this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2024
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This bit is a bit fucked up:
Not sure I agree, how else are they meant to prevent the ocean of "It wasn't me, it was my brother" excuses from hackers smurfing accounts?
I'd recommend (to everyone) that if you're unsure -or have even the slightest doubt about the person you're going to give access to your Steam account- to politely decline and play it safe.
It is not different from how the previous shared libraries worked. I guess it's there to stop cheaters from buying a single copy of the game and sharing it with throwaway accounts.
I guess it's to prevent creating family members for the purpose of cheating
I think it's a great rule. If you're sharing your library with others, don't be am asshole and cheat. If you do you'll be a disappointment to them too. More social pressure to not cheat is only a positive in my opinion, but also I will never cheat and I only share my library with people I'm confident won't cheat as well. I don't associate with people who want to ruin other's fun. If you do then that's on you. It's your choice to risk getting banned.
It also stops people from buying a game, sharing it to themselves on an alt account and using cheats. Then just spinning up a new alt account at no cost when the first one gets banned.
This is about families.
On one hand you have a responsible adult with over 500 collected Steam games and on the other hand you have a 14 year old discovering porn and cheats.
Sounds like a great life lesson to be taught by a responsible adult to a 24 year old discovering cheats.
Like how we respect eachother in online gaming and there are not cheaters?
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.
Steam Families is not just used by families.
I mean, someone should get banned from cheating. I can see why this happen though, since the account playing does not own the game the account which has the game linked gets banned instead. If the account cheating has the game they are instead playing on their copy and that gets banned instead (i assume).
However the ban should be linked to the account and not the copy of the game. I do not understand why this isnt the case. Maybe because someone could just make a new account and link that to play on instead, therefor never having to buy more than one copy of the game while cheating.
Yeah, it's most likely to prevent someone from using the family feature to get away with cheating.
As it stands now, if you get caught cheating you must create a new account and repurchase the game. So the main deterrent is the full cost of a game.
With the steam family function you could potentially create 5 new accounts per year, and simply remove them when they get caught cheating. The only deterrent would be the wait period.
So I agree with their decision. The downside is that you must trust someone before adding them to your family. If your cheating son gets you kicked off counterstrike, then just remove him from your family. They're never too old to drop off at the fire station.
This is indeed the appropriate reaction to being banned on counter strike. Joke aside you could just lock the entire functionality of adding an account to your family if someone got caught cheating though.
I'm not sure that would be the best solution. A cheater could still get caught cheating 6 times before requiring a repurchase, and it's still a pretty harsh penalty for someone who didn't cheat. You keep your game, but you can no longer share your library if your family situation changes.
'Sorry, son, you can't play my games on your computer because daddy made a bad decision when he was 21.'
The ultimate solution is probably an online identity when playing any game. Imagine if cheating got you banned from all online games for 5 years.
My question is, when there are 5 people with 5 copies of a multiplayer game in the pool, and the 6th member without a copy gets banned, which of the other 5 members gets banned?
They send their enforcement squad to all houses involved.
when you play a game that multiple people have, you can choose which copy is being used. The owner of that copy and the one playing get banned
Thanks, that explains it. So there is a pop-up when you try to play a game from the common pool and you have to choose who you are borrowing from?
Best guess? Whichever account gave account 6 permission to play their game.
Either account 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 will be the user that gives 6 the permission to play their game, so it follows they're the one that (I'm assuming) will get banned also. It's a good question you raise and I'd be interested to know for sure myself.
Nobody is giving anybody permission any more than anyone else though. Account 6 creates a family and 5 accounts with a game join the family. There are now 5 copies of the game in the family pool. Account 6 can play and get banned. In this situation nobody even invited account 6 to the family.
Just hide those games from your shared library and you will be safe