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Steam Families is here
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this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2024
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Not sure where you're going with this - I was implying that there are consequences for cheating, like losing access to a game library even if temporary.
I'm not sure where you're going with this either.
I know it's to make sure cheaters get punished. But that destroys the whole purpose of sharing your gaming library with your kids. They are prone to making mistakes. Should a parent be punished for that? I think the kid should.
15+ years ago I used an aimbot on the first Call of Duty that I got as a gift and got a PunkBuster ban. I was 13 years old and found something new and wanted to try it out. I got punished, in a single game, all by myself. My parents did not get punished, but I was crying.
I can't even imagine if I were a kid and made my parent lose access to a lot of games. That would be absolute horror. Not only for little kid me then, but also for my parent. If I would share my cureent Steam account with my kid and they'd get a VAC ban, I would lose €700 in CS skins alone.
Well it'd be just the one game that they cheated in. That's where you can sit the kid down and tell him that cheating has consequences. Ideally this talk would've happened before you share access though - I'm thinking of it as making sure the kid knows how to drive before you let them borrow the keys to your car.
I'm talking about how an account that cheats while using the shared library of a parent, would get the account of the parent in trouble.
That's what I took away from this whole ordeal.
If they just lose access to that game on their own account, sure, perfectly fine.
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.
That's stupid and too "perfect". You can't enforce perfect behavior onto a teenager. They are guaranteed to make mistakes.
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.
It's fucking games. Not a dangerous machine that could easily kill other people.
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?
Yeah I hope you lose a ton of shit because you put trust in your kid, tell them to not cheat, and they cheat regardless.
This feature is meant for family sharing, but they take away the stupidness of a teenager. A kid can even be tricked into running
funny.exethat randomly injects itself into memory spaces of programs, causing almost any anticheat to detect it.Keep your stupid perfectionism out of the equitation. Kids aren't perfect.
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.
Yeah sure buddy.
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?
Talking with you is useless.
You think teenagers don't make mistakes.
You think a parent is bad if their teenager makes a mistake.
Hence, discussing these things with you is useless, because you can not accept the reality.
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?
You're trying to use nice words within your assumption, but one can only assume that yes, this is to minimize hackers. Whether this is a good service, does not belong to that assumption. This service is demolished by the constant need to protect every single aspect against hackers. It's on par with kernel anticheats. A few cheaters ruin it for the rest of us.
The main priority should be family sharing, which is literally what it's called. It's not my job to provide a good service. But I do know when a service is prone to bullshit that'll just punish people for actually trying to be nice and share stuff within their family.
Valve could have just banned the account that was actually cheating, send a mail to the owner, and let them disable the sharing. Punish after.
So what if a hacker just makes a new account, and adds that to the family and continues ruining the experience of others?
Yeah I'm done talking to you.
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.
How can you be so absolutely stupid?
A well thought out and conveyed response to the concern about hackers. Valve should implement your plan pronto.
God you're annoying. This is a useless discussion that doesn't have any power over Valve whatsoever. Nor do I even have to be the one to come up with a plan. I actually even already gave a simple plan and you ignored it.
Your arguments that hackers are more important than a parent with a kid are selfish and stupid. You encounter a hacker online and instead of going "oh well, I'm sure that kid will learn sometime" you go "fuck that hacker!!! boohoo!!! valve fix this omfg!!!! boohoo". And force Valve to ruin it for the rest of us.
Valve has a stupid rule here which should be revised and improved for actual families, instead of trying to babyproof the whole goddamn thing. Parents shouldn't have to babysit their kid when it comes to videogames. It's actually bad parent and many teenagers would even choose to cheat just to rebel.
How come these concepts are too high for you to grasp?
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".
As I said, you ignored it once, and twice.
They aren't more important to Valve; they are more important to people like you. And Valve just tries to figure out the best for everybody. Albeit badly.
Go do some research before claiming such things. It has been a thing for many many years. And as far as I know, they simply reinforced their ruling on bans. My argument already existed for many years, but is now even more true.
Hackers buy and sell accounts for a few euros. On top of their €20/month cheats this is nothing. Most people getting VAC bans are the stupid ones trying out free hacks. Which mostly are kids. Who would have thought?
VAC is meaningless for the real hackers. And an account being used for hackers is easily spotted compared to an account from a parent sharing it to their kid. You keep asking for my solution, but my solutions are so obvious it would take a stupid person to not think of them. Hey here's one: "investigate the main accounts manually". I thought such ideas would not require a triple digit IQ to be considered obvious.
They already had family sharing where a ban upon the main account could have been contested. You could at least ask them to consider the age or stupidity of the person or family member using your library.
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.
I don't understand your point. Nor do I even understand why you want to justify this.
I only see selfishness because you obviously get butthurt over hackers.
Besides that I see no empathy for kids and teenagers, and even less for their parents.
This is done and you are blocked.
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.