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Whoah, Small Spender! Steam Sets Limits For Users Who Spend Less Than $5
As GameSpot reports, Valve has implemented a policy that reduces the privileges of Steam users unless those users have spent $5 through the service. Along the same lines as suggestions to limit spam by imposing a small fee on emails, the move is intended to reduce resource abuse as a business model. From the article:
"Malicious users often operate in the community on accounts which have not spent any money, reducing the individual risk of performing the actions they do," Valve said. "One of the best pieces of information we can compare between regular users and malicious users are their spending habits as typically the accounts being used have no investment in their longevity. Due to this being a common scenario we have decided to restrict certain community features until an account has met or exceeded $5.00 USD in Steam."
Restricted actions include sending invites, opening group chats, and taking part in the Steam marketplace.
I know this sounds off to some people on /. but I get something like 5-10 invites _a day_ from people who are trying to trade scam me. $5 doesn't sound too steep but I'm hoping this cuts it back even to 1 per day or fewer, just so I stop getting annoying notifications.
While it is kinda crappy thing to do I cant say as I blame entirely I mean I get several invites a week from level zero or one community members I have never heard of never played a multiplayer session with never traded with. They all end up being begging bots and scams.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Do you understand that this just blocks accounts from doing certain "spam tasks" until the account has spent FIVE FUCKING DOLLARS? Five is not a lot of dollars. It's not five dollars a week, a month, or a year. It's over the life of the account.
Because Steam accounts can be made in an automated fashion, this will greatly ramp up the effort needed by spammers- they'll have to steal cards or spend money.
This is to shut down spammers. Do you seriously mean to tell me you've been using Steam and have never spent five dollars, ever?
The price of entry is now $5 (or equivalent after currency conversion). This is a price. Previous to this imposition of limits, the cost of setting up hundreds or thousands of bot accounts to spam people with friend invites and phishing links was effectively nil.
For a couple months I was getting two or three steam friends invites a day from what were clearly bots. I for one am glad that these limits have been put in place.
I'm sure some people will do that, and I'm sure Valve thinks so too. But adding a moderate hurdle like that will certainly cut abuse down, and I don't see it as being a real imposition at all on actual users, so I think this is a brilliant idea. /been getting Steam Spam lately.
If you have access to stolen credit cards why would you be trade scamming for TF2 hats?
I would say some people may get annoyed due to following limitations:
>Submit content on the Steam Workshop
>Post in an item's Steam Workshop Discussions
Retail games dont give you full account, so if you buy some steam only game with a mod community (eg Civilization 5) you potentially lose quite a bit
That is possible, but how many people are actually active in the Steam community who have never spent $5 on Steam?
Is there someone, somewhere in the world that is like that? Probably. Many people? Probably not.
It is what is called an edge case, and a business can't account for all of them. They are trying to get rid of the bot spammers and this is one way to do it.
If you've only spent $4.50 on games, what they hell are you doing trying to get involved in mod discussions. The last thing those discussion forums need is more spammers.
You are welcome on my lawn.