This one got lost in the news a bit, as it happened about a week ago, but we thought it might be best to let you know what’s changed with Steam Workshop in the last week if you decide to go and visit it.
Games that add fan-created content into the mainline – such as Team Fortress 2, DOTA 2, and Counter Strike: Global Offensive, have added a new voting queue for voting on which additions you like or don’t like. It works similarly to the mainpage discovery queue or the Greenlight queue and is simple to use – you just go to the workshop page of the game and the queue will be there for you to go to. Much like the other queue it automatically generates a new one each day, or you can ask it for another set once you go through it.
The pages the ones that are to be voted on have undergone a couple of changes related to this change. The first is that these items no longer will display their star ratings while they are to be voted on; so as to in Valve’s words “help avoid biased voting”. The other change is that the main page for all of the ones to be voted on have removed their comment threads to a comment tab to clean up the main page, and perhaps especially get the evil ascii art off of it.
Workshop pages also got taken into the shop for a makeover. Now, all the games that use steam workshop have their home page which makes it easier to find mods for the games. It’s now easier than ever to find mods you follow or people you follow through it, with the blue homepage bar that lets you go to them. Also for ease of finding is a new tab system like see on the Steam front page, this one set on base of Most Popular, and letting you chose also Most Subscribed and Most Recent to let you see.
It is also possible now to view most popular over longer periods of time on some mods – looking back over 3, 6 or even 12 months to see if something has sustaining popularity or compare it to older ones of comparable popularity. Valve also mentions it will be possible for game developers to set posts to run special events such as themed ones – and one can imagine they plan on taking advantage of that for some of their games.
On the whole though, this looks like a pretty good win for the Steam Workshop with some cleaning up and organizing of stuff without any real downsides. They haven’t removed anything and just added on, improving the functionality of it all. Especially for games like Team Fortress, and Dota, it seems like this can help them out.
You can read the full update on Steams website.