby more likely to leave positive feedback.
Trash anti-player system
Trash anti-player system
OP
OP
Call me cynical but I wouldn't be suprised if this shit targeted people who their sales data/library data indicstes they'll probably give a more favourable review and if you give poor reviews you probably get put on the backseat as a troublemaker.
I fucking hate the review bombing panic. User reviews are a valuable tool and this panic over review bombing just gives companies room to remove that tool for their benefit. As people have shown in this thread Steam's solution to review bombing is much better than this.
I feel like the thread is incomplete without saying that this is not a replacement for a review hence the name "rating". Review system is still in the "Futur Development 4-6 month" on the Epic Store trello : https://trello.com/c/25E7HXcl/20-user-reviews
I'm not sure how they are going to mix the 2 though. Review with only text and no score ?
I'm not sure how they are going to mix the 2 though. Review with only text and no score ?
You literally left out the entire part of my post where I explain my view. I experienced it firsthand with TLOU2.
Also, yes, I see the screenshots of Steam removing the reviews after the fact. Unless I'm missing something, the screenshot in the article I posted points to the reviews being counted at the time.
Look, I know I'm not going to be changing minds here. Just wanted to give my two cents.
It's one of the remnants from the early days of EGS where game journalists swallowed ererything Epic said raw and regurgitated it for months after. There were so many people who obviously never used them talking about how useless bad terrible user reviews were. You would think every other game was unfairly review bombed based on the discourse back then.
You literally left out the entire part of my post where I explain my view. I experienced it firsthand with TLOU2.
Also, yes, I see the screenshots of Steam removing the reviews after the fact. Unless I'm missing something, the screenshot in the article I posted points to the reviews being counted at the time.
Look, I know I'm not going to be changing minds here. Just wanted to give my two cents.
What you're missing is that the article you linked went up within 24 hours of the "beginning" of the "review bomb timeframe" and as such the system simply didn't had the opportunity to catch it yet.
This is a very strange review system, and I'd argue it's almost as if they are trying avert transparency.
Sample size will be completely unknown, and the method of "random sampling" is completely nebulous. You have to "trust" Epic is weighting and sampling reviews proportionaltely, and that they are not making adjustment scoring to misrepresent or bias user scoring for their own interests.
Yes, this system can block some cases of review bombing, but not all, and there will be no visibility of what is happening with just a score and no commentary.
There is also no quantification for the timeline of changes in these reviews. When does the sampling take place, what is its size etc. There is no way to track change of quality over time and for what reasons and direction player sentiment changes and game dev itself progresses.
There are plenty of cases where so-called "review bombing" has actually been rational, and resulted in important change (eg Doom Eternal, where they reveresed course on their anti-cheat security measures, and even contacted reviewers including me to try and get a re-evaluation with the new update)
There's also no visibility on whether users received the game in good faith via purchase, or for other means (marketing, free, bundles, trials, keys etc)
Tags are equally strange, as these will be predefined by Epic by the sounds of it, with no flexibility towards burgeoning or experimental games with unique qualities.
OP has done a nice job of highlighting some of this. Also Steam has granted us a wealth of examples of the types of "review bombing", ranging from negative, positive and constructive.
An ideal system for PC gaming is very similar to Steam's. All the data is fully available, can sort by Steam or key purchases, view the entire timeline and like points of interest positive or negative, also zone in on review bombing periods AND define for yourself the rationale or relevance. You can also sort reviews geographically and by time period, so it becomes clear when certain communities have issues. And most criticially, you actually get a rationale for the recommendation itself and choose whether these are valid or not.
Sample size will be completely unknown, and the method of "random sampling" is completely nebulous. You have to "trust" Epic is weighting and sampling reviews proportionaltely, and that they are not making adjustment scoring to misrepresent or bias user scoring for their own interests.
Yes, this system can block some cases of review bombing, but not all, and there will be no visibility of what is happening with just a score and no commentary.
There is also no quantification for the timeline of changes in these reviews. When does the sampling take place, what is its size etc. There is no way to track change of quality over time and for what reasons and direction player sentiment changes and game dev itself progresses.
There are plenty of cases where so-called "review bombing" has actually been rational, and resulted in important change (eg Doom Eternal, where they reveresed course on their anti-cheat security measures, and even contacted reviewers including me to try and get a re-evaluation with the new update)
There's also no visibility on whether users received the game in good faith via purchase, or for other means (marketing, free, bundles, trials, keys etc)
Tags are equally strange, as these will be predefined by Epic by the sounds of it, with no flexibility towards burgeoning or experimental games with unique qualities.
OP has done a nice job of highlighting some of this. Also Steam has granted us a wealth of examples of the types of "review bombing", ranging from negative, positive and constructive.
An ideal system for PC gaming is very similar to Steam's. All the data is fully available, can sort by Steam or key purchases, view the entire timeline and like points of interest positive or negative, also zone in on review bombing periods AND define for yourself the rationale or relevance. You can also sort reviews geographically and by time period, so it becomes clear when certain communities have issues. And most criticially, you actually get a rationale for the recommendation itself and choose whether these are valid or not.
OP
OP
Until Reviews are introduced this is only way to "review" game on Epic Store so criticism is valid. On top of that leaving developer option to turn on or off reviews when they want is bad. For example here are no ratings for Battlefield 2042 on Epic Store, is that because developer opted out or because nobody is playing game there or because Epic didn't add it to that game.
I don't understand people who think that review bombing is a good reason to make a less transparent and more difficult to understand and engage-with review system. The transparency of Steam reviews and the detailed information you can see beyond the initial "score" makes it extremely easy to know WHY a product has the score it has. This EGS system is not an improvement - limiting access for reviewers (likely creating a bias where the most engaged players will be prompted for reviews) and limiting the information they can provide (no written reviews?) while also not providing any of the context Steam provides (reviews over time, off-topic filtering, tags, most helpful reviews, most recent reviews) sounds like a pure downgrade to me.
I didn't say it shouldn't be criticised but everyone here assume it's replacement for review despite that not being the case (According to Epic anyway, they are so late on their dev roadmap who know what they'll do)
Can you even opt out of Rating ? The news doesn't say so if that the case (or I missed it). Forcing rating on all games but not review would be odd
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OP
OP
We don't know how exactly work behind the scenes But as i said we already have games on the store without rating.
Steam User Reviews in general are more useful than any other reviews out there.
I have gotten so much more use out of steam reviews than I have ever gotten out of review outlets or even youtubers.
If its representative of peoples experiences playing the game. Which Steam reviews certainly aren't, because they're self selecting.
But you need to be randomly selected for it to counted towards the average, and you have to be above 2 hours. No possible way to know if it's based on 4 votes or 82,449 votes. I'm not sure what you mean by that last part.
The rating system seems pretty dumb and primarily concerned with pushing positive ratings, i.e. only asking for a review after at least 2 hours and presumably biasing towards players who play multiple sessions beyond that point. Reminds me of mobile game tactics, although in this case it's actually impossible to leave a negative review unless you keep playing out of spite. I'd be kinda shocked if any game ends up with less than 3-4 stars with such a system, but that's probably the idea.
I get the impression that Epic is so laser-focused on preventing "review bombing" that they lost sight of everything else. Separating the rating from the "polls" makes it difficult to tell why people rated the game high or low. For comparison, Steam's reviews are useful right now, but they wouldn't be if I couldn't read them.
And if you can only rate the game when given the opportunity at random, then that means you're not rating the game when you think you've formed enough of an opinion. You're more likely to either rate the game too early, when you don't think you've seen enough of the game yet, or too late, when your impressions may no longer be fresh. Or not at all. And the poll system just appears to be an annoying survey that tries to collect basic information that really should be collected by other means.
And if you can only rate the game when given the opportunity at random, then that means you're not rating the game when you think you've formed enough of an opinion. You're more likely to either rate the game too early, when you don't think you've seen enough of the game yet, or too late, when your impressions may no longer be fresh. Or not at all. And the poll system just appears to be an annoying survey that tries to collect basic information that really should be collected by other means.
Thinking about it more, I think the biggest issue with their concept is requiring 2hrs of playtime means that you're self selecting for people who could tolerate the game for at least two hours, which biases you away from an entire set of legitimate reviewers who bounced off it earlier than that. Most games I've bought and not geled with I've alt-f4'd before 2hrs are up.
Also I can completely empathise with people who'd find it annoying to be prompted, esp since I'm one of those people.
Honestly I think Steam's system of binding it to people who own keys (though they might have been free or whatever) and just giving you the information as neutrally as they know how is pretty excellent. If something gets review bombed you can tell and ignore it (or intentionally not ignore it if it's the kind of review bombing you support).
Also I can completely empathise with people who'd find it annoying to be prompted, esp since I'm one of those people.
Honestly I think Steam's system of binding it to people who own keys (though they might have been free or whatever) and just giving you the information as neutrally as they know how is pretty excellent. If something gets review bombed you can tell and ignore it (or intentionally not ignore it if it's the kind of review bombing you support).
These are all good points that I didn't consider at first. The lack of transparency in a game's rating, even missing basic information like the number of respondents, is an especially serious issue.
I will also add that the ratings are buried too deep within the store pages. For an example, I went to the Rocket League page, and I had to hit page down four times to get to the rating. If I hadn't been looking for it, I wouldn't have seen it at all. And even then, it just says 4.6 stars with no clarification other than some blurbs from the polls that say "Obsessive Gameplay" and "Extremely Fun". The one thing that might turn out to be a positive aspect is that one of the poll blurbs says "Quickly Understood Controls", but even that is too generic to actually tell me very much.
On an almost entirely unrelated note, it still bugs me that the main page of EGS will sometimes (but not always) remap your page up/page down keys to other functions. Sometimes you can press page down and have it work normally, and then press it again and have it do something else, just because you're farther down the page now.
A random sample of people who have played the game a significant amount of time is a good basis for a rating, potentially better than opt in systems like Steam. Though its reliant on there being a decent response rate, or it will be just as bad as Steam/metacritic user scores.
They shouldn't show a score unless there's a decent number of reviews, that's something they could stand to clarify.
Because they reflect the opinions of the tiny proportion of players motivated to post a review, which isn't representative of anything. Review bombing is simply the most visible symptom of this issue, they're innately flawed.
I'd like to see Epic release an Apple Silicon/M1-native version of their storefront. Currently Mac versions of games on the Epic store can only run through Rosetta, which is a bummer. Steam introduced M1 support late last year.
That said, the Epic launcher has been making slow but gradual progress over the past few years. (Sort of like Steam in its early years.) It's got a lot more features than it once did.
That said, the Epic launcher has been making slow but gradual progress over the past few years. (Sort of like Steam in its early years.) It's got a lot more features than it once did.
And it's not a random number, by making it 2 hours they instantly avoid any review from people who end up asking for a refund.
If this is an important metric to you, you can filter the reviews on Steam to only show reviews with a certain amount of playtime.
I don't see how having tools available is worse than a lack of tools.
The exact same could be said about Epic's system? In fact, since it's selective about who gets to vote, it is even less representative of the community.
I don`t think I agree. You should also always read the reviews rather than just looking at the aggregate score. When you do that I see no merit to your point.
The point is the random selection. Tools are irrelevant, filtered garbage data is still garbage.
Random sampling is better than a twitter poll
This is never true.
Review bombing is a terribly toxic method of trying to politicize or signal boost questionable decisions. for every 1 time it's to highlight the broken state of the game or the incredibly terrible boycott worthy culture the developer is a part of, there's 9 other times review bombing is used because people are just assholes.
We need a better way to exclude those other 9 times.
Yeah I don't see how Epic's system is somehow solving the "motivation" issue.
"sometimes"
Sometimes there is no other way to get through to devs about how shitty their decisions are. Consumers have basically no other recourse. It's why there are always shit square enix PC ports on EGS because there is no way to hold them accountable. The only reason we got a Nier Automata patch is because the game was review bombed and they didn't want that mark when they were releasing Nier Replicant.
And people who want to do bad faith bullshit will still do so with the EGS poll crap, as an end user you now just won't be able to tell if people are being bad human beings or if they are criticizing legitimate issues with the game.
OP
OP
Review bombing is rare on Steam in any form compared to number of games on the store. Vast majority of review bombing on Steam was done due to anticonsumer moves by publisher/developer.
Ok fair enough, but my argument still stands.
There needs to be a better way because the current methods make it more of a joke than a meaningful way to draw attention to game/studio issues worth ignoring a purchase.