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.

Hootings and Ramblings of a Deranged Dead Blogger

Thanks mostly to my own foolishness and sloth, this blog has the buoyancy of a lead brick and the influence of a field shrew. I had hopes for it. I thought it could get me ahead, or help me hone my craft. Instead I alienated myself further, and whatever dozens of readers I might've had have dissipated into the dark aether of the internet. My foolishness, and also my stubbornness. Due to my own stubbornness I view modern culture with basically unbridled contempt, and instead of trying in any way to improve things, I wallow in this dead end era of hype, spin, and mindless arrogance. I despise the way of life I spinelessly inhabit.

There's a funny anecdote from the 19th century, beginning around 1860, wherein Great Lakes fisheries completely destroyed a species of sturgeon. First it was considered a useless bycatch, and was stacked to rot on the shore and fed to pigs and generally misused... then its worth was discovered, which put it in the nearly fatal sights of the greedy optimists who believed there could be no end to natural riches. That fish still survives at some infinitesimal fraction of its pre-19th century population. What's this got to do with anything? Well the fisheries industry learned very little from the destruction of the Great Lakes.

In the ensuing hundred and fifty years many other species of fish have been devastated, the ocean's been filled with garbage, radiation, and the refuse from dipshits on cruise ships. The oceans, allegedly the birthplace of life, have been treated like a merry-go-round of possibility and nobody wants to take responsibility or change how things are done. Now, I don't ever believe that life will just give up because conditions are bad. The oceans won't entirely die anytime soon, but our ability to sustain ourselves with their bounty is diminished by all the bone-headed nonsense unrealistically optimistic businesses perpetrated.

What's that got to do with anything? It's why I'm a pessimist. Why I'm shitty, of a bad temperament unless I've drank enough to escape the downward pull of reality. What happened in the Great Lakes happened in a slightly different sense with every market crash and recession, every extinction prompted by humanity, and and and... so what, right? Things need to be the way they are so they can remain the way they are, so that people big and small, rich and poor, stay calm and comfortable and their entitlements to misery or luxury remain constant. We need to listen to the optimists as we climb out of each increasingly unbelievable crisis, and ignore the realists who warned us all along.

Even thinking about it bothers me because it's all such hackish reasoning. It's been done a million times, the truths are self evident and the truisms are deafening but it doesn't lead to real progress in any meaningful sense, which is either a factor of the naturally tardiness of progress and evolution or the sign that something is deeply wrong with the world and its most powerful and influential humans. Are the people at the top evil? Are they simply ignorant? Are the powerful inflated with such a facile self-worth and arrogance that they cannot be touched by the truth, by self-doubt, by any of the checks and restraints nature set on the human mind? Are they doing the right thing, trying and failing, and it's just 'leftists' who paint them with a broad brush of villainy? What is it? Why is it so hard to find a clear perspective? Is there none or does nobody care enough to attempt it?

Old sociology texts have only made me more cynical about success but as a result I'm a nobody, with no long-term goals, no particularly fun vices, and modest unglamorous hobbies like attempting to learn as much as possible, reading, and traveling, mostly on my own power, to nearby places - in short living in a cage of my own design within the larger cage of socioeconomic convention. Lately it's not been enough, but what I eschewed still seems hateful to me, but I have fewer and fewer certainties. Whatever is righteous and humble opens me to criticism (some legitimate, some merely hateful of divergence) and misery, and the sense that I am doing less harm than others doesn't matter, when others won't ever give a shit or sacrifice anything... I am giving myself a kind of slow martyrdom that lots of people live because they can't escape it, but which I chose out of perverse instinct.

Well whatever. Nobody knows anything. The people who get paid millions to hold the title of CEO are protected by the majority opinion that they have a 'necessary skill-set' and 'important contacts' and while that may be true in some cases, it is most often the product of a privileged upbringing and those 'important contacts' liking them. There may have been sexual favors and silence on sensitive secrets traded for power. There may, for all we know, be a few dozen secret societies that encourage the conspiracy set with half-truths in order to make the very idea of conspiracy (which in its least-fantastical and most realistic sense has been true for thousands of years) laughable to the mainstream. If the search for truth becomes a joke it will frighten away the serious-minded because their reputations may suffer (and have, in the flawed examples of yesteryear) But even so: what of it? If they're that successful and we're still alive, with coffee and a newspaper of a Sunday morning, who gives a fuck?

Why the hell does anyone care about celebrity culture? It's corrosive and stupid and the worst kinds of people are made rich by it and it's just a shameful, stupid spectacle that could be replaced or eclipsed by more edifying things that aren't advertised as heavily and let people be themselves. From what are Ellen and her feel-good safety show distracting you? Why is the internet three-quarter owned by celebrities? Why do even people who 'hate that shit' know where Kanye's yacht is parked, give a shit about the Kardashians? It's not celebrities, but rather their passionate followers, who should be flogged and shamed. Celebrities should be ignored, and have some of their riches taken away and donated to charity or used to defray government debt (debt is the new money, since money is just based on imaginary value now)... although the governments are celebrities and don't deserve the money either. I don't hate the entertainment industry... we need distraction so we don't think about killing ourselves or how little any of this means or how foolish our young aspirations were or how fucked the world might be. Maybe we should get rid of the middleman and let the entertainment industry run countries, and the world.

Why aren't soft drinks heavily taxed on the basis of their unhealthiness (it's only fair if tobacco and alcohol are rightly taxed based on their unhealthiness, which is not two orders of magnitude worse than drinking some carbonated sugar water each day)? Why do people get so upset at commonsense agreements that may make life easier for everyone?  Why do we all get off on the idea of hating someone (it is acceptable with targets like criminals, terrorists, people in other countries, and the insensitive)? Why are so many people around the globe so proud of being so ignorant? Why all this conflict? Lots of it was started by Western governments, who 'rule' an anesthetized populace with increasingly nauseating and wasteful habits and thoughts. Convenience and venality have destroyed humanity. If a system this disastrous and uncontrollable could collapse, I would say we are living in the closing years of it, but I don't even know what to think anymore. Avarice looks after itself, but where does it all end?

I wish more people could be happier with less, and with the idea that their not taking something ensured it would get to someone else who needed it. Decades of surplus production and planned obsolescence have made consumerism a nightmare of waste and distraction and its precepts have invaded everything from politics to faith to the 'third world' (outdated term, I know)... but I'm not about to launch a crusade even though I think it's miserable and destroying the best and most promising parts of being human and jeopardizes the whole world. I don't care... I exist within that system anyway and would have to take drastic steps to actually leave it, much less oppose it, which would then further invalidate my position due to 'extremism' and 'ecomania' and other bullshit critiques the comfortable heap on the anxious. If I find a way to stop colluding, I will be branded a traitor. There is no place in the law for people who see an urgent need for progress, who see the Western Lifestyle as a blight that needs to be changed now, painfully, not in 'a generation' while our prospects diminish.

I guess I'm saved by the need to laugh and to seek out the absurd before I even think of countenancing the more prosaic horrors implicit in the contemporary world. Even so, it's not enough... I feel powerless, completely powerless, to stop any of this madness and I always have. I feel so disinherited that I no longer consider myself real or a part of anything... I'm just a detached actor with no lines or stage presence, no beliefs be they foolish, hopeful, angry, or anything. I live in a void and everything that convinces me otherwise is constantly in danger of being swallowed by the deepening void of nonsense that has given rise to our slick, dishonest, empty culture. Those 'backwards' parts of the world don't fear the West – they pity it. 

[Don't worry, I will return to low-risk stuff next week like reviewing products, interviews, and less dire observation tempered by humor. Or I'll be gone, in which case, crawler bots, it's been fun. You won't need to index this site much longer.]