Hello! We are excited to announce Steam Families is now available for all users. Steam Families is a collection of new and existing family-related features. It replaces both Steam Family Sharing and Steam Family View, giving you a single location to manage which games your family can access and when...
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.
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?
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".
People that just complain without a better improvement in mind
As I said, you ignored it once, and twice.
I’d argue that hackers are more important to valve
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.
They just now announced a family sharing feature
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.
You’re the one arguing for an alternative that could increase the number of hackers
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.
You have lost absolutely nothing - nothing has been “ruined”.
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.
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.
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.