After Warframe struggled with poor reviews on Steam for some time, the developers and Steam themselves have now intervened. The situation has been investigated in more detail, and there are responses from both parties regarding the incident.
What happened? A few days ago, the ratings for Warframe on Steam suddenly plummeted. The reason for this was a review bombing by the Chinese Warframe community, who wanted to express their frustration with negative ratings.
Their anger stemmed from a popular volunteer translator who had worked with Digital Extremes, the developers of Warframe. “The Translator,” as he calls himself, helped with better translations into simplified Chinese but was fired for violating a confidentiality agreement.
The review bombing hit Warframe hard, as it had recently shone with good reviews and even the best possible rating.
The response to the review bombing
How the developers are responding: In response to the controversy, the developers posted a response in the official Warframe forums. In this, they explain that the decision of a termination never happens thoughtlessly:
We do not remove people lightly from the volunteer program, and such terminations are made after careful consideration.
The volunteers are provided with guidelines and a consent form, which makes it possible to share protected data with them. However, there are times when these guidelines may be violated, requiring a reminder for the Tenno.
However, if there are multiple violations, it may be necessary to part ways with them. Warframe does not want to disclose the exact reasons out of consideration, but assures that the decisions were made with utmost thought and review.
The Chinese localization is not to suffer from this. The workforce for the Chinese branch has doubled this year, and they want to listen better to the community’s concerns, while the localization is improved and polished.
How Steam is responding: Steam has already ensured that negative reviews are marked as “off-topic” if they were written as part of the review bombing.
On the Steam page for Warframe, there is now a filter “exclude off-topic reviews” in the reviews section. An asterisk next to the ratings marks them in this context.
The recent ratings for Warframe have already risen back to 82% “very positive” since then (as of September 19 at 11:20 AM). Warframe can now also count itself among the most popular MMOs on Steam according to ratings:
