Workshop submissions are being manipulated.
I don’t have a problem with bad, incomplete or repetitive maps being uploaded to the workshop.
The system should be able to deal with stuff like this.
What I do have an issue with is rigging the votes, particularly to promote spam advertising.
This isn’t what the workshop was intended for, and it also makes life difficult for
honest submissions.
To get us all up to speed, I think that there are many bot accounts that are there simply
to upvote the spam submissions and to downvote everything else.
You can see that submissions like this one were massively upvoted and subscribed to in
just a matter of seconds.
This gets the spam submissions to the front page where they can advertise stuff a lot
more effectively.
I mean, come on.
One of the map creators is called ‘Advertising’ and has been on the most popular page for
several days now.
And all these spam submissions show the same advert linking to the same site.
Personally, my submissions get enough publicity already so it doesn’t hurt me as much as
it does most people, but I believe that my recent train fix map was a victim of this
spam downvoting.
I captured this realisation on film, too- there’s me, getting a new comment.
Huh?
It’s getting downvotes?
And checking the ratings it’s got a rating of 26%.
Terrible.
This negative feedback wasn’t reflected in the comments or responses to the project
elsewhere.
Something fishy was going on.
I also spoke with Zelzstorm, maker of the recent Ramis.
He said that his submission received a wave of negative votes when it was first released
and linked me to some convincing evidence.
Fortunately most of them were later removed, presumably by Valve when they dealt with the
situation by reversing the damage that spambots had inflicted.
But since then the downvotes have come back yet again and in full force.
He says that other very good submissions have had the same experience.
I had to update my script again since things have changed in the past couple of hours-
I WAS going to say that the best maps have returned to the top places, but once again
there are now very few front-page maps without this advert link.
Poor Austria’s managing to hang in there for the time being, though, but many potential
operation maps have been wiped off the front page from the negative vote spam.
So who’s making these advertised submissions?
A lot are made by fake profiles.
One, called Jeff (followed by the spam site in his name), had dozens of map submissions
despite having 0 hours in the mapping program.
It’s a no brainer that these sorts of accounts aren’t legitimate and are only there to
spam.
What’s more difficult in my opinion is the second group of people, who are proper accounts
run by real humans who enjoy mapping.
These people are paid to link to the spam site in their map’s description in exchange
for money.
Now I find it more of a grey area because I myself am only able to do what I do because
of those adverts that you’re probably not seeing because of adblock right now.
I understand that mapping is a pretty thankless task if nobody sees the submission you’ve
invested so much time into, and receiving actual money for a tiny bit of extra work
is very welcome.
The relevant issue here is that I suspect that once they accept these adverts that their
submissions are also upvoted by bots, once again making popularity more to do with vote
manipulation than about producing good quality maps in the first place.
Plus, the way that most mappers go about advertising the site goes against Steam’s terms and
conditions.
Here’s an example of the vote manipulation in action.
This mapper accepted adverts and immediately saw his submission being upvoted.
He then removed the ads… and received a barrage of downvotes.
It’s disgusting.
I feel bad for not having made this video sooner.
The problem was worse a week ago but by the time I had a script written up for it, Valve
appeared to have cracked down on the issue.
But it’s not been fixed.
It’s still simmering just below the surface.
And unfortunately, for as long as the workshop determines a map’s success, we’re at Valve’s
mercy.
It’s their staff that moderates it.
Although they’ve shown signs of combating the issue, it just hasn’t been enough.
Don’t even get me started on the spam comments, I regularly go through my map submissions
and delete hundreds of these worthless posts.
Even after years of this being an issue, it’s still happening.
On a positive note, Valve has started sending cease and desist letters to various gambling
and skin sites which should reduce this issue, but for this alone to fix the workshop spam
issue the ban hammer needs to be applied far more thoroughly and more widespread than it
is already.
For example, they haven’t even listed the site that’s spamming the workshop.
For all we know this problem could actually be in RESPONSE to cease and desists as the
maker of the shady site attempts to expand his operations to gobble up the marketshare
left behind by the others.
Thanks to RZL, maker of the map Concert, for pointing this out.
But as of this video’s release, all of these problems listed are STILL serious issues.
The workshop is still a mess and it’s hurting all of the honest submissions.
And I was very slow to release a video on this topic.
It’s a shame, because the system has so much potential if it worked properly.
Valve have stolen business away from other communities, such as GameBanana and various
mapping forums.
But so far they haven’t been up to the task of moderating it.
So until this issue is fixed, you can help the situation by not clicking on the adverts.
They exist because they DO attract some people to the site, much like spam emails even after
all these years.
Don’t give them the publicity that they need.
Don’t visit these sites, don’t include them in your map profiles and certainly don’t
make a youtube video talking about them.
Oh dear.
A big thank you to the mapping community for helping me to make this video, particularly
to ZeLz Storm and davidredsox who collected a lot of the data that I’ve used in this
video.
Check the description if you’d like to know more.
I hope that the mappers who have been negatively impacted by this aren’t too discouraged.