The problem with steam

[mr_trooper]

i have always been a big fan of steam, valve, and everything linked to it. its stood as a shiny light in the dingy pool of gaming crap
but i have found one fatal flaw in its system, that leaves me glaring at it in disgust. odd, even im surprised im thinking this

i recently got my account hijacked, by a website that looked almost identical to the genuine steam website, but with .ca instead of .com at the end. well, human error. i know. i screwed up.

so i go to retrieve my account. my hotmail address is linked to it, should work fine.
i get in, and have to enter in a security question answer. easy stuff. name of my dog, i think i know that.

but wait, its been changed.

and 2mins later, the email address linked to my account, has been changed too.

in otherwords, in order to take FULL control of any steam account, all you need is the password and username. because the two ONLY security countermeasures, can be changed without authorisation from the original email address. for an organisation as large as valve, i would have at least thought they had basic security measures tightened that even hotmail have mastered


i sent out a message to steam support line. maybe they are the knights in shining armour afterall. but from reading posts online of people in the exact same situation, i doubt it


any clues?


oh and if you have a steam account, add mr_trooper. say hello on my behalf

 

[Zer_]

i have always been a big fan of steam, valve, and everything linked to it. its stood as a shiny light in the dingy pool of gaming crap
but i have found one fatal flaw in its system, that leaves me glaring at it in disgust. odd, even im surprised im thinking this

i recently got my account hijacked, by a website that looked almost identical to the genuine steam website, but with .ca instead of .com at the end. well, human error. i know. i screwed up.

so i go to retrieve my account. my hotmail address is linked to it, should work fine.
i get in, and have to enter in a security question answer. easy stuff. name of my dog, i think i know that.

but wait, its been changed.

and 2mins later, the email address linked to my account, has been changed too.

in otherwords, in order to take FULL control of any steam account, all you need is the password and username. because the two ONLY security countermeasures, can be changed without authorisation from the original email address. for an organisation as large as valve, i would have at least thought they had basic security measures tightened that even hotmail have mastered


i sent out a message to steam support line. maybe they are the knights in shining armour afterall. but from reading posts online of people in the exact same situation, i doubt it


any clues?


oh and if you have a steam account, add mr_trooper. say hello on my behalf

Contact support through e-mail or by phone and use give them some of your billing information. They keep that stuff on record and that cannot be hijacked.

 

[SenseOfTumour]

Yeah, I'd imagine if you've ever bought anything thru steam, as opposed to just installing one retail game once, they'd have your name, address, card details etc on file, and you'd be able to prove you are the legit owner of the account, I hope you can get your account returned to you tho, I'd be gutted if I lost mine, now I've bought Orange Box, all the GTAs, and all the Xcoms, along with a few other things.

 

[Noiguy25]

Funny you mention this because it had currently happened to me. TO THE VERY CORE. It was bad enough my own account got hijacked, but my frickin contact email was changed so I cant reset anything or retreive anything. All i can do now is wait on valve support to reply(this may suprise you, but valve isnt very supportive when it comes tho these things). So tell me if you've gotten an email from valve yet or when you get it(if ever) cuz i really dont feel like waiting more than 2 days for something that can easily be solved in 1 hour.

 

[Ace of Spades]

This is why you don't buy games online. I learned this lesson the hard way. I like having a box for my games.

 

[Checoburger]

I have had my account hacked 2 times. The first time was the same way yours was with my stupidity. I got it back about 3 days later after contacting them and showing them my cd keys. Then about a month later the same guy hacked it again even though i had changed everything. So I just added onto my first email to them and i got it back the same day. Now they say if it gets hacked again they are going to permanently disable it. So in the end steam doesnt really care about us they just want us to buy games that we already bought all over again.

 

[Noiguy25]

thats good news. atleast now i know they actually REPLY. hopefully my problem can be resolved the same way yours was. And yeah, Valve's popularity level on In-Game community based applications really sucks ass.

 

[Checoburger]

thats good news. atleast now i know they actually REPLY. hopefully my problem can be resolved the same way yours was. And yeah, Valve's popularity level on In-Game community based applications really sucks ass.

Yeah the second time they wouldnt reset it until i promised them i had done a full virus scan and changed all my passwords. The person didnt seem to be very enthusiastic about having to reset everything. But yes they do respond, but i depends on when you do it and how many other people are having problems at the same time.

 

[Epifols]

The questions are NOT to prevent account stealing. They are for people who forget their passwords. So Steam is in their proper place.

This is not Steams problem. You can't say "Steam sucks balls because I gave my account info to a third party..."

What next? "Steam sucks because I let my friend use cheats on my account, but it wasn't ME that was cheating!"

 

[shadow skill]

Steam sucks because it was made in what can really only be described as an amateurish way. There is no reason to require that games be installed under the Steam root directory other than laziness or sheer stupidity on the part of the programmer(s.) Users should not be expected to have what amounts to infinite hard drive space because of a nonsensical design decision that prevents the user from choosing where they install their games.

 

[Noiguy25]

Genericshadow.What I didn't need was the smart-ass response. I never said Valve was in their wrong place. I'll leave it at this so that I don't start barking back with smart-ass responses as well because,frankly, I really don't give a shit and it's the weekends.

 

[mike1921]

in otherwords, in order to take FULL control of any steam account, all you need is the password and username.

Actually, I'd prefer that. Once I sign in to my account, I don't want to type my password again just to change it, I don't want to have to type in my billing info to a company that already has it, I don't want to type in anything but a password because that is fucking sufficient for anything short of security measures that could bring down a government or at the very least a business.

Users should not be expected to have what amounts to infinite hard drive space because of a nonsensical design decision that prevents the user from choosing where they install their games.

Sure, it's better to allow us to choose, but really you're calling them bad because you apparantly have way too many PC games and they don't do something for those who don't store games on their hard drives(I don't know anyone who doesn't).

 

[shadow skill]

in otherwords, in order to take FULL control of any steam account, all you need is the password and username.

Actually, I'd prefer that. Once I sign in to my account, I don't want to type my password again just to change it, I don't want to have to type in my billing info to a company that already has it, I don't want to type in anything but a password because that is fucking sufficient for anything short of security measures that could bring down a government or at the very least a business.

Users should not be expected to have what amounts to infinite hard drive space because of a nonsensical design decision that prevents the user from choosing where they install their games.

Sure, it's better to allow us to choose, but really you're calling them bad because you apparantly have way too many PC games and they don't do something for those who don't store games on their hard drives(I don't know anyone who doesn't).

Let's put it this way, would you like your music program to become unusable because your music collection grew bigger than the drive you had your music program installed on? Would you like to install a second instance of the program so you could set up a library of the "overflow" tracks?

Let's say I had a 40gb drive laying around and I decided to put it to use for games, and let's also say that games are 8-9 gigs after installation. I only need to have four to five games installed before the drive is full! "Hur hur, you have too many games..." is not a good response, I have over thirty PS2 games that is between 240 and 270gb I could imagine having that many games for the PC if I was an avid PC gamer. Expecting users to go through the install process multiple times to manage space because of the way Steam is designed is nonsensical, especially when Steam is pushing Digital Distribution.

As far as the whole password thing goes, the slight inconvinience to the user that being required to authenticate when changing account details entails, pales in comparison to the rage induced fury they will experience if they are told they have to re buy all their stuff because their account got hacked.

 

[SimuLord]

If you're still using a 40-gig drive in this day and age, yet you have money to buy games, then it's not Steam's fault you're too cheap to buy a proper hard drive.

 

[_Serendipity_]

Steam sucks because it was made in what can really only be described as an amateurish way. There is no reason to require that games be installed under the Steam root directory other than laziness or sheer stupidity on the part of the programmer(s.) Users should not be expected to have what amounts to infinite hard drive space because of a nonsensical design decision that prevents the user from choosing where they install their games.

I had this problem, and it's really easy to get round, if slightly inconvenient. If you normally have Steam installed on C:, but want to install things on E:, just install a second copy of Steam on E: and turn off the autorun feature so Windows doesn't try to run two versions of Steam at once, or, more likely, just reinstall the entire thing on E:.

Plus, if you're annoyed at having to download entire games again when you transfer things over, you know that you can just copy/paste the files, right? (I think I did that... I think...)

Frankly, I love Valve's games, and I'm assuming that if you have to have them all installed in the same area, there's a reason for it.

 

[shadow skill]

If you're still using a 40-gig drive in this day and age, yet you have money to buy games, then it's not Steam's fault you're too cheap to buy a proper hard drive.

You can't be serious, a 40gb drive is not a proper hard drive? If the thing still works why shouldn't I be using it? You have to be pretty silly to suggest that I should just go buy a new hard drive and lose out on the 40gb's of space my old drive provided just to appease Steam.

Serendipty that just means you lose all the space on the new drive that you have to devote to the steam program + the games every time you change your drive. Where as if it was made right you could have any number of games on any number of drives/partitions without having to do anything as involved as copy pasting the files over and over again.

and there are two possible reasons for having the gamedata installed under the Steam root folder with no option to change this, stupidity, or laziness. I've never heard of a music program worth anything that actually expects people to have all their music under the root directory of th program. Have you?

 

[mike1921]

Let's put it this way, would you like your music program to become unusable because your music collection grew bigger than the drive you had your music program installed on?

I wouldn't ever let my collection get that big.

Let's say I had a 40gb drive laying around and I decided to put it to use for games, and let's also say that games are 8-9 gigs after installation. I only need to have four to five games installed before the drive is full! "Hur hur, you have too many games..."

No, it's "Hur hur, your hard drive sucks even more than Mike's". Seriously, I know very little about hard drives, but if I go on ebay and look for internal desktop hard drives I could get 500GB for 65$.

As far as the whole password thing goes, the slight inconvinience to the user that being required to authenticate when changing account details entails, pales in comparison to the rage induced fury they will experience if they are told they have to re buy all their stuff because their account got hacked.

Password is sufficient to not get hacked. Also, I'd rather have 500 idiotic people go into a fury than have everyone on steam who wants to change their account details be inconvenienced.

 

[shadow skill]

You might not, but in real life people have 30+gigs of music because they feel like having it. Anyone who makes a music program in the same way that Steam is made for games a moron for doing so.

No, it's "Hur hur, your hard drive sucks even more than Mike's". Seriously, my computer I know very little about hard drives, but if I go on ebay and look for internal desktop hard drives I could get 500GB for 65$.

My PS2 game collection could probably fill half of a 500gb drive and that is only 30 or so games. If you are Valve and you are pushing DD you would think that they would account for the accumulation of products over a ten year period. (I am being generous here.) Let's just imagine that someone fills a 500gb drive with games.

When they go out and by a terabyte drive they would have to copy the steam data over to the drive reducing their capacity to 500gb, where as if Steam was actually programmed correctly they would now have 1.5TB worth of space dedicated to games without having to copy stuff over, without wasting space on the new drive, without having to install another instance of Steam, and still have the ability to view their entire game library from one installation of Steam.

Now in real life people also use drives for more than one specific type of data, partition their drives etc. This makes it even easier for Steam's retarded design to become a problem.

Password is sufficient to not get hacked. Also, I'd rather have 500 idiotic people go into a fury than have everyone on steam who wants to change their account details be inconvenienced.

I hope you are never tasked with administering systems of any importance, making it pathetically easy for sensitive customer information to get owned for the sake of convenience is not convenience at all, it's just foolish.

 

[mike1921]

I hope you are never tasked with administering systems of any importance, making it pathetically easy for sensitive customer information to get owned for the sake of convenience is not convenience at all, it's just foolish.

It's not pathetically easy unless you're also willing to say that getting passed email verification or the like is at the very least not hard, since all you need to do is find out their email. That should be easy if you found it out via talking to the person or using that program that guesses every combo of letter and numbers imaginable(even though I'll admit, only reason for those programs to work is a bad admin).

You might not, but in real life people have 30+gigs of music because they feel like having it.

No, it's because they're idiots.

 

[shadow skill]

No, it's because they're idiots.

So people who collect greatest hits cds and rip them to their hard drives are idiots? Right sure, I believe you... People being really into music that they have that much music on their hard drive(s) are not dumb for having it, it just happens to be convenient when you want to find a specific song or album to use a computer to do the searching. Hell if I could I would love to rip my entire PS2 collection to a hard drive and connect it to my PS3 and play any of those games without having to get up and pull the game out of the cabinet. Hell my own music collection is about 16gb and that is not even including the stuff I keep compressed for archival purposes if I included that it would be a bit over 20gb. I only have about 1500 songs not compressed. If I went ahead and ripped my brother's entire cd collection it would be maybe 3gb if I did it in Wav or Flac.

Oh and by the way brute force is not the only way to hack a system.