Leafhopper
Banned
Not sure, it might not be going by what you said.
I don't think so. People are still getting invites.
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Accounts that have spent less than $5 on Steam now have limited access
- Thread starter Sendou
- Start date
I don't think so. People are still getting invites.
It's not retroactive. Sweeping changes like this never are, with the exception of the AllowCrossRegionTradingAndGifting flag being updated to have a runtime restriction in applicable scenarios regardless of when the gift was purchased (though to be clear, it didn't affect gifts that had already been activated).
yup. received 5 bot invites today
Leafhopper
Banned
Oh yeah, I am not saying its all going to happen at once. I probably should have said it's not standard everywhere yet.
ashecitism
Member
so it being retroactive was just a mistake? oh Valve
Dr. Buni
Member
It is hard to people some people can't be bothered to buy a $5 game on Steam. So much complaining about such a small change.
Hahahaha
If it was retroactive like it should be, yes it would stop many, many bots. Unless you think the following:
1- That spambots somehow make at least 5$ per account
2- That people that run hundreds of thousands of bots are ready to give 1 million dollars to Valve to make their bots.
Which are both nonsense things to think.
seriously, who do you think uses Steam community features and has never put 5 bucks into the store? other than spammers and the rare little kid with one gift on their account?
I mean once we get past the people who don't actually give a shit about Steam or PC gaming and are just in this thread to bitch about nothing because it's not the platform they use?
Slime Scholar
Member
Like others have said, most people who are gonna actively use Steam, or any of its restricted features, have spent at least 5 bucks on something, be it a game that went on sale, or a TF2 hat, or whatever. Valve's not set to somehow make a ton of money off of these people and this probably isn't a decision they came to overnight.
Some people are really quick to jump on shit like this as being an anti-consumer practice, and I understand the skepticism whenever something like this is implemented, but this really is being done to protect users accounts and information.
Those jumping into the thread to call out Valve, especially those who don't actually use Steam, probably aren't very aware of the kinds of scams that go on, or how often some people try this nonsense. Case in point, this is from a tumblr post of someone who was targeted.
This is what the new policy is supposed to stop. If someone's phishing account/bot gets banned, phishers would have to spend another $5 to make another one. Whether or not it will work (I think it will at least help) remains to be seen, but let's not get super-paranoid and act like Valve is just looking for reasons to nickel-and-dime its users with policies they already know will be controversial.
Some people are really quick to jump on shit like this as being an anti-consumer practice, and I understand the skepticism whenever something like this is implemented, but this really is being done to protect users accounts and information.
Those jumping into the thread to call out Valve, especially those who don't actually use Steam, probably aren't very aware of the kinds of scams that go on, or how often some people try this nonsense. Case in point, this is from a tumblr post of someone who was targeted.
The above describes one technique phishers use to compromise your information, but there are others that include phony URLS to Steam profiles, or other bullshit. Some people might be asking you to play, while others might want to trade with you, but their goal is always the same. There are plenty of other horror stories in the link.
This is what the new policy is supposed to stop. If someone's phishing account/bot gets banned, phishers would have to spend another $5 to make another one. Whether or not it will work (I think it will at least help) remains to be seen, but let's not get super-paranoid and act like Valve is just looking for reasons to nickel-and-dime its users with policies they already know will be controversial.
-tetsuo-
Unlimited Capacity
Then why do you care?
That'll be my account then, since registering in like 2006 I've spent £0
Not one Christmas or summer sale item? My god you're one tough hombre.
Slime Scholar
Member
I believe you can report them from their account page. Their accounts are usually private though, and you won't see any information on them, so unless you directly interact with them you can only really report them for being suspicious.
Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
so your stance is that rather than somehow extract more money from the people who do buy games, valve is going to screw over the people who DON'T buy games, who are going to pay the money because they're addicted to steam chat to chat with the people they met in the retail games they bought 6 years ago? and they're doing this by ... taking 30% of money that those people spend in the store?
that seems like a really strange cash grab.
like, they'd get more money if they randomly made games cost $0.02 more for people whose usernames start with q.
charlequin
Banned
I guarantee you the average return per account is way less than $5.
Then you'll have to find a different service than Steam to chat with the other dinosaurs about how the meteor is coming.
jim-jam bongs
Member
Hey now, I'm genuinely pleased that we have people like Yoshi looking out for us. Clearly they're very concerned about our well-being.
I resisted Steam for years because I'm an old dinosaur who likes physical.
I've spent more than $250 on Steam since Kickstarter.
Apparently, only $2.50 of that counts towards lifting this restriction.
But looking at the list of unavailable features, I don't think I'm missing anything, so whatever.
I've spent more than $250 on Steam since Kickstarter.
Apparently, only $2.50 of that counts towards lifting this restriction.
But looking at the list of unavailable features, I don't think I'm missing anything, so whatever.
jim-jam bongs
Member
I'm not sure I understand, why does only 1% of the money you've spent count?
Because I spent the money on Kickstarter, not Steam.
I bought Shantae Risky's Revenge on Steam for $2.50.
jim-jam bongs
Member
Oh right, sorry. That makes sense, but it does suck.
"This is what the new policy is supposed to stop. If someone's phishing account/bot gets banned, phishers would have to spend another $5 to make another one. Whether or not it will work (I think it will at least help) remains to be seen, but let's not get super-paranoid and act like Valve is just looking for reasons to nickel-and-dime its users with policies they already know will be controversial."
I wonder if they could just make you register a credit card, wait till an amount of time to make sure its not stolen and then allow you to have the services? No charge. I know for those who don't have access to a credit card or don't want to use it...you are the ones getting hit by someone else's criminal activity. But the idea would be is to have some positive id on these spammers. I don't think 5 bucks is going to stop them from phishing.
I wonder if they could just make you register a credit card, wait till an amount of time to make sure its not stolen and then allow you to have the services? No charge. I know for those who don't have access to a credit card or don't want to use it...you are the ones getting hit by someone else's criminal activity. But the idea would be is to have some positive id on these spammers. I don't think 5 bucks is going to stop them from phishing.
Not really. I don't even know what half of those features in the OP are.
I'm a proud dinosaur.
foxuzamaki
Doesn't read OPs, especially not his own
I see
Yes actually, for testing purposes only. Why should I watch porn on a 240p display if I have a smartphone and a PC with a 1080p screen
Yes actually, for testing purposes only. Why should I watch porn on a 240p display if I have a smartphone and a PC with a 1080p screen
Lower res only makes it more naughty.
foxuzamaki
Doesn't read OPs, especially not his own
Yes actually, for testing purposes only. Why should I watch porn on a 240p display if I have a smartphone and a PC with a 1080p screen
For that genuine amateur feel
But monthly fees are okay.
Yoshi
Headmaster of Console Warrior Jugendstrafanstalt
It does not directly affect me, but I still think it's not a fair move by Valve. You can think an action is wrong, even if you are personally unaffected.
It means: MS and Sony are taking more money from you, so that's worse in that regard. However, the money you pay, you pay directly for being able to use online and then have a guarantee that you can do that for the specified amount of time. If Valve decided to up the barrier of entry to any higher number at any given time, even if it is tomorrow, they can do this, because you never officially paid for being able to use the online features, but you paid for digital licenses of games.
You could have just quoted my posting in this very thread where I said I don't buy PC games. Other than that, see my first answer in this reply.(from a Freedom Planet thread a while back that I remembered)
Why are you even posting in this thread?
If you are buying retail games on PC, chances are they require Steam.
If this was just a measure against spammers, they could have offered free authentification measures like credit card info, or they could at least have accepted that someone who has a bunch of retail games registered through boxed copies, probably had to pay money for that too. The chosen option is a greedy one.
ebullientprism
Member
Because it feels good to be wronged or outraged. Especially on the internet when it doesn't affect you.
Pellegri Testament
Member
Just wondering, how much longer do you think retail PC games will actually last? Sooner or later that latest CoD game will be digital only (why isn't it already when the majority of the game requires online to begin with?) and things are just going to go down the food chain from there. Retail will not be an option forever, sooner or later you are going to have to be faced with the very real decision that you either go digital or you miss out on the latest games (this does not only apply to PC).
Also that greed man. It's like 30% (Valve only gets 30% of a purchase for anything non Valve) of a $5 purchase is going to make them truck loads and clearly they are doing this for the pennies, when they could have made it an actual significant amount of money that would screw over legitimate customers.
Yoshi
Headmaster of Console Warrior Jugendstrafanstalt
I don't know and if the situation on consoles was like it is on PC, where almost every game needs online authentification, I'd probably have stopped playing games already. However, I know there are people who want to buy retail only, but are fine with online-verification, because either they think on PC, they can circumvent online verification down the road if they want to play the game years later when the authentification might not be possible anymore, or they even do not care about longevity of the games and just don't want to download such huge amounts of data / like to have a box / can pay in cash (this is a huge advantage for some people, around here anyway)
1,5$ from a huge amount of people with no return service can amount to a nice sum. They could have just accepted value gained by activating codes, too, or, alternatively, offered the option of automatically declining friend requests from people under a certain amount of money spent, without enforcing it for everyone.
Pellegri Testament
Member
Define "huge amount of people" please. Because this won't affect a huge amount of people because they have already bought something from the store, it only affects a minority who only go retail or bundles and then it affects bots (which the bots are considered a huge amount).
Accepting value through activating codes would also mean that everyone who has ever bought a bundle would also be accepted (keep in mind that scammers could just buy hundreds of bundles for cheap and activate a single game per account), considering bundles have used codes 90% of the time. Before you ask "well why couldn't they just count bundles differently?" I would ask if you have any idea what that would entail. Because they aren't about to go through tens of millions of accounts to see who has a bundle key and who has a retail/store key, because right now they do not differentiate between the 2 and it would take an insane amount of time to do so (if they fucked up even once with classifying something, they would get hell).
charlequin
Banned
I'm sorry, but this is bullshit.
Anyone can charge you more for anything they offer at any time. The idea that a low minimum purchase threshold to unlock a few convenience features is worse than an actual, mandatory fee to play online at all is completely absurd. Not one person in this thread has been able to produce a non-hypothetical case where some real person would be seriously impacted by this rule, because it's designed to be so unobtrusive that it will almost never come up for any legitimate purchaser.
If you were like many posters in this thread who actually use Steam and were upset on principle, we'd still disagree but at least you'd be coming from a place of honesty. Given that you are an established PC gaming hater, however, it's hard to interpret this as anything but a disingenuous troll, and we don't cotton much to that.
Yoshi
Headmaster of Console Warrior Jugendstrafanstalt
Having to pay a mandatory monthly fee is worse than paying a one-time fee of similar amount. However, the difference is that this mandatory fee is directly tied to giving me the right to play online. If Microsoft sold me Xbox Live Gold and shut me out of the service because of arbitrary reasons like "you haven't bought any XBL marketplace funds", they'd have a serious problem, Valve however is not offering this. They just say "If you have spent 5$ on our marketplace directly, we will accept you use the online service" - and don't offer any guarantees over how long we can expect this to last. This is a problem on princple for me.
Then nobody in this thread knows a pair of people who'd like to play with each others, don't have each others in their friends list yet and only buy retail games? Maybe that's the case because the rule was just applied recently, so for now, all pairs of friends have added each others as friends in the past already, but in a few months, new people might become friends, or newly decide to play game together, who only buy retail games on PC.
First, just because I don't buy games on PC, does not mean I hate PC gaming. There are things I don't want to deal with and reasons why I prefer closed unified systems over PCs, but hate is such a strong word, I don't feel a grudge or similar towards PC games. In fact I have completed numerous games on PC and bought games on PC in the past, though long before Steam came into being (For instance the Keen games, the Jazz games, Rayman 1, World and 2, Sonic CD). Moreover, it depends on what you define as using Steam, I have a Steam account and a few games on it, a bundle that was gifted to me and Portal, which I played when it was free in order to decide whether to buy the game for 360 even though I hate (and here, the word hate is right) first person shooters. So, technically, I'm using Steam, though I'd not call me a Steam user, because I don't buy PC games anymore.
Pellegri Testament
Member
Uhh...what? You seem to have not read a single fucking thing in the OP if you think that Steam is locking you out of playing online. You can still play all your games, you can still play with other people, you can still talk to other people as long as they were on your friendslist before this change (hell you can still chat with people ingame too whether they're on your list or not). None of that is changing for people who don't pay this "fee". If that's what your last several pages of posts have been about, then I suggest reading the OP for the thread before even thinking about posting on this subject again, because this is pretty ridiculous.
charlequin
Banned
Make your next response in this thread something that establishes you have read the OP and the thread and you understand what it even is you're arguing about.
Yoshi
Headmaster of Console Warrior Jugendstrafanstalt
OK, I worded that too strongly, because I wanted to focus on the difference between these two models. I understand that you can still play online and you can still play online with your friends you've added before, but, to my understanding, and if this is wrong, I cannot read that from the op, you cannot add new friends to play with. So if you befriend a new person and both of you happen to like the same game and only buy retail games, you cannot play retail PC games tied to Steam together online other than by chance (of course it might happen you get matched in a game with a "stranger") if you do not add funds to your Steam account.
Laughing Banana
Weeping Pickle
Man, if a mod already proclaimed out loud that you are a ___ hater then it'd be best if you just bow out gracefully, hahaha.
Interesting move this one. At first glance it seems like it is a money gouging practice but ah, if the vast majority of people agree with it as indicated by this thread than I don't see why it is a problem.
Interesting move this one. At first glance it seems like it is a money gouging practice but ah, if the vast majority of people agree with it as indicated by this thread than I don't see why it is a problem.
Yoshi
Headmaster of Console Warrior Jugendstrafanstalt
It may be strategically better but since I feel he misunderstood what I wanted to say, I just treated him as another user who happens to, as I see it, misunderstood what I wanted to say and clarify this. In principle I think it is the nicer way of treating people, as long as he does not make an authority statement, I'll just discuss with a mod as with any other person, because if I were in the mod's position, I would not want people to run away the moment I say that I step into a discussion.
To ensure I did what you asked for: The next post I made hopefully made clear my miswording above and made clear I have read the op (and a sizable amount of the thread, but, I confess, not every single posting in it). So to make sure it is clear what I am talking about:
If you do not add funds of at least 5$ to your account (or have done that in the past), you won't be able to add new people to your friends list on Steam, a service, that is tied not only to a vitual store, but to a huge amount of retail games, too. The friendslist, and here I'm not 100% certain, is the only (convenient?) way of reliably playing with a selected person or gourp of persons online. You cannot buy full membership of the online service outright, the funds you add only have the side effect of unlocking the ability to add new friends to your friends list.
Now, one could compare paying 5$ on PC for full online functionality, or 10$ per month on two of the current five consoles (or 0 whatsoever on the reamining 3). However, the difference I see and something that is a problem on princple for me, is, that you do not get any guarantee from Valve wrt online play in return, because you are not buying into the system from Valve's perspective. So if you pay the 5$ just to enable fully-featured online play, you have no contract ensuring your purchase, instead you get a guarantee for something different you may not be interested in at all. From this perspective, this system is worse, because it allows for arbitrary behaviour of Valve (for instance, taking away your ability to add friends the very next day, or lock online-play behind a pay wall like MS and Sony do, or whatever the hell I cannot think of right now).
To give an analogon: There are internet cafés where you can go and use the internet for a given amount of time. You pay for the internet. At Starbucks, you get free Wi-Fi, if you are a customer there, however, if Starbucks turns of the router, you cannot access the internet anymore and you have no contract over the internet connection, so you're just out of luck. So, while it might be cheaper to buy a coffee at starbucks and just use their internet as an added bonus, than going to the internet café, if you are only really interested in the internet, you might still prefer the internet café that guarantees you access to the internet for instance for an hour.
PHOENIXZERO
Member
Meh, I've spent $7.49 through the Steam Store when I bought the first two Witcher games last year so I'm good. Is it really that difficult to spend $5 if this actually concerns you? As long as it does its job of filtering out bots/spammers then good.
Yoshi, since no one else will say it, I will say it. At this point no one in this thread who is participating in good faith and who has a Steam account and values the services being discussed here gives a fuck what you have to say. You a) are in no way impacted, b) do not even care about the platform, c) do not have an interest in PC gaming nor do you follow the social trends or actual interests of people who do. So the value of anything you have to contribute to this discussion is jack shit. Go away, no one here wants to talk to you about this anymore. Yes I'm being rude, I don't care.
Read, again, the thread before you post or maybe you really want a tag like "I dont read the thread or the op, please ignore me". Also your "analogons" are terrible...
texhnolyze
Banned
Perhaps non-retroactive is not a common term.
Let's say it in a simple way, accounts that are created before this change won't be affected. If there were any other changes in the future, it'll only affect newly created accounts. Valve won't take our ability away, chill out.
Let's say it in a simple way, accounts that are created before this change won't be affected. If there were any other changes in the future, it'll only affect newly created accounts. Valve won't take our ability away, chill out.
ashecitism
Member
It isn't even retroactive anymore (lame), so only new accounts will get affected.
I feel like that should be pointed out in the OP.
Why did you quote my post?