... actually you can link your forum account to your Steam profile now.

So...

True now yes, but only since recently which would've been after those rumors, and they have already stated that linking it in no way will lead forum bans to translate to account repercussions. Forum bans are just forum bans.

Well thats One horrible business practice down, just five more to go before I consider Steam to be no longer evil.

LOL.

I'm not a big fan myself.

The reasons for Steam bans are related to fraud. Just dont try anything stupid and you wont run into trouble. And as someone above me already mentioned, avoid using Paypal on Steam. There are a few reports of accounts getting locked due to problems with payment through Paypal. I dont know if these reports are actually true or not, but i wouldnt risk it. I trust Valves security measures enough, no need to use Paypal for me.

One thing about Paypal that is really true is that you should NEVER EVER open a dispute on something you bought on Steam. This really gets your account suspended till you fix the issue, which will take quite a long time, sine Steams custommers services is very slow.

Oh, and never "farm" those "gift points" (or whatever they call it) they give out on big sales (summer and christmas). There were a few people who got all their accounts banned for making new accounts just to get these points.

And dont try to bypass region restrictions using a proxy. Thats pretty obvious.

There are also reports of people who got banned for registering a retail key from another region. You know, those russian sites which sell cheap retail cd-keys. Stay away from those.

How do they even justify having taken so long to stop doing this ridiculous practice? Steam fanboys make no sense to me, it's like being in an abusive relationship.

OldFatGuy - the only thing you might have to do with Steam (and you have to enable it yourself to start with) is that Steam Guard might spark off when your steam account detects that its being accessed from a computer with a different software configuration to the one it started on.

This just means they send an email to your registered email with a confirmation code that you then enter in to gain access to steam. It's designed to help avoid account theft and honestly takes only a few moments (done it myself several times now). There isn't any good reason not to use the Steam Guard since the protection helps.



As for the subject of bans I tend to find that a lot of people mistake or misrepresent (either legitimately or illegitimately) their reason for being banned on a forum or group. This tends to get even more wild and crazy when they've had services/goods rejected/lost through the dispute.

Most times this happens its often their fault. Very few companies survive if they randomly steal from users or deny them access to paid services without good reason (eg voiding the rights by using illegitimate payment methods or similar).

So I suspect a lot of the "I got banned from steam for not liking Gabe" comments are possibly slightly twisted versions of the actual whole truth. Again its not a perfect defence since Steam company won't generally release full details of the bans to the general public - though normally most services will release details to the people that get banned (if those people miss the notification/fail to understand it or don't report that they know the real reason to others is a separate debate).

There is also a newish element who will deliberately try to badmouth companies by spamming their complain to multiple forums in an attempt to force a companies hand.

Maybe because it only happened if you did something abusive in the first place? Getting a false positive has always been a teeny tiny chance at best.

True - I suspect this measure is more to release pressure on their customer support during a case. Now the account is restricted its more likely that any falsely caught will be put in less pain and thus less likely to cause support problems whilst their case is being reviewed.
Steam does have problems with customer support, though most of it isn't so much that its bad support, but more that its simply a support structure overworked by the size of the population it has to service.

I also suspect that steam might well have problems in how much they earn so that there isn't (necessarily) the budget to expand the support channels well beyond what they have now (they might also only get problems at peek times - eg sales periods).

Somehow I doubt it ;)

There is no debate. Valve is never justified in taking back games that they've received payment for, except in the case where the charge was fraudulent.

Anybody claiming otherwise is just a Steam fanbois as it is ultimately theft on the part of Valve to accept the money and then take back the game.
Tell that to the many thousands of people that were banned by VAC due to a bug. If there's a bug in VAC, I don't see why there can't be one in other areas. Plus, it still doesn't justify taking back other lawfully purchased games just because Valve wants to be dicks.

That is not really comparable. As was said, accounts are mainly disabled due to chargebacks, and I doubt there is a bug identifying those, and most probably it's a manual process. Account get's flagged, someone checks and disables the account.

The rest of the bans are probably done manually too, like the ones getting hundreds of games from farming, and the ones trading (a lot of) games from cheaper regions.

But I do agree that someone shouldn't have their whole account disabled because of one infraction,

I sense a critical eye from a couple of State AGs or possibly the DOJ got them moving... Valve doesn't have what it takes to go in swinging against those kinds of opponents.
They've been disabled for Paypal fuckups too, hardly the user's fault. And chargebacks are a right granted by Visa, I'm frankly shocked their merchant account wasn't yanked for that practice.

The point is that Valve seems to think that its above the law and as Orcish said that they don't have to live up to their merchant agreement with the CC issuer.

The point is that if your account is VAC autobanned for any reason, you get kicked out of what are usually considered the best servers and the main reason why people like Steam for multiplayer. Sure, you can still play, but it's an extremely harsh reaction to what could be as simple as having the wrong program installed on the computer.