Support NeoGAF

[LordRaptor]

As a society we should care what children does with money, specially if it can degenerate into gambling problems.

As a society we tend not to hold the central bank to blame for a child having unmonitored and unrestricted access to wealth.
That onus is usually that of a legal guardian.

Wouldn't a simple ban of the gambling sites using the api be enough? I mean if you can't verify your steam account on the page much of the automation goes away, right?

Blacklisting specific sites solves problems with specific sites.
Would / should a site called, I dont know, CS Skin Price Check . com be blacklisted if you enter a steamid and it tells you what nominal value that backpack contains based upon current market value?
If no, what would stop any other site using that site for the information required to RMT those items?
Is that first site then liable for people using that second site to abuse the system?

Virtual economies are a hugely complicated matter, because they mimic real economies.

 

[ultrazilla]

How about immediately withdraw all access to the API.

Open applications to use the API.

Grant applications to use the API on a case by case basis.

Nope? Too much?

I'm surprised they didn't go this route. Seems like Valve's lawyers advised them they were on the hook for this or partially to blame. I'm saying "seems". I don't know for sure but if it looks and acts like a duck...

 

[Keinu]

Every single thing required for the gambling doesnt required the API in any way.

I understand that, but much of the automation goes away though, right? It would be hard for the gambling site to verify the skins you traded to the bot/middle man or am I missing something?

 

[Relaxed Muscle]

Which is why you should outlaw Chuvk E Cheese tickets, Pokémon cards, and children tpuching money in any way whatsoever since they can potentially use it on bad stuff.
Kids gambling on CS GO has nothing to do with Valve, and everything with the gambling sites that allowing for gambling without age checjs, + shitty fucking ass parents that allow their kids to run wild with their credit cards. If they didnt spend that money on cs go, they would spend it literally everywhere elae they could, and you dont go around limiting those because of those.

Even if I believe that the actual trading market on Steam, certainly needs some proper regulations, dosn't have to do with the matter at hand. Which is gambling sites.

And it has to do with Valve in the sense they use their tools and backend info for these shitty activities, the fact that Valve is not directly involved on it, dosn't mean they are free of any responsibility. A responsability they, finally, decided to assume.

 

[MUnited83]

Yeah because there are so many illegal gambling sites that take in 10s of millions of dollars in bets monthly using Pokemon cards or Chuck E Cheese Tickets.

So? Care to actually try to explain your point or you would just like to define gambling incentivation when it reaches a randomly defined point of revenue defined by yourself?

 

[jshackles]

How about immediately withdraw all access to the API.

Open applications to use the API.

Grant applications to use the API on a case by case basis.

Nope? Too much?

That would be one way to do it, but you'd have a huge rush of people attempting to apply for API access, and we all know how well Valve does at handing things on a "case by case basis" like individual user support. The result of this would be that several (thousands?) of Steam-integrated sites and services would stop working until their admins were granted approval by Valve to continue operating.

In my personal situation, this means that a number of Enhanced Steam features would stop working all together until Valve saw fit to grant our API servers access to their API again - meaning I get a lot of nasty emails from people and a barrage of bug reports for something that's outside of my control. If they were planning on moving to a manual review process, I would hope they would announce such a change well in advance and start taking new applications for the new API while keeping the existing system in place for ideally six months to a year before completely cutting off access.

But yes, in theory such a plan would work, as long as Valve were willing to dedicate the resources to such a fix.

 

[Acorn]

It's a start.

Just a shame the coals need to be lit under Valve's ass to get them to do something. The same bullshit expected from run of the mill AAA developers.

The cult around valve means they exist in a different world, like apple.

 

[Durante]

Let me sum this entire thing up since following my reasoning accross the conversation is apparently difficult for you:
...

What you said here actually mostly makes sense. I also didn't disagree with any of it, and I encourage you to read my posts in this thread from the start again if you think I did.

What I don't understand is why you seem so incredibly angry about your argument not being clear in the first place, and why you feel the need to liberally sprinkle personal insults between trying to argue your points. If you don't see how that can be considered unconstructive I don't know what to tell you -- I mean you are still doing it even in that small snippet with the whole "apparently difficult for you" thing.

 

[Rudiano]

Hope they still get sued, trying to act like saints now lol

 

[Dash Kappei]

BOOMSHAKALAKAAAA!!!!

YES! YESSSS!!!!

Finally.

 

[LordRaptor]

The result of this would be that several (thousands?) of Steam-integrated sites and services would stop working until their admins were granted approval by Valve to continue operating.

I suspect you probably have a better idea than most of exactly how many API inventory / trade requests / queries are sent on an hourly basis to Steam, and what sort of scale manually monitoring such requests would involve.

I would guess a hell of a lot.

 

[Spirited]

Hope they still get sued, trying to act like saints now lol

They are not acting like saints they are probably following what they're told by lawyers to do.

And they will be continued to be sued but from what I've read the lawsuits is not that credible so nothing is changing.

 

[SpiceMelange]

What you said here actually mostly makes sense. I also didn't disagree with any of it, and I encourage you to read my posts in this thread from the start again if you think I did.

What I don't understand is why you seem so incredibly angry about your argument not being clear in the first place, and why you feel the need to liberally sprinkle personal insults between trying to argue your points. If you don't see how that can be considered unconstructive I don't know what to tell you -- I mean you are still doing it even in that small snippet with the whole "apparently difficult for you" thing.

That's Yanger for you. Always angry, always shouting insults and always capitalizing random words for no reasons.

 

[collige]

The fuck? Gambling is a serious fucking problem for people with the weakness, dude. It's JUST as bad. There is literally zero difference. Your point does not stand.

Second these items are actual money. It take zero effort to convert them.

People having gambling addictions isn't a scandal. I was referring specifically to the drama with Tmartn which is far more egregious than just the fact that his site existed.

My point was that people who are serious about making money off esports bets don't have to fuck around going through two separate currencies when there are ways for them to just bet real money. When 322 happened, it was over $322, not $322 worth of skins.

I suspect you probably have a better idea than most of exactly how many API inventory / trade requests / queries are sent on an hourly basis to Steam, and what sort of scale manually monitoring such requests would involve.

I would guess a hell of a lot.

The idea would be to monitor API usage on a user by user basis, not a request by request one. This is significantly more manageable if they invest manpower into it. API keys are already given out on a domain by domain basis.

 

[Relaxed Muscle]

As a society we tend not to hold the central bank to blame for a child having unmonitored and unrestricted access to wealth.
That onus is usually that of a legal guardian.

We would had blamed that central bank, if they didn't put the necessary safeties and systems in place so kids had unrestricted access to their parents accounts.

The same way we hold blame against Apple, for how easy shitty games allowed kids to spend hundreds/thousands of bucks, without any kind of real ystems in place to avoid that situation.

 

[Glitchesarecool]

Now maybe someone will sue them and get a proper customer support division started.

Seems to be the only way to get shit done with Valve.

 

[MUnited83]

I understand that, but much of the automation goes away though, right? It would be hard for the gambling site to verify the skins you traded to the bot/middle man or am I missing something?

Not at all, all of that is extremely trivial. The only thing that the API does is let people login to the site directly, which is not involved in any of the trade systems at all and can be replaced by a normal registar option, and allows you to check your inventor, which is something trivial to automate.

 

[Gxgear]

It's unfortunate that even on GAF people are supporting the notion of throwing frivolous lawsuits at Valve for not babysitting Steam users on spending money. I mean yes we're seeing Valve making changes but it's for the wrong reasons.

 

[manfestival]

This is absolutely garbage. How else am I supposed to win Rares and arcana? Betting against Navi and eg fanboy is prime pickings!

 

[Dreams-Visions]

Correct. Far more likely, in this instance, the users would receive a community ban - meaning they would lose access to the community features on Steam altogether. This is different from VAC.

Actually, since using their services like this is against their TOS, a trade ban seems very much in play. You can still play the games to your heart's content; you just can't trade items. Essentially, all items in said account become account-bound.

 

[LordRaptor]

The idea would be to monitor API usage on a user by user basis, not a request by request one. This is significantly more manageable if they invest manpower into it. API keys are already given out on a domain by domain basis.

I have no idea of the scale involved, I was genuinely curious - I suspect either way we're not talking trivial amounts of work.

The same way we hold blame against Apple, for how easy shitty games allowed kids to spend hundreds/thousands of bucks, without any kind of real ystems in place to avoid that situation.

But there are systems in place.
Problems specifically arise when people bypass those systems externally.

 

[LUFTRAUSER]

Now maybe someone will sue them and get a proper customer support division started.

Seems to be the only way to get shit done with Valve.

God I hope so. I contacted Blizzard support to get my Battle.net username changed because I didn't realize that Battle.net only lets you change you username once PERIOD, not just just "for free", and they had responded and gotten it fixed within less than three hours. Crazy. One of the best things about Overwatch as a TF2 player is to play a game made by a company that actually cares about their customers. It has really lowered my opinion of Valve. By a lot.

 

[jshackles]

I suspect you probably have a better idea than most of exactly how many API inventory / trade requests / queries are sent on an hourly basis to Steam, and what sort of scale manually monitoring such requests would involve.

I would guess a hell of a lot.

I would say a hell of a lot might even be an understatement. Obviously Enhanced Steam's API servers were built to be well optimized - everything is cached locally then distributed to a multitude of users who run the client portion of Enhanced Steam that also caches the data in their browser's localstorage for 1-24 hours which reduces the load on our servers as much as possible. And even still, our servers typically serve between 200 to 1,000 requests per second depending on the time of day / general load. Moreso when events like popular sales are going on. And this is just clients pulling data for things like Steam Chart / SteamSpy info, price history data, user profile information, etc.

I imagine that Enhanced Steam's API server usage pales in comparison to the amount of requests that are seen on Steam's API servers.

 

[Zemm]

Good start, now for them to stop making gambling simulator games

 

[Relaxed Muscle]

But there are systems in place.
Problems specifically arise when people bypass those systems externally.

They weren't clearly working/not enough, as shown by the fact that they needed to take extra meassures.

 

[Gnome Scat]

Finally.

 

[MikeyB]

Yes, and she's scrabbling around to get them back on again, but even before she can get her knickers on, I've seen everything. Yeah. I've seen it all.

 

[rrs]

I do wonder who valve is going to make an example out of if they are going to ban anyone for real life money trading, there's been very very public 3rd party large trades for years and valve has just shrugged until now. Perhaps the message is saying "pull out your shit from these sites or it's gone for good" or "If you still run large gambling bots, we will wreck it"

 

[LUFTRAUSER]

Best reddit comment on this so far:

HIDE YO SKINS. HIDE YO KNIFE.

 

[Yukinari]

I do wonder who valve is going to make an example out of if they are going to ban anyone for real life money trading, there's been very very public 3rd party large trades for years and valve has just shrugged until now. Perhaps the message is saying "pull out your shit from these sites or it's gone for good"

Thats what im thinking it means, stop using these sites or you wont get the items back. They arent gonna fucking trade ban/vac ban a huge percent of their playerbase.

 

[teiresias]

It's unfortunate that even on GAF people are supporting the notion of throwing frivolous lawsuits at Valve for not babysitting Steam users on spending money. I mean yes we're seeing Valve making changes but it's for the wrong reasons.

Frankly, I can't really blame people even for frivolous lawsuits at this point. Valve is notoriously unfriendly in a customer service sense, has no support infrastructure to speak of, and hides behind being a private company to justify their aloof attitude to the customers that support them. You can only ignore your users consistently before people start taking you to task for it however they can through the legal means available to them.

Now one can argue they should do that by withholding business from them, but that doesn't help people that have extensive Steam Libraries they would like to keep access to.

Personally, this entire ordeal has me completely soured on Valve and Gabe. They're completely encapsulated in their own universe and taking no responsibility for these kinds of things that happen through their services and infrastructure until shit hits the fan. I've turned almost completely to GOG at this point unless I have no choice because something is exclusive to Steam.

 

[MUnited83]

God I hope so. I contacted Blizzard support to get my Battle.net username changed because I didn't realize that Battle.net only lets you change you username once PERIOD, not just just "for free", and they had responded and gotten it fixed within less than three hours. Crazy. One of the best things about Overwatch as a TF2 player is to play a game made by a company that actually cares about their customers. It has really lowered my opinion of Valve. By a lot.

Thats one terrible example.

 

[LUFTRAUSER]

Thats one terrible example.

It really isn't. Valve "support" takes so long to respond that it basically doesn't exist. K? Kinda like how gambling being still possible but way harder after this effectively means it will be dead. Do you guys just, like, not consider your time or mental state to be worth anything? Or are hours and stress just meaningless to you?

 

[pislit]

????

Im selling my dota arcanas, cash out and buy myself a car.

 

[autoduelist]

Virtual economies will have all of the issues inherent with real economies. Theft, gambling, counterfeiting where possible, etc, etc.

I think we ask a lot when we expect Steam to be on top of the entire economy like a hawk -- I'm not saying they shouldn't deal with situations as they arise, but expecting them to be ahead of the game seems an impossible task to me. They can only ever be expected to chase down flagrant issues.

More to the point, the solution to me is one of two things:
a) either these virtual economies shouldn't exist in the first place
or
b) accept they are and will be the wild west since it's impossible to crack down on endless virtual economies [it's hard enough to crack down on real economies.

A bothers me on a philosophical level, since I believe people should be able to make and trade with whatever they want, even alternate currencies [often outlawed in the US].

B seems the only option to me, with companies chasing down violations beyond the pale, where truly illegal things are going on. But even then, again, I don't think any company can stay completely on top of any virtual economy, simply because it's 'too big'.

Th trend of Valve being hands off on unless it hurts them directly, or the internet blows up, is getting old.

Good on them for making the right step but a lawsuit and internet rage shouldn't be the only thing that drives them to action.

See above. I don't think we can expect companies to be entirely proactive when dealing with virtual economies simply due to logistics. Why spend a fortune hunting down and resolving issues if no one seems to care and people are doing things they want to do [gambling, etc.]. There's no real reason to chase down and 'solve' those issues unless there is a big 'stink'. You may think it's immoral to allow gambling, but certainly, that's subjective. I don't see any issue with two adults betting over a coin flip. Yes, it gets foggy when you add children to the mix, but again, that becomes an impossible task - how does a company prevent third parties from allowing digital people to 'trade' when they may or may not be children?

 

[Iced_Eagle]

I do wonder who valve is going to make an example out of if they are going to ban anyone for real life money trading, there's been very very public 3rd party large trades for years and valve has just shrugged until now. Perhaps the message is saying "pull out your shit from these sites or it's gone for good"

Well according to the CSGO subreddit, some websites have already started to disable withdrawals from their site (example being CSGO Wild).

 

[LUFTRAUSER]

????

Steam wallet funds do not constitute real money, technically. Unless you sell your Steam account or something that money is gone. Though it would not surprise me if even this feature was eventually put under scrutiny.

 

[Keinu]

Not at all, all of that is extremely trivial. The only thing that the API does is let people login to the site directly, which is not involved in any of the trade systems at all and can be replaced by a normal registar option, and allows you to check your inventor, which is something trivial to automate.

Ok, but could you explain to me how the verification would work? After you registrer normally how would they verify your steam account without the api? I mean you trade the skins, go to the site to gamble and you simply claim to be the same user. Wouldn't that make the whole process easily explotable and risky to use?

Sorry if this is obvious to you, I'm just trying to understand.

 

[call_kotaku]

Virtual economies will have all of the issues inherent with real economies. Theft, gambling, counterfeiting where possible, etc, etc.

I think we ask a lot when we expect Steam to be on top of the entire economy like a hawk -- I'm not saying they shouldn't deal with situations as they arise, but expecting them to be ahead of the game seems an impossible task to me. They can only ever be expected to chase down flagrant issues.

More to the point, the solution to me is one of two things:
a) either these virtual economies shouldn't exist in the first place
or
b) accept they are and will be the wild west since it's impossible to crack down on endless virtual economies [it's hard enough to crack down on real economies.

A bothers me on a philosophical level, since I believe people should be able to make and trade with whatever they want, even alternate currencies [often outlawed in the US].

B seems the only option to me, with companies chasing down violations beyond the pale, where truly illegal things are going on. But even then, again, I don't think any company can stay completely on top of any virtual economy, simply because it's 'too big'.



See above. I don't think we can expect companies to be entirely proactive when dealing with virtual economies simply due to logistics. Why spend a fortune hunting down and resolving issues if no one seems to care and people are doing things they want to do [gambling, etc.]. There's no real reason to chase down and 'solve' those issues unless there is a big 'stink'. You may think it's immoral to allow gambling, but certainly, that's subjective. I don't see any issue with two adults betting over a coin flip. Yes, it gets foggy when you add children to the mix, but again, that becomes an impossible task - how does a company prevent third parties from allowing digital people to 'trade' when they may or may not be children?

I think the argument is that maybe running your own digital economy isn't a good idea if you have no intention of managing or regulating it.

 

[MUnited83]

It really isn't. Valve "support" takes so long to respond that it basically doesn't exist. K? Kinda like how gambling being still possible but way harder after this effectively means it will be dead. Do you guys just, like, not consider your time or mental state to be worth anything? Or are hours and stress just meaningless to you?

Diferent matters take different times to get replied to and solved. Your issue literally doesnt even exist in the first place on Steam. You can change your name a unlimited numbers of times. You wouldnt need to wait for Steam support at all for that.
I also submitted a ticket today to steam support because of a issue with the mobile authenticator. Got replied to in 3/4 hours.

Ok, but could you explain to me how the verification would work? After you registrer normally how would they verify your steam account without the api? I mean you trade the skins, go to the site to gamble and you simply claim to be the same user. Wouldn't that make the whole process easily explotable and risky to use?

Sorry if this is obvious to you, I'm just trying to understand.

You trade the skins to the middleman/bot. They take not of your unique steam id. They send you the items if you win.
It isnt hard.

 

[Hypereides]

Sounds like a 'whoops'.

the assistance valve provided the gambling sites, if any, was probably technical support with the API

If they were aware of these gambling sites, they shouldn't have been involved in any degree from the start.

 

[rrs]

Well according to the CSGO subreddit, some websites have already started to disable withdrawals from their site (example being CSGO Wild).

I get this feeling now those sites are going to run off with the skins and vanish before the bots get trade banned

 

[Relaxed Muscle]

I think the argument is that maybe running your own digital economy isn't a good idea if you have no intention of managing or regulating it.

Dude, anarchy is great, letting people govern themselves and do whatever they want is the future. Why Steam should babysit their customers? They are adult people, surely.

 

[CountAntonius]

Valve acting like they didn't like the money and popularity boost these sites brought to CSGO. It's for the best but don't try to act so innocent. They were perfectly fine with it till the media got a hold of it.

 

[Mechanized]

Valve acting like they didn't like the money and popularity boost these sites brought to CSGO. It's for the best but don't try to act so innocent. They were perfectly fine with it till the media got a hold of it.

The amount of benefit of the doubt Valve gets is astounding.

 

[Brashnir]

Twist: Valve shutting out the competition before they launch their own in-Steam skin gambling site.

Allow me a moment of your time to tell you about the word of our Lord and Savior, the DOTA Compendium.

 

[quest]

Well according to the CSGO subreddit, some websites have already started to disable withdrawals from their site (example being CSGO Wild).

The panic is real on the CSGO subreddit. I guess this will be a lesson for many what happens when you deal with underground gambling and scammers.

 

[Audioboxer]

The cult around valve means they exist in a different world, like apple.

Without a doubt I'm seeing this more and more. Great companies can do shitty things, so it's natural to point them out and criticise while still enjoying stuff from said company.

I'm just disappointed Valve wasn't more proactive and needed a media blitz to finally get off their ass and do something. They're beginning to unapologetically praise the dollar a bit too much. As I said like other run of the mill AAA developers.

Gabe seems more and more a reclusive these days and at times a bit of a dick. Cmon Gabe you're a legend and should be steering the ship better than this.

 

[PAULINK]

This includes betting sites right? Or do those not exist anymore

 

[rrs]

This includes betting sites right? Or do those not exist anymore

going down with the straight up gambling sites

The panic is real on the CSGO subreddit. I guess this will be a lesson for many what happens when you deal with underground gambling and scammers.

I can see skin gambling even going deeper underground, killing off the huge profits these sites made with it and thus interest.