Just out of curiosity, since the idea that there are dislike bots or a band of people mass downvoting other models, have you been affected by this in any way? I used to have a near enough fully positive set of rating then after one day everything I upload gets hit by many downvotes, and I have heard from other users that this has been happening to them, just going from a decent set of ratings to checking the next day and getting a wave of it out of nowhere, I can understand that some people may not like some models people make, but it feels really suspicious that there are so many that happen out of the blue.
I have noticed getting a disproportionate amount of dislikes on items very quickly after uploading them as well. This seems to be a semi-recent thing as many of my older items on workshop have little or no dislikes at all while any new uploads lately gain dislikes within a couple hours of posting or less. While I don’t really care about dislikes and you have to go out of your way to see them, if it does effect visibility on the workshop then this isn’t a good thing and should be looked into.
All of my older ones seem to be fine, even the less popular ones still have decent ratings, then all of my newer models have a huge jump in dislikes, and its not like the dislikes come over a long period of time they all happen at once then I don’t get any more after that, really feels like something is up.
all im going to say is that
either its bots
or its a group of people or a person with multiple accounts
it is too organised and happens almost to everyone (or almost everyone)
there is no chance that coincidentally almost everyone is getting a similar amount of spammed dislikes in one go for each upload they now do.
Also i know a few people have contacted steam support about the issue (i believe this includes TU Devs so they also have been trying to help, although they cant sort it out since its an issue steam needs to sort out), and from what i have heard steam has been no help so far, i hope they do help soon since its been to organised, and it just sucks for everyone and needs to be resolved.
although the player model select in game doesn’t rely on workshop up votes mostly, so new models bad or good still have somewhat of a chance to have some limelight in game.
The downvote spamming feels very discouraging to me as someone who uploads models to the workshop. It can take a long time to get playermodels and sometimes even props to work how I want them to, and before I would at least see some of them show up on the front/most popular this week page of the workshop, but now, since everything’s being downvoted, I barely see my models even in the TU workshop browser after the first few hours.
Tldr; It feels discouraging to take the time to make high quality playermodels and items and then see them immediately get downvoted and buried in the sea of workshop items after posting them.
I hate it, and it’s a huge blow to motivation.
You spend a few hours on something that you want to share with a community, just for it to get drowned by dislikes and never to be seen again.
It’s not a group of people, I am 100% convinced.
I privated a model for about 24 hours and the moment I unprivated it the dislikes flew in.
The act is too fast and consistent for it to be just a group of people having a giggle.
The fact that it’s painfully obvious that only one person isn’t getting affected just shows it.
And that actually noone is taking any action against it isn’t helping the case either.
I wish this issue would actually properly be addressed, because right now, I don’t think anyone has fun uploading any items to the Workshop.
I find it inconsequential to motivation since I mostly upload things for my friends and I, but it’s definitely a kick in the nads, and still annoys me on principal since, with the exception of one person, I only see boring furniture on top of the steam page anymore.
Regardless of this scenario, I’d like to propose that the in-game workshop browser at least have “sort by recent” as the default option. I really don’t care what’s “trending” anymore, since it’s the same nonsense everyday.
Never realized this was a problem until I recently looked at my stats.
Mostly negative votes, but I did notice it has happened only on my most recent submissions.
Honestly I don’t care, I usually upload models that I’d generally like to wear. Still though, it’s a bit annoying.
I’ve reached out to Valve about this a week ago and I’ve yet to hear anything back from them.
On our end we do not have the tools to help with this. The voting system on workshop is not something we have access to. I couldn’t tell you if it’s a bot or not. I’m hoping making a public statement about this doesn’t make the problem worse, though.
The best way to avoid this right now is to get people to up vote as much as possible or completely ignore the rating.
I’ve been thinking of defaulting the workshop browser list to recently added instead of trending for now, so that new models get more attention, regardless of their rating.
Ratings aren’t shown in the in-game browser as well and I’ve gotta say their API for getting if you voted on an item is pretty bad to begin with.
I got tired of waiting for somebody to import in a character I’ve wanted since I started playing again, so I decided to do it myself. Haven’t finished it yet cuz I’m a dummy who doesn’t know how blender works, but I’ll probably wait a bit before I do if this is going on.
By chance does it matter what the model is of? I know global chat loves hating on anthro and anime stuff and Tower is absolutely full of those sorts of characters so I’m kinda wondering if there is some connection.
It started around early/mid May and like a few others here it’s gradually just killed my motivation to post. As everyone else has said, barely anyone ever actually downvotes. I had hundreds of items and several player models posted prior to all this happening that never once received a downvote regardless of quality, then that one day suddenly I’m getting 5+ on every new post. Certain more popular models that managed to creep back onto trending also got hit.
I’m taking a break currently in the hope that it stops. The fact it’s been going on now for over a month is crazy. I find it extremely hard to believe there’s any group of people this dedicated to just sitting here all day every day monitoring the trending tab in Tower Unite to downvote everything but I suppose weirder things have happened.
Something unusual of note is how consistent they are against player models, yet items are mostly unaffected. When it first started it seemed to affect items just as much, but now they’re hardly touched from what I can see.
@Suburban It’s any player model from anyone (with the exception of a certain individual) regardless of content. The longer your model is trending/most popular, the more it will be downvoted. Typically ends up with your model at about 50/50 likes and dislikes as that’s usually what it takes to bury it.
I think switching from trending to recently added is a good idea for now, even just to see what affect it has. It’s such a sucky situation that none of us can do anything about besides hope Steam hires Cole Phelps to come in and investigate.
Not necessarily. It could be someone who never made any community content trolling TU. It could even be someone trolling Steam Workshop in general, and they might not even know TU exists. By the sounds of it, it’s probably one or many bots more or less indiscriminately downvoting workshop content. If that’s the case, TU might not be the only game with Steam Workshop that’s experiencing this issue.
Even if there was just one person unaffected, that doesn’t immediately incriminate them. They could just be lucky, or they could be someone the real perpetrator might try to shift the blame to.
yes, I think you’re right, I’ve seen similar events happen in other workshops. It doesn’t seem to be targeted at the game always. This is also reminiscent that downvotes seem to stop once the item reaches the 50:50 likes/dislikes mark too. Hopefully this is an issue that steam can rectify, as they’ll be able to see the user’s performing the actions and may well be able to mitigate/undo the damage they’ve done.
Huh, I thought you could go directly through Steam to do that for any game, even without ownership (you can favorite items without owning the respective game, and I assumed that carried over to general ratings), but I just checked and you’re definitely right. It’s weird that they still have the buttons on the pages, though, even if an error pops up.