Valve Restricts Over 2,000 Steam Accounts for Marking a Negative Review as “Helpful”

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Valve allows Steam users to rate whether a review was helpful or not with "Yes," "No," "Funny," and "Award" buttons, but users may want to think twice before doing so when it comes to negative reviews. According to a lengthy thread on Steam's forum for Warlander, an online PvP game that has been criticized for its Sentry anti-cheat software, "almost 2,500" Steam users had lost upvoting and downvoting privileges after they marked a negative review from FREEDOMS117, which was banned and scrubbed by Valve, as being helpful, despite the review apparently being a legitimate one with no ill purpose, per an update from a Steam Support employee. Some critics of Steam are now claiming that the platform can no longer be trusted, in that users can be silenced for speaking out about a game's problems.

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