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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'."
Since one of the latest patches presumably fixes the requirement for the CD to be in your 'puter ; I am still thinking that anyone who bought their game (either in store, or over Steam) are allowed to screw around with their files (no-cd .exe's / modified .exe's), and no ban can be justified by this.
As soon as multiplayer files are being manipulated , I think banning is in line, as it compromises the game's fairness (not that VAC is able to stop anything this time around.....)
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.
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.
I had a problem when I purchased Sim City 3000. You were supposed to logon to a website, enter your key and get additional content.
Well, I tried that - but someone had already used my key to setup an account. Keep in mind the copy I bought was a sealed store-bought copy, not second hand. I guess someone used a keygen and got my key.
I tried going through support and sending them a scanned image of the CD case with key. Nothing. Just a standard thank you for contacting support message.
I feel for anyone who got their account wrongfully banned/disabled.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
You have a right to take it back to the store and excahange it, in that case. You can simply cite the product as "defective". Walmart is especially good about this, mainly bc they don't yet have any notion of the value of a CD key.
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
It'd be counter intuitive for them to start charging for steam. The purpose is for them to make more money by offering a publisher-free avenue for game distribution. Should they start charging there will be little reason for the consumer to value steam as functional. It'd be like being charged a toll at the front door of your local mall.
WTF are you talking about? If anything else, Steam has pissed people off and increased piracy. Pirated versions of HL2 don't need steam for the single-player game.
Steam may be somewhat effective in preventing multi-player use of pirated games, but Blizzard's battle.net system works just as well, has been around forever, and isn't nearly as evil.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.