Tag: Valve

Valve Changes CS: Go Keys To Combat International Fraud


Counter Strike: Global Offensive is making some changes to its keys this week and you can thank international fraudsters for that. Starting today, Counter Strike container keys will no longer be traded or sold on the market. Players are able to earn cases that contain weapon skins while playing Counter Strike but must buy keys in order to open them and see what loot is inside.

According to a statement put out by Valve, the keys recently became the preferred method of cleaning money by international fraud networks to the point where almost all key purchases are believed to be fraud-sourced.

“Why make this change? In the past, most key trades we observed were between legitimate customers. However, worldwide fraud networks have recently shifted to using CS:GO keys to liquidate their gains. At this point, nearly all key purchases that end up being traded or sold on the marketplace are believed to be fraud-sourced. As a result we have decided that newly purchased keys will not be tradeable or marketable.”

This update does not affect keys that were already on the market.

(Source: Counter Strike)

Steam Library Beta Shows Life After Clickbait Spam


The new visual update for Steam is here! Well the beta is, anyhow. You can download the beta by going to your settings and opting into the beta branch of the Steam client. It’s very simple and doesn’t require any external downloads unlike the previous trick to get ahold of the early version.

The new Steam is all about ease of use. Click on any game and you’ll see all sorts of information provided by the developer. See your achievements, your trading cards, DLC releases, timed events. Anything your heart desires and more that you might have had to navigate through multiple windows to find before is now in one easy place. What isn’t there? The clickbait spam.

One big complaint that users have had of the Steam News section for each game is that Valve thought people really wanted to see clickbait spam from bloggers like Rock, Paper, Shotgun, PC Gamer, etc. It’s basically a glorified RSS feed that pulls stories based on certain websites that Valve trusts (for some reason) tagging their articles with the games in question. The result? An embarrassing deluge of articles that have little if anything to do with the game they are tagged in.

Well those of you unhappy with Valve’s handling of the Steam News will be glad to know that the clickbait spam newsfeed is officially gone as of the new library. It will be interesting to see how the traffic to the websites is affected once they are no longer getting free advertising on a massive platform for their clickbait.

Steam Cleaning: Banned Developer Creates Shell-Accounts


Where would we be if Steam’s worst developers weren’t so stupid?

There have been hundreds of developers banned from Steam for various reasons of scumbaggery, and Valve doesn’t do a fantastic job of vetting the identity of creators so many of them have come back in one form or another. The latest developer to do this is apparently Sun Lucky Industries who have taken to creating numerous shell accounts to put their copy-pasted, low quality games on Steam.

Thankfully they aren’t very intelligent. Their games Monster Planet, Urban Riots, Desert Monsters, Animal War, Alien Creatures, and Desert Lost contain the exact same price (99 cents) and the exact same product description. They also look like exactly the same game but with different assets packs.

“This is a third person action game,The player is surrounded by a group of monsters represented by the leader,Players can explore the surrounding area freely, but need to kill the monster or avoid the monster’s attack, the leader of the attack and vitality is very high need attention,Players need to survive as long as possible.”

Will Valve react? More than likely.

Big thanks to the folks at Sentinels of the Store for their diligence.

Steam Powered: Valve Negligence Lets Developers Impersonate Them


Meet Wizhood, a game developed and published by Valve. Well not developed or published by Valve. Or maybe it is? The Steam store says it is.

On the latest edition of “Valve Is A Negligent Publisher,” it looks like the folks at Rakarnov Studios noticed that Valve will allow anyone who pays $100 on Steam to impersonate anyone else, including Valve themselves. The game Wizhood was noticed by intrepid Steam watchdogs to have changed its name, unabeited, to Valve itself. Maybe for nefarious reasons, maybe to see if it would actually work, maybe for poops and giggles. Either way, the name change was allowed with absolutely no oversight or confirmation required from Valve.

Even better, looking up Valve’s catalog of games now includes Wizhood as a title right under Half Life 2: Deathmatch and above Half Life 2: Episode 2. Unfortunately for Wizhood, it does not automatically include the game in the Valve Complete Pack.

Looking at the Steam database it appears that this change was made back on June 26 and may have been a tactic to increase visibility with the Steam summer sale having started just a day prior. Incidentally you can pick up Wizhood for 49 cents, a 75% saving over the standard $2. If you have any inclination of picking this game up, we suggest you do so now before the sleeping giant that is Valve wakes up.

PSA: How To Get Early Access To Steam New User Interface


The big UI overhaul is coming to Steam in the next few weeks, but if you are just too excited and don’t want to wait, you are in luck. As it turns out, the new interface is already publicly available thanks to some assets dropped in the Chinese Counter Strike: Global Offensive launcher.

You can get your hands on an early version of the launcher by following the steps below. Keep in mind that the interface is going to look a bit ugly right now as many developers have not yet uploaded assets to fit in with the new box design on the library page. On the other hand, it appears that the new interface has dumped the random Rock Paper Shotgun articles that you all loved seeing spammed in your game news feeds.

MMO Fallout can confirm that this works, the images included in this article were from my own test.

Valve Combats Workshop Scams With New Update


When it comes to updating the quality of life of its store, Valve is like a particularly slow iceberg. That said, they do tend to get to their destination. Eventually.

If you pay attention to the drama of the Steam community, you’re probably well aware of an issue plaguing specifically Counter Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2. The workshop for both games, and others, has been the target of an onslaught of scams. The scams generally come in the form of ads for free skins, free items, rare skins, giveaways, promotional content, etc. The actual guides lead to phishing websites, infect the user’s computer with malware, keyloggers, etc, and ultimately all you’re left with is a VAC-banned Steam account and an empty inventory. Generally these guides were posted by accounts stolen from other similar scams.

With this week’s update, Steam will now send an email to the account owner when a new item is posted for the first time, asking them to review and confirm the item that was posted. The goal is twofold, to plug the endless stream of scam guides without creating unnecessary hassle for frequent workshop creators, and to inform a user that their account has been compromised without their knowledge. The effectiveness of the new system will have to be seen.

Source: Steam

Valve Promises To Nuke Review Bombs


It’s safe to say that (outside of the revenue share) one of the best promises that Epic Games has made to potential games is the option to avoid a phenomenon that is becoming more and more prevalent on Steam and the internet as a whole: Review bombs. A review bomb, for those living in bomb-proof shelters, involves large numbers of people leaving negative reviews for a game. In the last few years, this has ranged from insertion of DRM, something stupid said by a community manager, the developer entering a publishing deal, an anti-China joke, bad updates, etc.

Valve, in their consistent refusal to deal with community issues, has remained silent on the problem of review bombs. They have instituted what amounted to a bandage in the form of a graphical chart where customers can see if the negative reviews are consolidated to a very short time span.

In a blog post released this morning, Valve has announced that the company will revisit user reviews starting with off-topic review bombs. According to the post, once Valve identifies a review bomb, it will mark the time period and remove those scores from the review score calculation. The reviews will not be deleted. If your review is caught in that time frame, unfortunately you are out of luck as well as the system does not go into each individual review to curate them.

“Once our team has identified that the anomalous activity is an off-topic review bomb, we’ll mark the time period it encompasses and notify the developer. The reviews within that time period will then be removed from the Review Score calculation. As before, the reviews themselves are left untouched – if you want to dig into them to see if they’re relevant to you, you’ll still be able to do so. To help you do that, we’ve made it clear when you’re looking at a store page where we’ve removed some reviews by default, and we’ve further improved the UI around anomalous review periods.”

Source: Steam

Reminder: Steam Will No Longer Function On Windows XP/Vista Tomorrow


Does anyone still use Windows XP or Vista to play Steam? Unsurprisingly, the answer is yes. According to a November 2018 Steam software/hardware survey, approximately .12% of Steam users are still on Windows XP while Windows Vista is, to put it bluntly, presently unlisted. Presumably Vista users are lumped into the .09% currently running “other” versions of the Windows operating system.

At least, Windows XP users will making up .12% of the population until tomorrow, as January 1 not only marks the beginning of a new year but the official end of life support for Steam on both systems. Valve announced the end of support back in June of this year, and as of tomorrow the client will no longer function for owners of either operating system.

As far as the internet goes, Valve is one of the few remaining companies to have continued support for Windows XP through 2018 along with League of Legends. Blizzard ended support for DirectX9 and 32-bit operating systems in 2017, as did Neverwinter, while Heroes & Generals left the OS behind in 2015.

Discord To Allow Self-Publishing AND 90/10 Revenue Split


If you thought Epic Games offering an 88/12 split along with a curated store was the pinnacle of digital distribution, think again. Discord today announced that as of 2019, not only will their service serve as a self-publishing platform where any developer can place their game, but that developers will enjoy a 90% revenue share to sweeten the deal.

So, starting in 2019, we are going to extend access to the Discord store and our extremely efficient game patcher by releasing a self-serve game publishing platform. No matter what size, from AAA to single person teams, developers will be able to self publish on the Discord store with 90% revenue share going to the developer. The remaining 10% covers our operating costs, and we’ll explore lowering it by optimizing our tech and making things more efficient.

Epic Games recently announced that its store would offer an 88/12 revenue split compared to Valve’s standard 70/30. Valve comparatively announced that it will offer better rates in an attempt to bring big name publishers back to the platform.

Source: Discord

[NM] How Counter Strike: GO Keeps Its Battle Royale Poppin’ Fresh


Counter Strike: Global Offensive recently went free to play, adding in its own Battle Royale mode in the form of The Danger Zone. Danger Zone is a bit different from your normal battle royale jazz, chiefly being that it’s a faster game with up to 16 participants in each fight on a smaller map (18 in teams). The mode initially leaked more than two and a half years ago when files referring to a survival game mode were discovered in the base game.

That said, I wanted to discuss some of the features that separate CS: GO from the crowd.

1. The PDA

The PDA is your best friend in Danger Zone, it’s an upgradeable device that tells you where you are, where you should probably be going, and generally where other players are located. The map is divided into hexagonal slices which at the start of each round serve as locations you’ll pick a spot to land in. You can order weapons with money found throughout the map and have it delivered to you by drone. Fun tip: You can drop your PDA on the ground and the drone will drop whatever you purchased on top of it rather than you. If you think someone might follow your drone, you can set up an ambush.

Which brings me to upgrades: You can buy upgrades that allow you to track other player’s drones, as well as an upgrade to see which zones are about to become unsafe as well as an upgrade that makes enemy positions more specific. These upgrades can rarely be found in the wild.

2. Buying Weapons

Danger Zone just wouldn’t be a proper Counter Strike mode without the ability to buy equipment and thankfully Valve haven’t overlooked that feature. You can buy some pretty rudimentary weapons from the shop with your hard-stored dollars, including weapons, armor, ammo, grenades, and upgrades for your PDA. Money is found strewn about the level and if you manage to kill someone you get to watch as their body explodes into a pile of cash.

Weapons and equipment can be found throughout the level, however guns tend to be far less available and with very low ammunition sources than finding cash and hunkering down and ordering through express Amazon Prime delivery. You can also choose to be even more of a jerk and shoot down someone else’s drone to grab whatever they are delivering, or just keep your eye on the sky and follow them to their destination, pop the guy in the head once they come out to claim the delivery.

3. The Explosives

One item you’re bound to come across while playing Danger Zone are grenades, and plenty of them. Other battle royale games have grenades as well, but those who play Counter Strike will be familiar with how grenades in this game can save your life when properly used in a pinch. Among the items available to you is the distraction grenade, an explosive that simulates gunfire wherever it is tossed. The molotov cocktail is great for creating a buffer between you and someone else, or for flooding a room if you know someone is hiding inside of it.

But here’s where CS: Go gets even fancier. While PUBG and its many clones might also have grenades, molotov cocktails, and smoke grenades, CS: GO has breaching charges, remote activated bombs that can be used to cover your ass or more likely to catch someone by surprise as they walk into a room.

4. HVT and Hostages

High Value Targets, or HVTs, are a great addition to The Danger Zone. The gist of the feature is that a random player becomes your target and if you manage to kill them the game will give you an additional $500. One benefit of this system is that you are constantly aware of where that person is on the map, letting you set up an ambush or avoid them if you aren’t properly armed up yet.

Hostages meanwhile are a holdover from the standard Counter Strike game types, and don’t really need any explanation as to why they’re there or who is holding them hostage. Picking up a hostage will slow your movements and obscure part of your screen, but if you manage to safely get them over to one of two extraction points on either side of the map, you’ll net a cool $500. Given the length of time this will take compared to the relatively short length of each round, you’re going to have to dedicate most of your time to this activity.

5. In Conclusion

Given how overloaded the battle royale scene is becoming with cheap knockoffs, it’s good to see not just Valve putting out a big update but also leaving an interesting spin on the genre that makes The Danger Zone worth playing.

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