Valve’s new anti review bomb measures kick in to protect Borderlands and Borderlands 2’s aggregate review score

Valve’s new anti-review bomb measures – a system that prevents “off-topic” reviews from affecting a game’s aggregate score on Steam – are seemingly working.

Defining a review bomb as one where the focus is on a topic that Valve considers unrelated to the actual satisfaction of a game, Valve announced last month it was introducing a new tool that identifies any anomalous review activity on all games on Steam.

According to Steam DB, the new feature has already stripped in excess of 4000 negative reviews from 2K’s Borderlands and Borderlands 2 Steam storefronts after fans hit back at 2K’s decision to enter into an exclusivity partnership with the Epic Store for Borderlands 3 on PC.

Borderlands 2 is the first game on Steam to make use of the “off-topic reviews” marking. Over 4000 reviews are excluded from the rating calculation. pic.twitter.com/kUMN0Lqdx3

— Steam Database (@SteamDB) April 6, 2019

Valve announced the new measures in March, hoping to control review bombing and “ensure [reviews are] accurate and trustworthy”. While the system does not censor written reviews on the site, prospective purchasers are less likely to be misled by a negative aggregate score on the game’s storefront.

Borderlands 3 will release September 13th, 2019, exclusively for PC on the Epic Games Store. It is expected to open up to other PC platforms in April 2020. 

“Hi! What part of “2K/Take Two has exclusive publishing rights for Borderlands 3 and makes all decisions regarding price-points, territories, distribution and platform partnerships. Please direct all inquiries regarding any of those topics to 2K.” do you not understand? Love you!” Pitchford said in a tweet, responding to fan backlash. “As a customer, I’m happy to shop in different stores – already do! I’ve bought games from Xbox, Playstation, Switch, Steam, Origin, GOG, Humble, Uplay, Epic and other stores. To me, exclusives are fine when they come w/ advantages and when they are short – say, six months.

“For what it’s worth, 2K’s decisions aside, myself and the team at Gearbox have a very keen interest in cross-platform play,” he concluded. “We believe multi-platform support is a pre-requisite and Epic’s leadership with cross-platform support is helpful to our interests there.”