Valve have made changes to Steam’s community awards system to discourage people from posting daft and angry posts in order to farm Steam points. You will, in fact, no longer be able to receive Steam points from other users when they give you awards. Adding insult to injury, there’s a new set of awards that are explicitly designed to spread goodwill. Filth!

For context, Steam community awards are those emoji stickers people slap on reviews to indicate a rich spectrum of human emotions – all the way from spitting contempt to absolutely brainless enthusiasm. With community awards hitherto being a source of Steam points (used to buy stuff like profile pictures and backgrounds) there has long been a culture of posting garbage to attract a few dozen clownface emojis.

No longer! Now, all you’ll get in return for provoking the hatred of the commons is a picture of a flaming chilli pepper. This being one of 12 new community awards Valve have created, which replace the existing designs. They are not only worthless as a means of monetising cringe – they are intended to “keep the vibes positive”. Yeah, good luck with that.

“Just as before, you can purchase these awards using your Steam Points (earned by buying games), and use them in Steam Community to show your appreciation for things like user reviews, forum posts, guides, screenshots, artwork, Workshop mods, or even directly on your buddy’s Steam profile,” notes the Steam blog in question (thanks, Aerothorn).

“When we originally created Steam Community Awards, the idea was for them to not only look cool but to also grant a small number of Steam Points to the recipient, meaning they could be used as a tip of sorts for people who create and share amazing content with the Steam Community,” it goes on. “However, we found that this encouraged and rewarded a narrow set of attention-grabbing content and didn’t allow the focus to be as much on a broader pool of thoughtful, well-considered creative content.

“Because of this, we’re refocusing the system: The Second Edition of Steam Community Awards won’t transfer points. Instead, the goals of the system will be solely about conveying the appreciation of the viewer to the content creator, and as a signal to others that someone appreciated the piece of content.”

The new awards all cost 500 Steam points apiece, and are a mix of flavourless and awfully saccharine. Seriously, if anybody ever reacts to anything I’ve posted with a picture of a bouncing life preserver, take me outside and gun me down like a rabid dog. Still, we can rest assured that Steam users will twist their meaning. Give it a few weeks, and that bouncing life preserver will probably actually be the Steam user equivalent of gunning somebody down like a rabid dog.

We can also rest assured that Valve will bring back the OG community award designs at some point, once the dog of nostalgia is sufficiently rabid and ready for the gunning. I will quit with this analogy now.

If we had a community award system for RPS comments, what designs should we include? Other than a rock, a piece of paper and a shotgun, of course.