Holy shit I forgot about Stella “demon semen” Immanuel. Bruh this timeline.

We were using Skype… Dark days.

How else do you get multi device sync?

My current solution is to use syncthing to handle syncing the files, but I have to debug a permissions error that pops up.

I only see selfishness because you obviously get butthurt over hackers.

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.

Go do some research before claiming such things. It has been a thing for many many years.

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…

Most people getting VAC bans are the stupid ones trying out free hacks.

Are the ones using free hacks not hackers? Seems like bans on them for hacking makes sense.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Nor do I even have to be the one to come up with a plan.

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 actually even already gave a simple plan and you ignored it.

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?

Your arguments that hackers are more important than a parent with a kid are selfish and stupid.

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.

And force Valve to ruin it for the rest of us.

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”.

A well thought out and conveyed response to the concern about hackers. Valve should implement your plan pronto.

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.

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?

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?

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

I can’t even imagine if I were a kid and made my parent lose access to a lot of games.

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.

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.

Sounds like a great life lesson to be taught by a responsible adult to a 24 year old discovering cheats.

And still refuse to address the core issue, which is the lack of moderation and policing of content creating the essential need for adblockers in the first place.

You are voluntarily consuming content that the content creators agreed to have the ads for. You can just not consume that content.

Why won’t they think of the content creators?

For the upteenth time, they probably are thinking of them because the content creators agreed to have them as a revenue stream.

You’re acting like content creators are completely removed from this. guess who pays them? generally speaking, not you. It’s the big bad ad companies. Why? BECAUSE THEY HAVE AN AGREEMENT.

Especially in a world where far better alternatives (like merch and patreon type sites) exists to give them money, directly, without having to deal with advertising hellscapes.

Great! Consume your content from those places! I’m in the patreons for a few podcasts myself for the ad-free versions.

Be smart, use an ad blocker for your sanity, but at least acknowledge that you are likely at least a tiny bit cutting into a revenue stream that the creators utilize. Again, no guilt trip here, I’ve ran pi hole instances myself. In fact some folks definitely encourage their base to use ad blockers on their content, I believe Louis Rossman is one of them. But I don’t delude myself into thinking this is their fault. That is truly some “LOOK AT WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!” reasoning.

After all of this, do you see why it can be comparable to piracy? Because content creators agreed to have it as part of their revenue stream to be served alongside the content, so having it blocked cuts into that revenue stream.

I’m not asking you to change behaviors. It just feels like I’m talking to a wall. Do you disagree with anything the previous paragraph?

After all of this, do you see why it can be comparable to piracy? Because content creators agreed to have it as part of their revenue stream to be served alongside the content, so having it blocked cuts into that revenue stream.

EDIT: so optimistically, it takes two parties to have poor communication. So I’m going to try and clear things up.

I am NOT arguing that users have to be subjected to ads.

I am arguing that content providers serve ads as a revenue stream, and blocking that cuts into that revenue stream. Boo hoo, I’ll do it anyways and probably support them in other ways, like subscribing to them, buying their merch, sharing their articles or songs, etc.

But I’m saying I understand why, from a content provider/creators standpoint, being deprived of that revenue stream that I intended to be served alongside my content, is comparable to piracy. Because as the content creator I agreed to financially benefit from ads being served alongside my content, and instead content is being consumed without that financial kickback.

You’re missing my point - the creators of the content you voluntarily consume have an agreement with advertising companies, under which they get financial compensation when people view the ads.

Therefore, when you use an ad blocker, you are depriving them of that expected financial compensation.

This is why it can be comparable to piracy. You are voluntarily consuming content while depriving the content creators of an intended revenue stream.

Do you have any criticism against that line of reasoning, or are you just going to try and criticize me instead?