The problem is that one of the steam badges (pillar of the community) includes a requirement to rate a workshop mod. We had a bunch of random people come in and just pick something on the first page they saw, and vote it up. So blame valve. Saw people complain about it on the steam general forum for another workshop as well(civilization V).
Stupid Valve making stupid rules for lazy people. People want games. They do not want to be secretaries for Steam. Offer the average gamer a position of power that ultimately means nothing and almost all of them will accept it. Almost all will do the bare minimum to maintain that power until they get tired of it and abandon it. When I buy an item from Amazon, after I receive the item I am required to give a statement about the quality of the service and the item I purchased. No, not just a few checkboxes. I actually have to type something in or it will reject my reply. I usually put "Item arrived in the shape and by the means described by the seller." But Amazon like Valve never realizes how useless this reply is. They are making the problem themselves. I would buy from Newegg over Amazon anyday to avoid this useless step. Steam should learn to not require anything for a nothing position. Otherwise they cause this exact problem. Thank you Aegho for clarifying what is happening.
ugh, I hate it that I just get ratings up. I want to see fair ratings, not fake ratings because valve gives them a badge for it. -__-
Another thing to note, apparently, you don't even have to have a copy of the game to favorite & vote for a mod. *facepalm*
Then there is also that the steam browser doesn't correctly filter out hidden mods from the results. Amusingly, this means the mod cannot be reported for its content, and one piece of content (the preview image) is visible to people searching. Ask TSED about "furry porn" and "steam workshop" sometime. Perhaps if someone put Goatse as a preview image on a hidden mod, it'd spur valve to fix the browser.
Technically I (or another admin) could ban a mod for any reason but I don't know what would happen to it. So yes if it was reported for say a goatse avatar and I saw it I could remove it.
It's a "We can't have nice things because of blah" kind of thing. One oversight leads to people pushing boundaries leads to a lot of enforced rules and setup.
I dont find it supprising that the workshop rating thing doesnt work properly. In the scheme of things it's actually fairly new and steam has issues many years old that still arent fixed. Yes, it is a pity it doesnt work correctly (or does by valve logic) but it is steam, so atleast somewhat expected.
I don't see what they would stand to gain by rigging the system. It's much more likely that the system uses time stamps on votes in an attempt to keep the front page for the individual Workshop pages fresh, content-wise.
I've been keeping a close eye on mods for the steam workshop and it is my firm belief that a few mod authors are skewing the ratings on their own mods by voting down competing mods. How are they doing this: If a mod is rated down it's the equivalent of losing 20 up rates or more. This means someone can easily skew results on the steam workshop. As long as you own any game at all you can vote on any workshop game mod, even if you do not own the game the mod was made for. Steam is presently the best application for game purchases in the world. I hope it stays that way and they fix this soon.
Personally, I don't find the ratings useful to determine which Dredmor mods I'll try. It's better to simply read the description, and the comments below to see more specific information. The comments and description will tell you a whole lot more about how good a mod is and whether or not it's worth downloading, than any rating. If a mod sounds interesting and there's no recent complaints about bugs or imbalance, then it's worth trying. If there are bugs, then it still may be worth trying, but probably at a later date once they get ironed out. Ratings don't even enter into my decision. Then again, I probably have read the description and at least a page's worth of comments of every mod in the workshop, and I know not everyone wants to do that.
Comments can be deleted by the author on steam, and the user blocked who wrote them. Also you are telling me someone who gets rated higher doesn't get more exposure?
Those who are do, but there are different sorts of people and some of them check the details instead of only caring about the ratings. That is what he was telling you, nothing more and nothing less.
