Except that you are dismissing their absolutely horrible consumer practices because they have "done some good things." I am not and never said it discredits everything else they have done. I just dont think people should continue to ignore and forgive their illegal practices because of what they think valve has done. Its like saying Bob may be a rapist but its okay because hes a really great guy and gives a lot to charity.NuclearKangaroo said:
Cleaning up Steam, your suggestions?
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yes, selling bad games is EXACTLY like raping somebodyLittle Gray said:
did you by any chance miss the part in which i said "while i dont think is right for them to allow a broken game to be sold..." the thing is calling valve anti-customer because of some very few mistakes theyve made is completely unfair
Well you missed my point admirably on most of that.BigTuk said:
You can continue to believe that libertarianism is the best way to go about things on a store. And maybe Steam will believe that too. Fine, Steam just isn't the store for me anymore if that's going to be how it operates. I just don't have the time/energy to do the expected level of research on every potential purchase to make sure I'm not getting ripped off. Because if I do get ripped off, then Steam effectively goes "Haha, you stupid bastard". And I lose.
I don't want to act as though my purchasing behaviour is a battle of wits between Steam/devs and my diligence with google. But that's the way it's going. So I won't play along. Like I said in my first post in this thread, I've stopped looking for new games on Steam because I just don't have the patience. If I buy an indie game, now, it's only because of near-unanimous positive word of mouth.
As for this:
That's some of the most anti-consumer stuff I've ever seen posted. I'm sorry, but I'm glad you aren't actually in charge of making consumer laws, because we'd be totally fucked.
But whatever. We're clearly at a tremendous impasse. You aren't going to persuade me, and I clearly won't persuade you.
of course valve is a business ive never said otherwise, they dont go out of their way to screw over customers, and for me thats worth a lot, plus theres some stuff they do that shows they do care atleast a little bit for their customersVilealbaniandwarf said:
http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/06/27/steam-workshop-now-lets-creators-give-back-to-their-supporters/
http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/12/25/left-4-dead-2-is-free-on-steam-until-tomorrow/
the thing with quality control is, it might not be the best solution and Valve knows this, they are trying to move to a more self-publishing model, and having to check every single game that gets into steam might just make the whole thing clunkier, it wasnt that long ago back when indie devs complained about how hard it was to get into steam, i dont think Valve wants steam to go back to those days
as much as i love Valve and Steam, im not afriad to critize them, i just think your solution would the best for the direction Valve wants for Steam
like i said im not sure thats the best solutionVilealbaniandwarf said:
but improving the customer service when it comes to refunds might be a great way to deter broken games from appearing on the store, since devs wouldnt get money off of them
They should at least check if the game actually runs, keep shovelware away from the frontpage and maybe tone that whole early access nonsense down a bit.
Releasing a game with no executable should not be possible!
Technical stuff like this should be a pretty agreeable basis for quality control.
Anything beyond that, I'm not so sure.
Apples esoteric "quality control" has fucked many a game developer over, we don't really want that.
Releasing a game with no executable should not be possible!
Technical stuff like this should be a pretty agreeable basis for quality control.
Anything beyond that, I'm not so sure.
Apples esoteric "quality control" has fucked many a game developer over, we don't really want that.
I don't understand some of the arguments of "Buyer Beware" and "VALVe shouldn't do quality control, it's the customer's job to research!"
One of my favorite bad arguments is "VALVe's a business! What do you expect?"
Let's imagine that we are all VALVe, or any generic business, maybe a furniture franchise, at a board room meeting. We're talking about "how to improve the user experience when using our platform." If you suggested that the customer should just do their own research when looking through their products and not offer any method of discerning quality, people would look at you like you're speaking in tounges. The point of a business is to make money, and they make money through pleasing the customers.
Think about this issue from an actual businesses' perspective; when, in the history of selling goods and services to customers, has making your customers do most of the heavy work been a good thing and streamlining any interactions between business and customers a bad thing? Companies constantly try to streamline the process for their customers so they can exchange money faster, quicker, and more efficiently. There is no reason why VALVe cannot and should not implement streamlined UI, incorporate some system of basic quality control, or any other things to improve what is right now a pretty slapdash and unregulated mess.
You are the customer, act like it, why the hell would you defend VALVe's right to not make navigating and finding actual quality games in the store easier? It's okay to feel entitled in certain scenarios regarding consumer rights, no matter how small or negligible those rights are. Some of these may be minor things, sure, but it is VALVe's job to impress us and cater to our needs, not the other way around.
One of my favorite bad arguments is "VALVe's a business! What do you expect?"
Let's imagine that we are all VALVe, or any generic business, maybe a furniture franchise, at a board room meeting. We're talking about "how to improve the user experience when using our platform." If you suggested that the customer should just do their own research when looking through their products and not offer any method of discerning quality, people would look at you like you're speaking in tounges. The point of a business is to make money, and they make money through pleasing the customers.
Think about this issue from an actual businesses' perspective; when, in the history of selling goods and services to customers, has making your customers do most of the heavy work been a good thing and streamlining any interactions between business and customers a bad thing? Companies constantly try to streamline the process for their customers so they can exchange money faster, quicker, and more efficiently. There is no reason why VALVe cannot and should not implement streamlined UI, incorporate some system of basic quality control, or any other things to improve what is right now a pretty slapdash and unregulated mess.
You are the customer, act like it, why the hell would you defend VALVe's right to not make navigating and finding actual quality games in the store easier? It's okay to feel entitled in certain scenarios regarding consumer rights, no matter how small or negligible those rights are. Some of these may be minor things, sure, but it is VALVe's job to impress us and cater to our needs, not the other way around.
well recently people discovered valve is testing some sort of report feature precisely to avoid something like rapelay and other problematic products finding its way into the storeVilealbaniandwarf said:
http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/03/13/steam-will-allow-you-to-report-a-product-for-malware-pornography-other-reasons/
its a better solution than quality control i just hope it doesnt get abused like game tags initially where, since the abuse could have far worse consequences than some vandalism and i hope you dont actually have to buy shitty games in order to report em
This is rather insignificant, but allow renaming or manual sorting of games in your library. Certain series like Tomb Raider, Hitman, have inconsistent naming conventions, which makes working out release order a bit irritating - especially when the number in the series isn't included in the title.
And it would be so easy to incorporate into the Steam client!
And it would be so easy to incorporate into the Steam client!
apparently you can report games for pedophilia. which if Valve isn't checking the games they put up on steam for that, I don'y think they can be trusted to due content quality control.NuclearKangaroo said:
also they talked extensively about this on polaris podcast this week. it was basically the only thing they talked about.
The problem comes when these no name publishers take their old shovelware games from 2005 and put them on the steam store bit by bit and they get first page "new release" status alongside other ACTUALLY new and potentially good games.Rayne360 said:
There's so many games released every day now (most are crap or early access too) that the actually good games dont have a very long shelf life on the "New releases" page, which TB has shown directly correlates to increased sales. They're just getting pushed out by all the shovelware. Also some of these games we're seeing now ARE barely playable. Have you seen TB's Guise of the Wolf video? or his Desert Gunner one? These should not be allowed to masquerade as actual games with all the other real, working games, and they should not be allowed to charge actual money for them.
OT:
Steam actually does have a "Recommended" tab on the store page. You get it by hovering your mouse over store and clicking "Recommended" from the dropdown menu. I never actually use it though so idk how functional it is.
I like the new tags feature for steam games but it seems like Valve is spending a lot of time curating that instead of the actual games it posted. They are banning plenty of tags, including many useful ones like "bad port" and "Mobile port" which are actually important tags for some people. Instead of moderating their tags they should be moderating their games.
This is so annoying with Heroes games, since Ubisoft, for some rather stupid reason[footnote]Well, technically they probably do want to group the entire M&M franchise together...which still doesn't make much sense as "of Might and Magic" is a well established naming convention for literally decades. In fact, one of these decades belongs to Ubisoft themselves. And even then, most of the time nobody refers to the games by the full name - Heroes is enough to identify the game, same with Dark Messiah and so on. The namespacing is not really needed and actually gets in the way. So yes, the naming convention is rather stupid overall[/footnote] decided to name the new one Might & Magic Heroes 6, rather than Heroes of Might & Magic which means any time I need to find it, I go to "H" first, then scroll to "M" after briefly wandering why am I missing a game. It's annoying. And for the times I don't use the client to launch it (for, I actually have those things called "shortcuts" which I use to launch games from) I am still mislead, for I immediately go to the more recognisable icon of Heroes 3 SOD and then I need to find the new one again.OneCatch said:
At any rate - a possible solution is adding the games to a category in the client[footnote]which lets me get back to my gripe with Ubisoft - WE CAN ALREADY HAVE OUR M&M FRANCHISE TOGETHER. If we choose to, at least. The namespacing is doubly idiotic when you take into account that we DON'T NEED IT in order get its effects. You can have categories in Steam or just groups of shortcuts on your PC. Pretty much any way of launching the games would offer some way of grouping them. And that is IF one even wants them grouped - technically M&M itself is really rather different than Heroes, so I, at least, would not want them in the same place - I would prefer to have games similar games together, so games like Heroes would be with Heroes, not...other completely unrelated stuff.[/footnote]. Not an ideal solution at all, but a solution, at least.
I agree with Totalbiscuit's point that better filters should be employed, and companies should be obliged to publicize when their games were first released, rather than simply that they're "new to Steam".
...But as far as curation goes, I suspect it's a manpower issue. It doesn't take much time for someone to note that a dozen titles are new and hot on any given day, but going through hundreds or thousands to distinguish that game X from 2003 is a cult classic but game Y from 2003 is shovelware is the sort of thing that could require multiple new positions entirely devoted to the task. What separates Valve from many other companies, in a big part, is that it's a relatively small company in which people are free to pursue passion products. Hiring on people to do such drudgery isn't exactly their usual modus operandi.
...But as far as curation goes, I suspect it's a manpower issue. It doesn't take much time for someone to note that a dozen titles are new and hot on any given day, but going through hundreds or thousands to distinguish that game X from 2003 is a cult classic but game Y from 2003 is shovelware is the sort of thing that could require multiple new positions entirely devoted to the task. What separates Valve from many other companies, in a big part, is that it's a relatively small company in which people are free to pursue passion products. Hiring on people to do such drudgery isn't exactly their usual modus operandi.
the system isnt in place yet, Valve wants to move Steam to a self publishing model in the future, thats what the system is forweirdo8977 said: