Valve counters off-topic Borderlands review bombing on Steam

These plans were revealed last month, and Borderlands 3's deal with the Epic Games Store gave Valve a chance to test the system.

Back in March we reported on Steam's announcement that they would be working to "identify off-topic review bombs, and remove them from the Review Score," which effectively means that - unless you change your preferences to disable this - this anomalous review behaviour would be removed from the game's overall score, although they'd still be visible on the product's page.

This is an attempt to combat review bombing, a practice that sees users flood in to give a wave of negative reviews. We've seen this with Metro and Last Light Redux after Metro Exodus was revealed as a timed exclusive for the Epic Games Store on PC, and now Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition and Borderlands 2 are suffering the same fate after Borderlands 3 was confirmed as a timed exclusive to the Epic Games Store too.

This extends to The Pre-Sequel and Tales from the Borderlands too, and all of these games have an asterisk next to the Recent Reviews and All Reviews sections of the page, with the following message:

"This product has experienced one or more periods of off-topic review activity. Based on your preferences, the reviews within these periods have been excluded from this product's Review Score."

If these filters are turned off, the Recent Reviews for The Pre-Sequel plummet to Mostly Negative, while Borderlands 2 drops to Mixed, as does the Game of the Year Edition for the first one.

A brief look at these reviews shows that the Epic Games Store deal is the reason for the review bombs, but it's given Steam a chance to test out their methods, which uses a tool to recognise anomalous activity within reviews, then removing them from the score.

Do you think this has worked to counter off-topic review bombing effectively?