| 1 | 0Valve Explains How It Decides Who's a 'Straight Up Troll' Publishing Video Games On Steam (vice.com) null/SLASHDOT/0102640946 70\r |
| 2 | i Thursday September 06, 2018 @11:30PM (BeauHD)\r |
| 3 | i from the behind-the-scenes dept.\r |
| 4 | i\r |
| 5 | i An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard:\r |
| 6 | i Wednesday, Valve, the company that operates the huge online\r |
| 7 | i video game store Steam, shared more details about how it plans\r |
| 8 | i to control and moderate the ever-increasing number of games\r |
| 9 | i published on its platform. In the post published Wednesday,\r |
| 10 | i Valve shared more details about how it determines what it\r |
| 11 | i considers "outright trolling." "It is vague and we'll tell you\r |
| 12 | i why," Valve wrote. "You're a denizen of the internet so you\r |
| 13 | i know that trolls come in all forms. On Steam, some are simply\r |
| 14 | i trying to rile people up with something we call 'a game shaped\r |
| 15 | i object' (ie: a crudely made piece of software that technically\r |
| 16 | i and just barely passes our bar as a functioning video game but\r |
| 17 | i isn't what 99.9% of folks would say is "good.") Valve goes on\r |
| 18 | i to explain that some trolls are trying to scam folks out of\r |
| 19 | i their Steam inventory items (digital items that can be traded\r |
| 20 | i for real money), while others are trying to generate a small\r |
| 21 | i amount of money through a variety of schemes that have to do\r |
| 22 | i with how developers use keys to unlock Steam games, while\r |
| 23 | i others are trying to "incite and sow discord." "Trolls are\r |
| 24 | i figuring out new ways to be loathsome as we write this," Valve\r |
| 25 | i said. "But the thing these folks have in common is that they\r |
| 26 | i aren't actually interested in good faith efforts to make and\r |
| 27 | i sell games to you or anyone. When a developer's motives aren't\r |
| 28 | i that, they're probably a troll." One interesting observation\r |
| 29 | i Valve shares in the blog post is that it rarely bans\r |
| 30 | i individual games from Steam, and more often bans developers\r |
| 31 | i and/or publishers entirely. [...] Valve said that its review\r |
| 32 | i process for determining that something may be a "troll game"\r |
| 33 | i is a "deep assessment" that involves investigating who the\r |
| 34 | i developer is, what they've done in the past, their behavior on\r |
| 35 | i Steam as a developer, as a customer, their banking\r |
| 36 | i information, developers they associate with, and more.\r |
| 37 | i\r |