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Steam Families is here
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this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2024
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Parents just have to make sure the kid understands to not cheat before sharing the account. It might sound new to us because we never grew up with this scenario, but it seems reasonable to me.
Again, it's just making sure the kid is a safe driver before letting them borrow keys to the family van.
If the ban worries you, you can just not share the games - this is strictly an upside and there's no penalty for maintaining the status quo and not using this feature.
The problem with that statement is that there's a pretty common example that I already brought up that easily disproves it - letting the kid borrow keys to the car after they've shown they can drive safely.
There's a lot more parental liability there than some skins in a game.
And the penalty is losing access to a fucking game, not the death of other people.
Teenage driving proves that they can learn to be responsible enough to be trusted with the lives of others. You're saying they can't learn to be responsible enough with your CS skins?
And I hope your child is trusted enough to drive at some point, because you invested the time and effort to trust them behind the wheel.
I've had my steam account forever, so I might be overlooking something I did early on and forgot about, But I think the problem with anything along the lines of what you're proposing is that they don't have the time or ability to confirm that each steam account does belong to a different individual. This would either result in super intrusive amounts of data collecting, or risk someone saying "oops, look at that, my 15th child just got banned for hacking!" And then adding yet another "family member"?
Where do you draw the line in the above scenario? At least the current policy is clear.
It's much easier to bag on an idea than it is to come up with one, isn't it?
Do you have any proposals that you think would be better?
Humor me here.
My assumption is that steams main goal is to provide paying users with good service by minimizing hackers, and second to that, provide QOL features like family share.
Do you agree with that assumption? If not, what do you think the priorities are?
If you do agree with the assumption, what would you have done differently to accommodate both those priorities and your complaint?
So what if a hacker just makes a new account, and adds that to the family and continues ruining the experience of others?
So your proposed solution would let hackers make indefinite new accounts and add them as family. Do you see a problem with that?
If not, I hope you're done talking to me, lol.
A well thought out and conveyed response to the concern about hackers. Valve should implement your plan pronto.
People that just complain without a better improvement in mind didn't actually care to change anything, because they've haven't shown that there's a reasonable alternative. Those people don't care if there's a practical alternative, they're just upset that it doesn't meet their specific needs. They just want to "speak to the manager" and complain. "It's not my job to fix it! Fix it!". If that's quote captures your stance, just lmk and it will save us both some time.
I didn't ignore it, I asked how it would deal with a fundamental enforcement of rules that steam has always done and you've ignored that, lol. Are you here to just complain or do you actually want to see if there's a better way forward? What's a feasible alternative to handle hackers and provide quality of life improvements like family sharing?
I'd argue that hackers are more important to valve because they implemented VAC bans almost 20 years ago. They just now announced a family sharing feature and you're pretending that steam was meant to be designed around the family to start, which is an uphill battle to argue.
First of all, it's already implemented this way. You're the one arguing for an alternative that could increase the number of hackers - if anyone is trying to force valve to ruin it "for the rest of us", it's you, since you're arguing to change the status quo.
Finally, don't want valve to "ruin" it for you? Don't use the brand new opt in feature. You have lost absolutely nothing - nothing has been "ruined".
So that's the thing... The bans have also worked this way for that long, which further solidifies the idea that valve prioritizes banning hackers over being forgiving of cheating relatives...
Are the ones using free hacks not hackers? Seems like bans on them for hacking makes sense.
I'm going to propose that this would probably take an infeasible number of hours when you scale it up to the full customer base for steam, which looks like 132 million monthly active users.. Otherwise, like you said, it's so obvious, what else would prevent them from thinking of it and implementing it?
Hmm, I might be misunderstanding what you're saying, but it doesn't seem like the case. If a borrower got the main account banned, it was up to the borrower to successfully appeal.
EDIT: here's a proposed change that I like. It's better than a blanket "you get 1 excused VAC ban", because with that solution what happens when you have two unruly teenagers? n+1, children, for that matter. However this would still potentially double the amount of hackers, since they could get their first strike for free before truly losing access to the game, so it really falls to how much steam wants to weigh keeping hackers out of games vs allowing folks to share libraries.
You're projecting a lot of the preferences and priorities onto me when I've shown that steam has chosen to operate this way for nearly a decade. It's not what I want - it's what steam wants.
Steams job is to provide people with a good gaming experience, my guess is that hackers ruin that for others so they don't like it and prioritize banning hackers.