Around 2,400 Steam Accounts Restricted for Marking Negative Review as Helpful

With Steam reviews users are provided the option to mark whether a review is helpful or not but now it seems doing that can get your account restricted as over 2,400 users found out.

2,400 Users Restricted For Marking Negative Review as Helpful

Over 2400 people had labelled a negative review of a free-to-play multiplayer game Warlander as helpful and had found their accounts were restricted. The review in question, from FREEDOMS117, raised concerns around the anti-cheat system included with the game claiming it was “suspicious” and continues to run even when the game was closed and was even sending packets of data to Japan IPs. The reviewer also went on to explain how to uninstall the anti-cheat as well as instructions on how to remove anything left in the registry. This review became the top most-helpful review with over 2,400 votes which then led to FREEDOMS117’s account being restricted for 30 days and then it was revealed through several posts on Slashdot, that this restriction extended to those that marked the review as helpful.

Steam’s Response

Steam Support has now removed the restrictions of FREEDOM117’s account as well as the restrictions on the voters and the reasons for the restrictions aren’t as malicious as many may have assumes. Steam claimed that the moderator mistook the review for instructions on how to avoid anti-cheat software and also viewed it as dangerous as the instructions included using registry edits which can be risky if you don’t know what you are doing. This reasoning makes sense to me and I do doubt there was any other malicious motive behind the restrictions but valve being able to restrict people for simply clicking a thumbs up button is a bit extreme.

When it comes to the Anti-Cheat issues described in the review, the publishers of Warlander released a statement regarding the included Sentry Anti-Cheat. In the statement they claimed the issues raised were down to a bug where sentry fails to unregister the icon in the task bar and will be resolved in a future update.

What do you think of Steam restricting people who upvote reviews, is it crossing a line? let us know in the comments.