Steam counters Borderlands 1 and 2 review-bombing
New measures appear to be working.
Steam's new anti-review bombing measures appear to be working.
Borderlands 1 and 2 suffered review-bombing on Steam after 2K announced Borderlands 3 will be a six-month timed exclusive on the Epic Games store.
But Valve's new anti-review bombing measures have kicked in, and these "off-topic" reviews are excluded from the review score by default.
Currently, a message is displayed on the Steam pages for both Borderlands 1 and 2 warning a "period(s) of off-topic review activity" was detected.
According to Twitter account Steam Database, Borderlands 2 was the first game to make use of the new counter-measure, with over 4000 reviews excluded from the calculation.
It's an encouraging sign. Valve has often come under fire multiple times for inaction on Steam issues. Indeed, recently Metro games suffered review-bombing after Metro Exodus launched as a timed Epic Games store exclusive.
However, while these Borderlands 1 and 2's review-bomb scores are excluded from the overall user score by default, they're still live on Steam, if people want to read them. And, as expected, most are complaints about Borderlands 3 launching first on the Epic Games store.
Meanwhile, Epic's drive for exclusives shows no sign of slowing down, despite the controversy over its effort to establish its store.