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Whoah, Small Spender! Steam Sets Limits For Users Who Spend Less Than $5

Posted by timothy on from the are-you-committed-or-just-involved dept.

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.

31 of 229 comments (clear)

  1. Thank god by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Thank god by v1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It'll sure make a huge cut in the bot accounts that are being used for scamming and spamming. Some of these scammers are probably looking at thousands of accounts used on a given day. Busting their "business model" is the best way to get rid of them.

      --
      I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
    2. Re:Thank god by X0563511 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      While I've been fortunate to have never received any of that junk, I do see this as a good move... and $5 is really low. Recall it's not $5 on any purchase, but $5 over the lifetime of your account. That's... well. If that's a problem for you, how exactly do you afford to have whatever it is you're running Steam on? I'll give you the internet - maybe public wifi (or stealing it)... but unless you dug the device out of the trash and are also stealing electricity, I think spending $5 at one time or another isn't much to require.

      --
      For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
    3. Re:Thank god by JMJimmy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      While I've been fortunate to have never received any of that junk, I do see this as a good move... and $5 is really low. Recall it's not $5 on any purchase, but $5 over the lifetime of your account. That's... well. If that's a problem for you, how exactly do you afford to have whatever it is you're running Steam on? I'll give you the internet - maybe public wifi (or stealing it)... but unless you dug the device out of the trash and are also stealing electricity, I think spending $5 at one time or another isn't much to require.

      The question really is, does the $5/account cover the costs of policing them if they do pay up.

    4. Re:Thank god by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That's silly. People don't hate Google+. They do, however, find it irrelevant - and got really annoyed at Google's repeated attempts to force-feed it to all of their users.

      Now that Google has finally (mostly) stopped doing that, everyone's back to simply finding Google+ irrelevant.

      --
      #DeleteChrome
    5. Re:Thank god by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      History shows this will work. Similar problems plagued the postal system until the invention of the postage stamp. From the article...

      "The first adhesive postage stamp, commonly referred to as the Penny Black, was issued in the United Kingdom in 1840. The invention of the stamp was part of an attempt to reform and improve the postal system in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, which, in the early 19th century, was in disarray and rife with corruption. There are varying accounts of the inventor or inventors of the stamp.

      Before the introduction of postage stamps, mail in the UK was paid for by the recipient, a system that was associated with an irresolvable problem: the costs of delivering mail were not recoverable by the postal service when recipients were unable or unwilling to pay for delivered items, and senders had no incentive to restrict the number, size, or weight of items sent, whether or not they would ultimately be paid for. The postage stamp resolved this issue in a simple and elegant manner"

      $5 is a small hurdle if you're going to be spending a lot of time on Steam.

    6. Re:Thank god by mhkohne · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Doesn't matter - they have to police scam accounts as it is. The biggest attraction to scammers is a zero-cost place to run scams, because most scams have such a low success rate that if it cost the scammer anything, they wouldn't do it.

      If Valve restricts the accounts unless they have SOME money in the game, the scammers can't simply operate at full rate - they'll have to pick and choose the scams and targets more carefully, because there's overhead. That knocks 90% of the bozo population out of the game, and while you'll ALWAYS have scammers, the most annoying ones will go away.

      --
      A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
    7. Re:Thank god by NetCow · · Score: 2

      No idea about trade since I never bother with it, but an account creation cooldown is out of the question: Many ISPs deploy transparent proxies or, worse yet, they NAT tons of their customers through the same public IPv4 address. A cooldown of this type would impact Valve's bottom line *and* piss off customers, so I don't think it can be done.

    8. Re:Thank god by X0563511 · · Score: 2

      You can buy wallet cards in various retail outlets with cash.

      --
      For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
    9. Re:Thank god by Yomers · · Score: 2

      If Valve restricts the accounts unless they have SOME money in the game, the scammers can't simply operate at full rate - they'll have to pick and choose the scams and targets more carefully, because there's overhead.

      Good news everyone - Steam is working on increasing scam quality!

    10. Re:Thank god by Neil+Boekend · · Score: 3, Funny

      Obligatory XKCD

      --
      Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
    11. Re:Thank god by bemymonkey · · Score: 2

      That's incorrect. I can no longer sell dropped items on the marketplace and I've spent ~$100 on my account over its lifetime. It's something like spend $x in the last y days... The last thing I bought was CS:GO, so I can no longer use the marketplace (I just sell the stuff that drops in CSGO, I'm up to like $50 in Steam credit and I only played like an hour a week for about a year or so) until I buy a new game via Steam.

      I think it's a step in the right direction though... towards the end I was also getting a lot of invites purely for trading's sake and it was starting to piss me off.

    12. Re:Thank god by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Google+ is the only social network I use, because it's the only one that isn't a torrent of effluent. If you start by following a few well known people in your area of interest (mine are electronics and retro computing) you can quickly build up a network of interesting people who only post stuff relevant to you. For the most part G+ doesn't suffer from the Facebook/Twitter style "I just wiped my arse!" "updates". It's where the smart kids hang out.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    13. Re:Thank god by jythie · · Score: 2

      Good point regarding that demographic. I wonder if Valve could do some fine tuning so that playing those games a certain amount also marks someone as a 'real' account.

  2. Can't say as I blame them. by lister+king+of+smeg · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  3. So by Greyfox · · Score: 2

    Instead of paying nothing they'll just have to buy a cheap game with a stolen credit card? The monthly subscription fee never seemed to be a problem for the gold farmers in WoW or the isk farmers in Eve Online.

    --

    I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

    1. Re:So by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:So by fiore42 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:So by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If you have access to stolen credit cards why would you be trade scamming for TF2 hats?

    4. Re: So by Hognoxious · · Score: 2

      I think you should have included "I heard that" , "this TV show I watched said" or "so they say" "somewhere in your post.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    5. Re:So by gman003 · · Score: 2

      The point is to make the account cost more than the expected value gained via scamming.

      Scams, in general, have a poor success rate. There may be a sucker born every minute, but there's 250 people born a minute. Even if a successful scam nets a large gain, losing $5 on each attempt makes it a losing proposition.

  4. Re:should be higher by MacTO · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you set the threshold that high, new users will probably be turned off by the price of entry. That's particularly true of people who buy indie games or wait for sales, since that $50 can easily buy a couple of dozen games.

  5. workshop by jarkus4 · · Score: 2

    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

    1. Re:workshop by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  6. Re:Tired of this from valve by cfalcon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

  7. Re:Tired of this from valve by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    bullshit, buy wallet credit from gamestop etc.

  8. Re:should be higher by PopeRatzo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  9. Re:Tired of this from valve by PopeRatzo · · Score: 2, Informative

    Also to spend money you have to hand over your personal information such as your full home address.

    Not to Steam, you don't. I buy games on Steam using PayPal.

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
  10. Re:should be higher by Altrag · · Score: 2

    The threshold doesn't have to be high though -- it only has to be higher than the opportunity cost for spamming. Once you hit that point, going further does little or nothing to help your cause but can negatively impact additional legitimate edge cases.

  11. Labor market doesn't accommodate all kids by tepples · · Score: 2

    We made plenty of money when we were young doing things like mowing grass and shoveling snow.

    The demand for such services is limited. What steps should a child take to ensure that all the lawns on his block aren't already being mowed either by a resident or by another child on the block? And in winter, how should a child cope with the neighbor who runs a gasoline-powered snow thrower up and down the whole block for free out of 1. altruism and 2. wanting to walk to the bus stop without having to dodge cars in the street? (I am said neighbor.)

  12. Re:should be higher by murphtall · · Score: 2
    agreed.

    Slashdot is read out of context