Steam Rant

[Zaffre]

(This thread contains contains anger. Read at your own discretion. It is also off-topic and not related in any way to these forums or Amnesia: The Dark Descent. If this is the wrong place to discuss this, a moderator may delete it at will. There may also be traces of stupidity so, again, read at your own discretion.)

Spoiler below!

Most of us use Steam as a choice game platform. And unless you've been living in a cave for the past year, you'd know about the new "Steam hubs" feature. Here, you find screenshots, discussions, and videos about the game in choice. It seemed like a good idea at first but now it's just degenerated into a horrible mess.

For instance, most discussions are about people moaning about how bad the game is for not exactly meeting their standards. These posts usually consist of things that would be impossible to change and end with "For the love of God, do NOT BUY (creators of the game)'s GAMES EVER AGAIN! DON'T PAY THEM!".

The rest of the stuff is just blatant sex references from self-centered children who think that the world revolves around them. It seems everywhere I go this happens as well. Go to the Battle.net forums for any of their games. You'll find complaints with little suggestions but rather just focusing on the bad parts.

There are other bad things too. For one, the underaged. Many users are not of legal age to use the Steam platform. I will see people with usernames such as "john2004" implying that they were born in the year 2004 and revealing that they are only eight. This means that they are five years too young to be using the Steam gaming service.

Not only that, but the language of some of these users just flat-out disgusts me. Take this "john2004". He is either making sex jokes or asking any female player unfortunate enough to meet him in-game to "blow me plz" either through microphone chat or text-to-text. This is not something you learn at eight years old. How would he know this? Are his parents either unaware of what he views on the Internet, or just too sleazy to care?

Here's a list of things I would do to fix the proposed issues.

1) To prevent Steam hub vandalism: add a team that filters Steam hub content. Have some of the staff of Valve work specifically on filtering vulgar or unrelated content out of the hubs. Since there are so many hubs for games, I propose that they start with removing already existing inappropriate things from popular game hubs (Team Fortress 2, PlanetSide 2, Amnesia) and then focus on removing any other content.

Have a system where you must get moderator confirmation to post a screenshot or video within a hub. If this screenshot or video is off-topic or just flat-out disgusting, the request is denied and you will not see this content appear. If it is approved, then it will be submitted as normal.

2) Prevention of underaged players: there isn't a whole lot we can do about this as underaged people on the Internet will always be there. However, one system may be to provide proof of age. Whether this be an email from a parent, a photo, or anything of that sort, this might help to filter out the people who are not allowed to play on Steam and those that are.

That is all.