Valve tweak Steam Community Awards to deal with point farming and "attention-grabbing content"

Along with an entirely new set of awards you can give out across Steam the changes should stop all the clown farming on reviews, guides, forum posts and more.

You've probably seen guides and forum posts that are just pure silly bait on Steam, as it has become a bit of a problem since people expected to get a bunch of clown awards — and they did, it was everywhere. This should hopefully now be a thing of the past. In the Steam announcement Valve mentioned that Steam Awards no longer transfer points over, and they've retired the old awards in favour of a completely new set.

Now it's purely about showing appreciation, with all the awards costing the same amount of Steam Points too.

Seems like a good change to make the Steam community a bit healthier overall.

The FAQ from the announcement:

Q. I've got 3,141,592,653,589 Steam Points. What do I do with them all?

A. Show your appreciation for the fine content shared in the Steam Community by giving Community Awards. Each time you see a user review, forum post, guide, screenshot, artwork or other Steam community post, click the little AWARD icon and select a thematically-appropriate award to grant that content.

Or visit the Steam Points Shop and get cool items to deck out your Steam Community profile, get cool stickers and emoticons to spiff up your conversations, unlock new profile showcases, or level up the Seasonal Badge.

Q. Do Community Awards impact the sort order of content?

A. Nope. User generated content posted to Steam is typically ordered by how recent it is or by the number of helpful votes it has received. The number or type of Steam Community Awards applied to a piece of content does not cause that content to appear higher or lower on lists. Though we expect that a piece of content with a bunch of awards may be more likely to catch your eye, and thus may get more helpful ratings indirectly.

Q. What happened to my favorite Community Award?

A. The Second Edition set of Community Awards is intentionally a smaller set of awards, each one meaning something distinct from the others. This set is designed to make it quicker and easier to choose and keep the vibes positive.

The First Edition awards cannot be granted anymore.

Q. Is there a Second Edition badge?

A. First Edition series of Community Awards had two associated badges, the Community Contributor and Community Patron badges, which leveled up with each award given or received. These badges will remain on profiles that had granted or received First Edition Community Awards, but will not include Second Edition awards. If you are looking to count up the number of awards that you have given or received, you can find that count by visiting your Awards Summary page.