https://kotaku.com/valves-rocky-road-to-better-communication-about-steam-1833504663
Valve's Rocky Road To Better Communication About Steam
Credit to Valve: Over the past 15 years, it's turned Steam into a megalith
and kept it relevant with a steady, if slow, stream of new features. But in
continually reacting to problems instead of anticipating them, and by keeping
communication to a minimum, Valve has left a swath of damage in its wake,
from review bombs and toxicity to fiascos like the recent near-release of
post-apocalyptic rape fantasy Rape Day. After a press briefing at GDC in San
Francisco this week, I spoke to Valve about its recent travails in the realm
of transparency.
Valve在過去15年間將Steam建設為宏偉的奇觀，並以緩慢而穩定的速度添加新功能。
但由於在面對一連串問題時的遲鈍反應，以及與外界僅僅保持著最低程度的交流，
Valve在諸多評論轟炸與後啟示錄幻想作強姦日等仇恨言論中徹底搞砸了，留下一地狼藉。
本週在舊金山召開的GDC新聞發佈會後，我與Valve談論了近來他們在透明度方面的困境。
Valve still plays things pretty close to the chest when it comes to
communication, but the folks running Steam seem to be realizing that isn't
quite working. Recently, there's been an uptick in statements from the
company's beating heart in Bellevue, Washington.
Valve仍然相當重視溝通的重要性，但是負責營運Steam的人似乎才剛意識到，
現行的做法並不有效。最近，這家公司位於華盛頓柏衛的運作核心，
對此已經有了較明確的說明。
“The company still thinks like it's this tiny little group of folks,”
director of marketing Doug Lombardi told Kotaku. “We've never outgrown the
mentality that we're only, like, 50 people. And the principle has always been
‘Just ship stuff, people will find it.’ Then we'll listen to developers and
customers and make updates and stuff like that... Now we're hearing from
folks that there's so much going on, that they're being fed from the firehose
and all that. ‘Maybe if you guys took some time to curate your messages a
little better, we'd understand where you're going, where your head was at,
how to leverage it, etc.’”
市場主管Doug Lombardi告訴Kotaku：
"公司以自己還是個小團體的方式在思考，我們仍然幼稚地以為自己還是個50人的小公司，
遵循著'把東西放上去，人們自己會去找'的原則，然後再聽取開發者與消費者的意見，
進行後續的更新。現在，員工都說事情實在太多了，他們就像被消防水管強迫餵食一樣，
'你們要花點時間組織一下語言，我們才能了解你們要幹什麼、在想什麼、如何去實現。'"
Steam business specialist Tom Giardino was frank in his assessment of how
unintuitive Valve's previous, infrequent missives about new features,
changes, and decision-making could be. “Developers are so busy,” he said. “
They might ship a game once every two or three years. A huge amount of
Steamworks changes and improvements come in that time. We'd work really hard
on an update, ship it, and post a blog about it that maybe 500 people would
read.”
Steam的商務專員坦誠地評價Valve過去關於新功能、
改變與決策過程的公文有多麼稀少而又不直覺：
"開發者們都很忙，他們可能每兩三年就要出一款遊戲，
與此同時也會有大量的Steam功能改善，我們努力更新，
最後卻發佈一篇可能只有500個人會想去讀的說明。"
But Valve is still a primarily reactive company, putting out fires where they
arise instead of building features and policies that are immediately
fireproof. This approach has frustrated many developers and users over the
years. Most recently, that tendency drew widespread ire when, earlier this
month, a self-described “game where you can rape and murder during a zombie
apocalypse” called Rape Day appeared on Steam, with a Steam page that said
it was coming soon. After days of controversy, Valve announced that Rape Day
wouldn't come out on their platform after all due to “unknown costs and risks
” the game posed.
但Valve仍然是一家以回應為主的公司，哪裡有火才去撲滅，而非主動建立能防火的對策。
這條路線在過去多年來令許多開發者與用戶都感到相當挫折。
就在最近，這股挫折感又招來了廣泛的怒火，因為本月稍早，一款宣稱
"可以在殭屍末日中強姦與謀殺"，名為強姦日的遊戲頁面在Steam上出現，並即將發售。
在數日的論戰後，Valve公告不會讓強姦日上架的決定，理由是"無法預知成本與風險"。
But that's pretty much all the company said, and nobody could parse out
exactly what the statement meant. As ever, Valve refused to put things in
cultural, moral, or ethical terms, preferring instead to speak from behind a
veil of incomprehensible business-ese. This led to further confusion and
anger over the whole incident.
表態僅此而已，沒人能從中分析出這句聲明的真正意思。一如以往，
Valve拒絕為文化、道德或倫理表態，而是隱藏在幕後打令人費解的官腔，
又為此事招致進一步的困惑與憤怒。
When I tried to ask Lombardi and Giardino about the statement's specific
wording, they sidestepped the question on two separate occasions. However,
Lombardi, along with Steam man-of-many-hats Alden Kroll, delved into how
Valve hopes to prevent another Rape Day-type incident from happening in the
future.
當我分別試著詢問Lombardi與Giardino關於這句話的明確意思時，
他們不約而同的避開了這個問題。然後，在Steam中有著多項職務，
與Lombardi同行的Alden Kroll努力闡述表示，
Valve希望能避免未來再有強姦日這樣的事件發生。
“There's this issue that happens that we're working to correct now where a
developer or publisher will sign up for something, they'll make a [store]
page and that'll go live, and then the code comes through and there's an
evaluation for the code—for the game itself,” said Lombardi. “So there's
this step where the sign goes up—’coming soon,’ so to speak—and then
there's this process of actually looking at the game. We're working to
correct that now so that everything gets reviewed before anything goes up.”
"我們正在修正的一個問題點在於，開發商或發行商為了註冊一些東西，
他們會先創建商店頁面並上線，接著還要上傳程式碼，然後是對遊戲本身的運作測試，
在此間便是'即將上市'標語出現的時機，之後才會真正進入遊戲審核的過程。
我們正在修正這些問題，確保以後所有的東西在上線前都要先經過檢查。"
Rape Day, he clarified, was never actually approved; it only appeared that
way because the developers put the page up. In the future, that shouldn't
happen anymore.
他表示強姦日從未獲准正式上架，當時僅僅只是開發者想讓頁面先出現而已，
未來也已經不會再有這種事。
Kroll said that, despite the belief that Valve automates too many of Steam's
processes, “like 90 percent of the games” being submitted to Steam are
reviewed multiple times by a human team at Valve. First the review team looks
at a game's store page, and then they play a build of the game itself and
check to make sure that it's functional and contains features listed on the
store page. “We go through a checklist of ‘Does it do these things? Does
the build match what's on the store page? Is it what they're promising?’”
said Kroll.
Kroll表示，雖然有人認為Valve過度自動化了Steam的許多程序，
實際上大概有九成的遊戲被提交給Steam之後都會由Valve的人類團隊進行多次檢查。
先是看商店頁面，然後進入遊戲來確保是可以運作的，並且包含了商店頁面聲明的內容。
"我們用檢查清單來確保'它能做這些事嗎？內容是否與商店頁面吻合？
這是它們承諾會有的內容嗎？'"
There's also another review team for “edge cases,” according to Kroll. This
team meets once a week to look at games that don't fit pre-established molds
and evolve Steam's policies over time.
另外還有一個檢查團隊是為了特殊案例準備的，這個團隊一週開一次會，
來看那些不符合規範的遊戲，並且持續改進Steam的政策。
“These are things that we can't deal with right away, and we need a group to
figure out ‘How does this fit into our decision making, and how can we adapt
our decision making to that?’” said Kroll. “We knew from the beginning, we
couldn't define ahead of time a bunch of gray lines, because you can't
anticipate what people are gonna make. So then it's all these weekly
conversations around ‘This is in this gray area here. How do we see that?
How do we determine what that is?’ So it's an ongoing, iterative process.
We're constantly refining how that works.”
"有些事我們沒辦法立刻處理，而且需要一群人來思考'要怎麼讓這能符合我們的決策、
我們要如何調整決策？'，我們從一開始就知道，我們沒辦法提前在灰色地帶劃清界線，
因為你無法預期人們到底會做些什麼事，這就是每週會議存在的目的。
'這裡有個灰色地帶，我們該怎麼看？我們要怎麼決定這裡該怎麼做？'
這會是一個不斷重複進行的過程，我們會持續改進它的運作效率。"
Doubtless, this team has plenty to learn from Rape Day.
毫無疑問，這個團隊需要從強姦日身上學很多東西。
Valve's particular style of reactivity has also left loopholes open for
abusive behavior from users. Over the years, Steam developers have dealt with
barely moderated communities, review bombs, harassment groups, and other
forms of toxicity. Valve initially let these things proceed sans much in the
way of human intervention, putting moderation duties on the backs of
developers and pushing back against review bombs only by implementing a graph
system in 2017 that mostly just served to make review bombs more visible.
Valve特有的反應模式也留下了能被用戶濫用的漏洞。多年來，
Steam上的開發者們一直在處理難以管理的社群、評論轟炸、組織騷擾，
以及各種形式的負面行為。Valve最初對這些事放任自流、不進行人為干預，
將管理的責任全丟給開發者，只有在2017年反制評論轟炸時導入了圖表，
來讓評論轟炸一目了然。
Recently, the company's become more open to the idea of creating specialized
teams of flesh-and-blood people—rather than automated solutions—to weed out
Steam's most deep-rooted problems. Valve now has its own community moderation
team to assist developers. Most recently, it created a team that will look at
games that seem to be getting review bombed and, if need be, lock them down
so that incoming reviews temporarily don't count toward their scores. These
are positive steps forward after years of ineffective action or inaction, but
by previously opting to largely stay silent and let these things play out,
Valve ended up being partially responsible for heaps of harassment and a
broader player-vs-developer culture that has some devs eyeing the Epic Games
Store's greener pastures. Despite all that, Valve sounds like it plans to
stick to its guns.
近來，Valve為了解決Steam根深蒂固的問題，
開始從有血有肉的人組成的專家團隊汲取靈感，而非依賴自動化的解決方案。
Valve現在有了專門的團隊用來協助開發者管理社群。
最近還創建了用來觀察評論轟炸的團隊，並在有必要時暫時鎖定評分以避免分數被影響。
Valve在長年來的無效行動或無所作為後，終於開始向前邁步，
但是由於過去長期的沉默與放任自流，Valve被認為需要對騷擾行為負一部分責任，
也形成了玩家與開發者對抗的氛圍，而這又讓一些開發者轉向了Epic商店的新鮮土地。
無論如何，Valve似乎是準備好它的武器了。
“We can go all the way back to the day we launched Steam and say there's all
these things we wished we'd known beforehand that we could have done in
advance,” Lombardi said. “Part of it is, you get it to a point, you think
you have it, you ship it, and you find out a bunch of stuff once it's in the
wild and millions of people have it. You find not only the lists of things
you thought you should have included, but then there's this whole other list
of things that users and developers point out for you that you need to go do.
We measure ourselves more on how quickly we can respond to that stuff and
update things and keep reacting to stuff as times and technologies change.”
Lombardi說：
"我們可以回到Steam出現那天，然後說我們早就知道這些事然後可以提前預防。
一部分是，你知道這事該怎麼做，你覺得自己已經掌握它了，然後實行，
接著你才會發現這件事實際上會導致大量的新問題，影響到無數人。
你會發現你該做的不只是你所想到的事情，還有用戶與開發者所指出的事。
我們更加重視審視自我對於這些事的反應速度，
也會隨著時間與科技演進不斷更新並且應對新事物。"
Lombardi went on to point out that even way back when the company released
Half-Life, it wasn't expecting players to stack crates and find weird ways to
break the game. “That's sort of the funny example, but the same thing
applies,” he said.
Lombardi指出即使回到發行戰慄時空的那天，也無法預測玩家會去堆箱子、
以奇怪的方法通過遊戲。"雖然是搞笑的例子，但道理是一樣的。"
But that's a single-player video game. Steam is a worldwide platform where
every minute decision affects hundreds of millions of users and developers.
One piles up far more collateral damage than the other.
但那是對單機的電子遊戲而言。Steam是個世界級的平台，
任何微小的決策都會影響上億個用戶與開發者，所造成的傷害遠比其他平台都多。
In response to that point, Kroll said he has regrets but ultimately stands by
the way the Steam team has handled things like review bombs.
Kroll對此的回應是，他雖然感到遺憾，但仍然支持Steam處理評論轟炸的方式。
“Of course we would rather save people grief,” he said. “But it's hard to
anticipate exactly what boundaries you need to put in place because you don't
know what people are gonna try, and you don't want to constrain too much the
ways people can voice themselves or—in the case of new features or
moderation or new types of games—you don't want to constrain the amount of
creativity people can put into the system, because we're surprised all the
time by what people bring.”
"我們當然不希望讓人感到痛苦，但是真的很難預測你到底該做到什麼程度，
因為你不知道人們會怎麼做，你也不想過度限制人們的發聲權，
—比如新功能、管理條例或遊戲的新類型—
你不會想去限制那些有創意的人所帶來的新點子，因為我們總是會為之驚嘆。"
“But if you're looking at the review system for example, it was hard to
anticipate how people were gonna use it. Review bombing is a symptom of
having a popular platform that matters. That people care about. If nobody
cared about Steam, review bombing wouldn't be a problem on Steam.”
"但你在看評論系統時，難以預期到人們會怎麼去使用它。
評論轟炸只在有影響力的熱門的平台上才會出現，人們才會去在意。
如果沒人在意Steam，Steam就不會有評論轟炸問題。"

終於知道自己還在用小公司思維開大車了

所以才出不了3嗎

劃重點 以後改成先審查才有頁面 而不是先有頁面再審查上架

營收營業額多少的小公司？

其實他這樣改玩家製作方都沒好處= =大概只有爽那群鬧事的

steam希望大夥能自主自重，但現實層面來看幾乎不可能

反正私人公司

溯游從之