Steam has lastly removed these goddamn clown awards
Steam has introduced a huge change to its neighborhood awards system meaning they not confer Steam factors to awardees and, thank god, has freed us all from that one jester icon that folks would unthinkingly hand out to any content material they discovered offensive or idiotic.
In case you’ve ever dipped right into a sport’s Steam boards, or its guides, or its critiques, you have most likely seen one thing: an entire lot of the stuff posted there completely blows. On the one hand, hey, it is the web, proper? However even among the many slurry you could find anyplace on-line, Steam’s neighborhood hubs have lengthy stood out for being particularly tedious and crammed with rage-baiting content material.
In principle, a high-quality thought—a approach for the neighborhood to work together with one another and to offer little reveals of recognition to stuff they like. In apply? A nightmare. Every neighborhood award additionally got here with a small variety of Steam factors that awarded customers might spend in, effectively, the Steam Factors Store, and customers would usually award a specific icon—the jester, which seemed like a clown—to content material they thought was offensive or silly. You see the place that is going: a vicious cycle the place trolls have been straight incentivised to publish trash-tier content material to take in the jester awards and ensuing Steam factors.
However much more significant is that neighborhood awards not award factors. “We discovered that [awarding points] inspired and rewarded a slender set of attention-grabbing content material and did not enable the main focus to be as a lot on a broader pool of considerate, well-considered inventive content material,” says Valve. So even when one of many new awards does turn into a byword for ‘get a load of this fool,’ trolls will not be incentivised with Steam factors to publish ineffective content material. Additionally, Steam not fingers out profile badges for giving or receiving these new awards.
The brand new awards all price the identical quantity—500 Steam factors—and any you accrue may be displayed in a brand new showcase you’ll be able to stick in your Steam profile. “The Second Version set of Group Awards is deliberately a smaller set of awards, each that means one thing distinct from the others. This set is designed to make it faster and simpler to decide on and maintain the vibes constructive. The First Version awards can’t be granted anymore.”
Thank goodness for that. I do not suppose this may out of the blue flip Steam’s neighborhood right into a hub of erudite discourse, however at the very least it means there isn’t any longer a direct incentive to publish rubbish.