Steam – Page 73 – MMO Fallout

Steam Severely Limits Free Accounts To Combat Bots

If you haven’t been inundated with phishing attempts lately, consider yourself lucky.

With a customer base of their size and a lucrative trading market ripe for the picking, it only makes sense that Steam is in a constant uphill battle against account theft. In the latest attempt to curb phishing, Valve has placed multiple limitations on free accounts.

Certain features will be restricted until the account has spent at least $5 USD on the store, either by adding funds, purchasing a game, or purchasing a gift.

Malicious users often operate in the community on accounts which have not spent any money, reducing the individual risk of performing the actions they do. One of the best pieces of information we can compare between regular users and malicious users are their spending habits as typically the accounts being used have no investment in their longevity.

Free users with nothing spent on their account will be limited from:

Sending friend invites
Opening group chat
Voting on Greenlight, Steam Reviews and Workshop items
Participating in the Steam Market
Posting frequently in the Steam Discussions
Gaining Steam Profile Levels (Locked to level 0) and Trading Cards
Submitting content on the Steam Workshop
Posting in an item’s Steam Workshop Discussions
Accessing the Steam Web API
Using browser and mobile chat

The limitations can only be removed by spending on the Steam store. Receiving a gift, playing demos/free weekends, or adding a retail product will not lift the limitations.

(Source: Steam)

Xsyon Now On Steam Early Access

Notorious Games has officially launched their sandbox MMO Xsyon on Steam Early Access. Now available for $29.99, and includes one month of subscription time.

During the Prelude, Xsyon is continuously evolving and expanding. This phase of the game was intended as a time for the game to adapt to its community. The development team has been working closely with the player base to determine the future of Xsyon and wishes to continue to do so with the Steam crowd.”

Players with existing Xsyon accounts can request a Steam copy for no additional charge.

(Source: Notorious Games Press Release)

Project Gorgon Successfully Greenlit

Following its unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign, Project Gorgon has been successfully greenlit for release on Steam.

There’s a lot of work to get the game Steam-ready, and I don’t know the exact timeline yet, but the hard part was getting Greenlit.

You can currently play an early build of Project Gorgon at the official website.

(Source: Steam)

Economic Trouble Leads To Steam Trade Restrictions

As the Ruble continues to plummet in value, tech giants are taking notice. In a notice released to the public by Steam Database, Valve has region locked all new purchases made by Steam accounts made by Russian players. While the games may be gifted or traded to players in the same region, they will not be able to transfer the games to those outside of Russia. The region locking is a common response by Valve to prevent people from taking advantage of economic turmoil to buy games at a lower price, and currently includes Russia, the Commonwealth of Independent States, South America, Turkey, and Southeast Asia.

Apple recently announced that they will be halting online sales in Russia.

(Source: SteamDB)

Steam Holiday Auction Exploited, Temporarily Suspended

The Steam Holiday Auction is a temporary event encouraging players to recycle their unused items for gems, which can then be used to bid on games and other Steam goodies. As it turns out, players almost immediately figured out a way to farm gems at no cost to themselves, vastly deflating the value of the gems and causing hyperinflation on the price of even the cheapest games. As a result, Valve has shut down the auction for the time being.

Sorry, but there have been some issues with Gems and the Steam Holiday Auction has been temporarily closed. The elves are working franctically to get the issues sorted out, and the auction will start again as soon as they’re done.

More information will follow as it becomes available.

(Source: Steam)

Valve Changes Trade Policy To Reduce Fraud

Valve has updated their policy on game trading in Steam, requiring a one month wait period before giftable games can be traded.

All new games purchased as a gift and placed in the purchaser’s inventory will be untradable for 30 days. The gift may still be gifted at any time. The only change is to trading.

The move is part of an ongoing effort to clamp down on steam key resellers using fraudulent credit cards to buy and quickly distribute keys. Games can still be gifted normally.

(Source: Steam)

Final Fantasy XIV Steam Trial And Free Weekend

Square Enix has announced that hopeful gamers can now try out Final Fantasy XIV through Steam. Head on over to the Steam website, or through your Steam client, go to the Final Fantasy XIV store page, and click on the “try demo” button located on the side-bar. The trial is good for 14 days and includes certain restrictions on player activity. Further, the game has been discounted 50% on Steam down to $12 until November 12th.

Secondly, Square Enix has invited previous players back into the world of Eorzea to check out update 2.4. Users who have previously purchased the game client, or who were grandfathered in from FFXIV 1.0, will be able to log in starting November 7th and running through November 10th. Download the client and patch up today.

(Source: Final Fantasy XIV)

Valve Pulls Game After Developer Tweets Threat

Social media has brought many great things to the gaming community, chief among which being a much closer and more personal connection with the people who make our games. Unfortunately, it has also had the effect of giving faces to the otherwise faceless, a voice to those who for the sake of the company’s public image, perhaps shouldn’t be given an open microphone.

Paranautical Activity has been removed from Steam and Valve has terminated its contract with the developer after Mike Maulbeck posted a profanity-laced rant on Twitter. In his tweets, Maulbeck called Valve “incompetent,” lamented the company’s monopoly, and expressed his hopes that the platform would no longer be a monopoly by the time his next game released. Maulbeck posted another tweet that has since been deleted, stating “I am going to kill gabe newell. He is going to die.”

Whether or not the “threat” was genuine is irrelevant to what transpired. At the end of the day, video games are a business and companies like Valve expect a certain amount of professional conduct from their partners. Business issues should be dealt with professionally via email, not through vitriolic rants on Twitter.

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Line of Defense Momentarily Made Free On Steam

Line of Defense went into early access last week and while the idea was that players would need to purchase one of the game’s founder’s packs to gain access, a mistake in the game’s Steam listing caused the title to be made available for free to anyone, buyer or not. The mistake was fixed by Valve, but not before several thousand players had managed to start the client download. Since the players had not purchased the game, however, they were still unable to access the servers and were thus unable to play. Several of those players then took to Steam’s review system to show their anger.

In a news piece on the Line of Defense website, Derek Smart responded to complaints, noting that while the game will eventually be free to play, the current box price is to weed out players simply looking for something new and free to toy around with.

We know that a lot of you are excited about the game; but the whole purpose of pricing this Early Access tiers this way is so that we can attract a specific dedicated crowd during the next three to four months of testing. It is a very large and involved open-world game. We’re a small indie team. For those reasons and aside from the fact that we do not have the resources, we simply don’t want to be distracted by large numbers of players who – for the most part – won’t contribute any meaningful feedback to the game.

Line of Defense is currently in early access on a heavily staggered release system.

(Source: Line of Defense)

MMOrning Shots: Wakfu Steam Release

Today’s MMOrning Shot comes to us from Wakfu, which the more observant of you will know is now available on Steam. Players who join up through the Steam service will be able to enjoy the revamped tutorial, with all beta testers receiving the Paravortal decoration item.

Check out MMOrning Shots every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Mostly.

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