Last week in gaming saw the release of new user-added tagging to games on Steam. The idea was to allow players to apply tags to games to further refine categories and maybe allow people to find games similar to ones they might already own and be enjoying, a way to give the players more control on how they sorted games available and allow them to choose what tags they followed. What followed was some of what was intended but as is the way of humanity, the new tagging system quickly became a free-for-all. The exploiting of the system ranged from people using the tags to spoil endings of story-driven games, to people using the tags to insult the game or developers to even offensive and abusive tagging on games such as Gone Home from players who opposed themes presented within the game.

Now in a bid to attempt to combat abuse of the new system and prevent strict moderation internally Valve has added a way for other users to flag tags they don’t find helpful, bringing them to the attention of Valve who will remove the tag if it meets one of four criteria: spoilery, offensive/abusive, not appropriate for the game or simply unhelpful. Tags will also now need to be applied by a greater number of people before they will show up as popular tags to the wider Steam audience.

The Steam Dev team says that they are working to improve the feature and to keep feedback coming as to how the new safeguards are working, but also Valve has shown no interest in removing tags that might keep someone from purchasing a game if enough players find it a bad game; which can only be a good thing.

What do you think? Will this new set of safeguards be enough to make Steam user-tags useful and reliable at last?