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Valve Bans Another 30,000 Steam Users
bryhhh writes "Valve has announced that they have banned another 30,000 steam accounts which had been used to try to illegally gain access to Valve games without a valid purchase. Only last month 20,000 accounts were banned for the same reason, only this time Valve states that, 'The accounts that are disabled today will not be reactivated'."
...as long as all users -will- actually be people who tried to circumvent copy protection/authentication without buying the game.
Gabe sat on the account server! On no!
Anyway, those bans sucked last time. My friend who legally got the game ended up banned.
It seems Steam is really proving useful in preventing illegal use of Half Life 2 and, once certain bugs are ironed out of Steam, I can see it being used across the board as the main deterrant of pirating games. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is another discussion entirely.
The only things I would be concerned about are ensuring that of the 30000 banned, all of them are actually banned for valid reasons and not due to any error. Valve has said they wont reactivate these accounts, so once it's gone, it's gone.
I'm not stressed. I'm just terribly, terribly alert.
According to a mod on the Valve forums
Banned is different than "disabled"
Banned = VAC caught your account cheating
Disabled = You tried to steal HL2 (the first 20,000)
big difference between the two IMHO...
Sig
While certainly not all of these people are customers, I think that they may be pissing off a potentially large base of customers.
and another inspiring display of incompetence and immorality from our overly affluent overlords.
Corporate greed is destroying the gaming community.
Quote: Moofie http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=129610&t hreshold=1&commentsort=3&tid=204&tid=98&tid=133&mo de=thread&pid=10811750#10811793
"Since I bought it, I can crack it legally. Anybody who thinks different, well, they're wrong."
Valve doesn't seem to agree with you....
How are they going to handle the appeals for those people who have been banned by mistake? 30,000 + 20,000 = 50,000 will take a long and costly amount of time.
But of course, Valve/Steam never makes a mistake, so I guess there really is no problem, right?
There is not nearly enough love in the world, but there is far too much trust.
What a joke. Anyone dumb enough to use Steam in the first place and then gets their account deactivated, wrongly or rightfully, gets what they deserve for being blind, dumb sheep with no sense of what they're dealing with. And I can guarantee you out of the 30,000 they have deactivated, the number of paying, legit customers they deactivated is in at least the hundreds. That's the way it always works.
Valve has completely ignored the history and fact that these schemes DO NOT WORK, and when you try to do something like this to combat illegal copies of the game you only 1) Piss off your normal customer base by making it even more inconvenient for them, and 2) you INEVITABLY make mistakes and you punish/cut off paying customers. Oh yeah, and I forgot... the people who REALLY want an illegal copy will still get it no matter what.
Valve has become a joke, and Steam is a joke. And no amount of Tychos gushing in their blogs and news posts about how "great" a system of delivery a model like Steam is will prevent its eventual failure. No content system which lets a company deactivate accounts on a whim can survive because there WILL be mistakes, and those "mistakes" will go from Paying Customers to Former Paying Customers. And once you lose them, they will never ever come back, and they will make it their personal goal to drive as many other people away form it as possible.
Time to get a new idea instead of rehashing the same old one that's been tried and failed for nearly a decade now, guys...
-- Primis.
Thats a nice rant, but you're way off. It's not actually inconvenient to have your games automatically installed and updated just by logging in to Steam. The only people Steam hurts are the ones who want to cheat or steal. I'm sure it will be cracked, and all of the cheaters and theives will play CS:S on their cracked servers, and it will suck because everyone will be using aimbots. Have fun with that.
When that didn't work, they purchased the game, entered a legit CD-key, had no problems playing for awhile, and then their accounts were disabled.
Apparently Valve must keep logs of all the CD-keys a certain account/IP address has tried. I don't know if I agree with this. If someone has actually purchased the game, should they be penalized because they tried stealing it previously?
My userid is prime!
Should we presume from that rant that Valve mistakenly disabled your Steam account?
Also... has anyone thought of asking/callng for Valve to make publicly available how and WHY they're deactivating people? And by that I mean specific records and details? In other words, some proof so that they can be audited? This extends beyond Good Budiness/Bad Business and seems to have wandered into an area where someone should really be regulating/overseeing Valve.
Otherwise, is there any accountability for them to not just deactivate paying customers once they have their money? I can't imagine they would care much if it's a paying customer or not, seeing how it's very likely the next product they release wouldn't be for 3 or 4 more years anyways...
-- Primis.
If I buy it online, and you ban me, do I get a refund? How about if I send you the box I got at EB? Better question: If I'm banned from Steam for pirating HL2, does that lock me out of HL1? This is why I don't want activation in games (or the OS, for that matter). Presumably, if you piss off the company, they can lock you out of dozens of your legit products. Imagine pirating 1 EA game (or having your kid do it) and finding every EA game you own doesn't work anymore.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
So how long is it going to be before someone writes a virus that intentially attempts to steal Valve games through Steam? The virus detects Steam on your computer and goes about trying to "hack" or steal or whatever it takes to get someone banned. Just imagine; use IE to visit a malicious page, your Steam account is banned. Steam is just evil and unnecessary.
You're an idiot.
Do you know how they were banned? There was a CD key (maybe more than one) floating around tons of warez forums prior to official release that let you play it. VALVe quickly disabled it, then logged everyone trying to use it.
You were caught, and you were owned, weren't you.
Don't buy their stuff.
To disable your network connection and run the game offline. What am I missing?
Hmmm... I can see a class action suit against Steam/Valve in the near future. All previous paying customers that have been 'caught'....
Please don't mod me troll for this, But if you changed "Valve" to "Microsoft" and "HL2" to "Windows XP", there would be ALOT more cries of foul-play.
I don't approve of Valve suspending accounts that are potentially associated with even ONE paying customer. Steam is a (overall) good thing, but I think it's gonna go a little too far.
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
Why ban these people for trying to hack the account...why not simply remove the ability for them to do so? Seriously, actions like these, where they take a hard edge and undoubtedly affect the innocent, are not elegant ways to handle the problem. These people wanted to play, and they may have had other games that they legimitately purchased that they've lost access to. I've not played HL2 or used Steam...but given their propensity to ban accounts (even for the no-cd crack earlier), I'm not impressed with their customer service.
Next thing you know there will be usb "dongles" to run a game.
Valve : F*** you, you're banned, thx for the $$, now get lost.
"The only people Steam hurts are the ones who want to cheat or steal." ...or the people who couldn't play the game the day they bought it or the people who found themselves magically under a new EULA with the previous game.
Take your blinders off.
"Derp de derp."
Take your blinders off.
What?
You said nobody was hurt by it. You're wrong. I really hope no further damage is done, but disaster is quite possible.
"Derp de derp."
i haven't bought half life 2, and i don't intend on buying the game before the steam bullshit is removed.
HL2 game is located in world with big corporations that are very powerful, and single person means nothing.
Valve have created most evil system of distributing computer games. And it is banning legal users.
And nobody noticed this relation...
What a irony!
Ho Ho Ho!
Merry Christmas you cheap bastards!
I'm starting to appriciatre reading at -1. Seriously, if you don't want to get locked out of your games, don't pirate. I don't see what the big issue is here.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
i can understand the valve wants to keep as much money in their pockets as they can, but steam really is a joke. i have 4 legit copies of hl1/cs we rebuilt my sons box and went to reinstall hl1 on his comp..of course he cant rem his steam pass. how do you recover your account well. his hotmail account had lasped so we could not resend his pass to his email (we have to have a dif email for each of these so we can onlly attach so many to our permanent email accoutn..and who wnats to give valve their real email addy anyways) so basically unless we send them his original package AND pay them a fee that cd key is dead so a game we bought ( pre steam mind you) is now under a new eula and we cant use a game we actually own. this is part of my problem with steam. all it is a control system under the guise of a content delivery system and no game should try to stick around in your task bar when i leave a game it should close without having to shut it down then go to my taskbar and shut it down again. steam is jsut a joke on the paying customers and i will not be buying hl2.5 or 3 or anything else from them
"tell the ones that come after me that 5 is to much"