Steam Marketplace and Authenticator: The End of Fast Steambucks

In the past, I had written a little about the decline of the Steam Sale as related (at least in part) to the availability of 'free money' (more of a working discount system) via the Steam Marketplace, where users of the service could sell digital tchotchkes for pennies or dollars (as market forces would dictate). Very low-priced games stopped appearing in sales, prizes stopped appearing, and discounts became pretty shallow, predictable, and unexciting. The high point of the 2011 Christmas Sale would never again be seen, and the blame is mostly on predatory users that couldn't leave a nice thing alone without trying to break it. This attitude, unsurprisingly, caused a lot of problems in the marketplace. Time passed. Inundated with security breaches, lost accounts, trading skullduggery, and service tickets, Valve decided to make their product's product marketplace more secure. Ok...

But it's so god damn annoying. Let me explain. I'll do my best. In the old days of Steam Marketplace, you logged into the service, checked your inventory, and listed an item at a value you set, and it was instantly put up for trade. If your price was a bit lower than the average asking price a bot would buy it almost as soon as you listed it, you would have your 6 cents or 15 cents or 10 dollars. You could trade immediately and use the money immediately - good for making quick money for a sale item when you didn't want to use your credit card. It was pretty simple. It worked. And I made almost a dozen dollars from it, which I used to buy several games, and I liked it. I didn't use it often, but every now and then I checked into the marketplace, and if I saw a good margin on an item I would sell it, and during sales I would buy a cheap game, get the cards, and make a tidy 1 cent profit or whatever, and realized that it didn't matter much. Basically the scheme worked because the gains made from trading went into your Steam Wallet as actual currency. I like to call it Steambucks.  [ I have used Steam for nearly 12 years and I have never put actual money into my Steam Wallet, because that's so insane that I can't understand why someone would do it. It's essentially a feature to give money to your kids, because no other sane person would take real money and let it sit on Steam. The crux of this problem is because accounts with Fat Steam Wallets were getting ganked like crazy. ]

As anybody who has even a remote understanding of the internet will understand: this simple and effective system turned into a huge problem and led to many unfortunate people getting ripped off and targeted by scammers and the whole fucking thing became such a nightmare for Valve that they introduced a phone app and multiple layers of security so that people would stop bothering them and stop (Valve hoped) being so goddamn stupid. Well that was all fine and good. You could use the mobile app or not, and trading went on as usual for a while.

The whole thing came to a head earlier this week? Last week? I don't trade much, but sometime in the last two months it became essentially mandatory to use the Steam Mobile App to authenticate the trade or else suffer a 15 day hold on any item you list. Plus you get boned if you delist an item (which you want to do if the market surges or collapses in order to get your value for it) by having your trading account frozen. All of this is because of hacked accounts and all of those are because people with little to no knowledge of the internet, computing, and basic online security got phished, scammed, and hacked and lost all their precious internet shit. Oh, and people who complained about legitimate trades and demanded returns. So much for the marketplace, and therefore Steambucks. I get it, Valve, but I want to belong to a different tier of uses: the ones who don't fuck up and who never gave you a problem, who didn't expect the world, and just wanted things to stay mostly the same.

The whole thing is dumb anyway, and it's more of an annoyance than anything, but the userbase has been up in arms about it. Pro and contra camps have created a 2000 page thread in the Steam discussions forums that is filled with seething rage and skunk-like defensiveness. Smells like millennial spirit. It's true that downloading one free app is a not a vast and cruel cost, in order to have normal access to your free money. It's true that Valve HAD to do something to protect the credulous and simpleminded and give pause to the over complaining elements of their userbase. Steam users got the solution they deserved. It still rankles me a bit.

I hate apps, and I hate having to register for additional services on top of a service that used to work. I hate having to verify a million things through email, too – it's not just apps. I also hate having to jump through hoops, and I hate when a simple and effective thing that works gets screwed up by people who are predatory and the people who always fall for shenanigans. I hate 'security features' because I keep my computing simple and anonymous for a reason - to be unnoticed, to go unmolested, and to not be bothered or have to bother anyone else. Simple. Never got hacked. I hated two factor security when Blizzard did it for their notoriously noobish, unworldly, immature, and credulous WoW userbase (the cutesy security video forced on everyone as the security features spilled over brought me to the realization that the company I had grown up with had been functionally dead for a while) and seeing Steam go the same way is just depressing. And so very, very annoying, and so very rigidly authoritarian.

Therefore, being forced to wait two weeks to sell an item I used to sell just as safely in two seconds, on a service where I've never caused problems or suffered them, is kind of a kick in the teeth. I used Steam for 12 years and never got hijacked. I never used the Steam Wallet because any sane and reasonable person saw that keeping 'real' money in it was a bad idea and did nothing to make purchases easier or safer. Now the whole thing is getting so complex that even I, a most casual and disengaged user, am actually slightly worried. I mean I knew that Valve could legally shut down and completely deny me any access to the products I've bought through Steam, but I never thought they'd become the type of company that would even think about the possibility. In a sense all these restrictions and half-steps and annoyances are a sign that Valve is being serious and trying its best, but I don't know. It doesn't put my mind at ease either. So I guess I'm selling everything in two weeks, taking the money, and forgetting that Steambucks were ever a thing. Goodbye to an OK era.

Well, Valve is allowed to protect itself from legal action and the Steambucks belonged to them from the start, so it's their call. It's just very disappointing to see it happen like this. Every company is trying so hard to get my phone number or sell me extra apps these days, and I sit here waiting until the day Facebook defriends me for not giving it up (or Google, etc) but Valve is my videogame dealer, and I thought we had an understanding that this was a no-phone arrangement, casual but secure, and that was the strength of it. The internet ruins all things, yea, even itself, and that is known and has been known...

... but still. Damn. Shaking my damn head... it seems there is nowhere to hide, and that indifference is the only thing separating me from insanity. But it seems even I am not immune to writing about the thing and responding to it. It's just another case of dumb people getting fucked by bad people, with the majority caught in the middle wondering sadly why these things never change, why you can't protect the digital dumbasses from the hard knocks everyone has to take. The whole thing is stupid, and it's stupid of me to step into it, but the annoyance and disgust need a way out. Thank you for reading, and good luck.

Steam's Holiday Sale 2011: Achievement Hunting, Coal, and Spite Purchases

Valve is a legendary computer game company responsible for Half Life. Now they're a monolithic entity which is known for its online distribution/other platform, Steam. Every year Steam is the meta-location for sales where the prices are low enough to trick you into buying games you will play for five hours then forget. Steam includes a library that tallies up the amount of games you have, and the amount of hours you have wasted on each.

In late 2011, Steam began its ambitious Holiday Sale/Contest Event. The premise was simple but awe-inspiring: users would complete various trivial/useless tasks (known as 'achievements' in gamer parlance) in order to win various paraphernalia including games, coupons, and chances to win further prizes which were cunningly disguised as useless bits of coal. This was the first time in history that I witnessed and experienced achievements having an actual purpose, and an actual real-world benefit. This is the sort of thing that will either be forgotten in the dismal future of gaming, or will inspire a great upcoming era where interesting games are buoyed by thoughtful, interesting distribution.

The event got people to replay old games for the sake of a small chance at winning something. Each day there were a handful of new things to do, and once again the participants would be heartbroken to receive a free copy of a game they already owned, a useless piece of coal (which could be crafted into heartbreak), or a coupon which would be valid into March 2012. Now it was a generous decision to allow participants to finish achievements until the last minutes of the contest.

Well the event finished, and there is a draw which will take place on the 3rd of January, 2012. The winner takes every game available on Steam. Other prizes exist but are vague and generally related to wishlist fulfillment. I will say that it was an interesting and largely successful event, though when it started there were some hiccups with the Steam service and at times the company's servers were swamped with download requests and purchases.

Valve clearly means to be good to both the industry and its consumers, as events like the Christmas Sale 2011 show. Publishers sell a lot of units on the basis of sale pricing, and customers tend to buy things they would otherwise ignore, because the price (and season) warrant a bit of curious purchasing. Everybody enjoys themselves and content producers profit. On top of that win/win situation, Steam offered an interesting contest event which encouraged users to replay titles they may have forgotten about, in the exciting pursuit of prizes. Looking back, it was perhaps the best Steam sale thus far.

Sorrowful Regrets from the World of Gaming

Thanks to Steam I regret buying games all the time. Years ago, when I had to travel to a store to buy a game, I occasionally had regrets as well, but I bought fewer games because stores never have sales, never have anything in stock, and Do you really want to be seen entering or leaving a computer game store? Steam solved all these problems. Of course, it also introduced new ones.

I regretted buying Left 4 Dead 2 after I learned it is not allowed to play without a microphone to scream into, and that if you try death squads will be sent to your house and your game will be sabotaged. Fortunately, in December 2010 (a much simpler time) the game was on sale, so I only spent 4.99 to shoot zombies with computer controlled idiots. I am not spending the minimum of 29.99 for a decent headset, or even 8.99 for a decent desktop microphone. I don't like to hear squeaky-voiced nerds and apathetic stoners when I play games. I don't like to get involved in defending girl-voiced game players from creeps. I just want to play a goddamn game and enjoy it for its own sake, with at most an optional social aspect. This is why I never played WoW, and also why Blizzard can suck it.

I bought Blue Shift, the Half-Life add-on, because it was cheap and I wanted to savor the nostalgia of the old Half-Life engine, which brought me so much fun when I was young. I regretted that purchase as soon as I entered a suicide elevator and had to check the internet to see how to progress further. You can search for Blue Shift + Suicide Elevator on Youtube and find out what I mean. It took 2 hours to beat, but was honestly worth the low, low price because I just wanted to hear the old sounds, see the old models, and die the old deaths while shooting the old guns.

I kind of regret buying Borderlands, but it was enjoyable enough for a while. It's just that the game has so little character or anything that I question playing it all. Will it make me bland?  It doesn't help that Borderlands is also linear as hell but still makes you run around like a little cockroach – which is interesting, because it blends the worst aspects of linear and non-linear games, proving once and for all that the openness of a game does not really matter unless the game is generally superior anyway. It also has the worst, blandest, simplest, most annoying bosses since Dungeon Siege.

Then, this weekend, I had the ultimate temptation. Steam had 75% discounts on all Command and Conquer games (made since 2007 by EA, not Westwood [R.I.P]). Now the detail that they are all newer games is what made me question my urge to consume all of the games without thinking. Red Alert 3, when I researched it, had shitty animation, shiny graphics, and slick, soulless 3D nonsense. At 4.99 it might have been worth it.

But instead, I got Command and Conquer 3. Tiberium Wars. Sounds good, right? It looked marginally better than Red Alert 3, and I want to know how the series was doing in undeath (it ended sometime between 2003 and 2005). Well I've sobered up and thought about it and Fuck that stupid game. I regret it, and I regret being gullible enough to believe for a fatal minute that it would be enjoyable to play.

The cutscenes are for a dramatist to critique, and only serve to make the game more expensive to produce. The music is a steep let-down from what CnC used to offer. The interface is so hideous, bland, uninformative, finicky and featureless that I barely know how to repair or sell a structure. There are twice as many buttons as there need to be, none of them look like they do anything, and they're hard to see properly among all the action.

Oh there's the second point. The game is so busy with everything that you get the feeling it is holding your hand and pulling your leg at the same time. Even the main menu has a hundred moving parts and very small buttons to click upon. Objectives are presented in clumsy video clips, with wobbly 'recon' camera shots. Special effects take over half the screen, so you lose units all the time, and the color scheme makes it even harder to find anything. The cursors look like they were stolen from a Win95 theme pack. All of the buildings have moving parts and wheels and shit, and in a CnC RTS too much movement means that an older gamer, like me, is constantly thinking that one (wheeled) building is a tank, and that my tank is an enemy, and that I'm going blind or am visually retarded. The game is busy.

This is obviously a game from way back when gaming really started to get retarded, opulent, and unplayable. Generals was kind of distracting, unclear, overproduced and annoying in exactly the same way. What is so strange is that the gameplay really hasn't changed, but the interface and presentation make the game harder to play. The default shortcut keys are sadistic and unresponsive and unhelpful. An expensive and carefully planned attack goes to shit in seconds and all I see is smoke and little bastard missiles flying all over the place. When did every other attack have to be a missile? Why do I need to buy 6 riflemen in a group? This is not Command and Conquer, this is Generic RTS for the generation who can't chew with their mouth closed but can run three different computers at once while social networking.

This is my latest regret. I could've gotten drunk, or close to drunk, for the same money I spent on a game (and expansion!) that will continue to annoy me if I play it, and continue to bother me if I don't get entertainment out of it – and all the while I will think that I had enough games and enough regrets last week and I even knew better than to buy a game I was pretty sure would be a disappointment. So it's unfair for me to say "Fuck Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars" and I should say, "It's a game that is disappointing, annoying, and a botheration as well as of limited entertainment value. But you might like it, you cretin."

Nothing feels right when I play this game. Five or six missions later I can't even defend my base properly, and I get angry and go to my blog to complain. I was never great at RTS games but a few years ago I could play well enough to finish campaigns. I never had a problem with Red Alert 2 and it has a lot of annoying missions where all kinds of trickery and attacking and action take place and you have to deal with things. Who killed this series? When did every game get so self-involved and joyless?