Do I see right? Someone wrote "fuck" in this thread and the word isn`t replaced by hearts?

Urk! What a way to push their mobile authenticator thing....

Well, thanks for the heads up, I'll sell all my remaining cards tomorrow....

good, hopefully it will stop all the bots. And I will wait before saying anything else, until it is implemented and I can see how it will actually work.

edit - by this I mean I am not going to start scream bloody murder just because of a thread in a forum. I like to have things confirmed before I gather the torches and pitchforks.... I can sell you some, for a reasonable price, though.

Hoping they go through with this. This is the result of years and years of "Help, I was hacked. I want my items back!", "Help, i was scammed. I want my items back!" "Help, I was hijacked. I want my items back!". Years of cleaning up after people's own security problems.

To this day, despite all the added security they've added it still shows up daily in the help forums, it's ridiculous. This is no doubt the biggest reason Steam support is so bogged down.

It doesn't prevent trading, just slows it down if one of the accounts isn't secured with a phone. Seems reasonable to me. Not only that, but every account used to scam or hijack will need to have a phone attached to, and whether they can emulate one or not, that's going to make the process a lot more involving.

Hopefully this will finally be a measure to reduce their support queue to a manageable level.

So if you're not one for trading, it doesn't affect you.

I don't get it. They do something to increase security and to prevent scam and the people are picking up the pitchforks???

I'm afraid you lost me. Are you referring to the "Confirmation of Trades" feature they added a while back? I wasn't aware that there was much complaint over that.

I was referring to the thread that was posted in the OP. I admit that I didn't read it all, but most comments seem to be "Steam is killing trades!", "Fuck!" or "This is the worst idea ever!".

Talking about the escrow thing. Basically, if you or the person you're trading with don't have a phone attached to your Steam account for security your trade will be put into escrow, meaning there will be a wait (no idea how long yet but imagine a week+) before the trade finalizes.

It'll make it more complicated to keep scam accounts and possibly make it fraudulently purchased gifts get weeded out before they're actually traded for by someone.

Of course, there's the added complication that this 'may' be the end of all the 3rd party sites that use bots for trading, like all the CSGO betting sites, scrap.tf, dispenser.tf etc etc.

Funny thing about this, it won't even prevent people from scamming others. Since there are phone/app emulators such as Bluestacks . It just renders this "Security" useless.

1. The need of a smartphone (to install the various authenticator programs chosen by the stores because of course, there's no standard one). A big middle finger for people like me who uses their phone just to call people (yeah, what a phone is for in fact) or send SMS. Unless they invent the 25€ smartphone available in every nearby physical stores.

2. The lack of back up solution if you lose your phone number for whatever reason (like in my case, I'm on anonymous pre-paid cards, if my phone is lost or stolen, I'm fucked regarding these authenticators...)

Now, I know I'm old&grey and stuck with my 20th century habits so I would gladly take your solutions to counter my two main points. I only demand to get convinced to jump into this authentification mumbo-jumbo :o)

Because not everyone has a smartphone? I even know someone who hasn't any kind of mobile phone. E-mail authentificationwould make sense since it can be uses with just a PC, but this requires something most have, but not everyone.
And because there are trade bots.

In Steam's case, both 1 and 2 are not applicable, since you can get an SMS text with the code, and there are methods to recover your authentication if your phone is lost.
Not to mention the multiple android emulators available for PC.