Unless you're unfortunate enough to live in Japan, then they will lie to you and fuck with you.

Except what me and the rest of the apologists are saying is "I have not seen proof that Valve has ever banned an account that didn't deserve it" and "I have not seen evidence pointing to a false positive VAC ban that wasn't later reversed and apologised for by Valve". If you have proof of either of those, I'd very much like to see it. But until I do, I will keep repeating the same. That's not being an apologist, that's being rational.

I guess it's to be expected as they know they can get away with it here. There's pretty much no one we can raise grievances with that have the power to act on them. =S

to be fair, Valve can't know why the payment hasn't come through, can they? you purchased something but the seller didn't get the money. they have to do something or they would get scammed to hell and back. if it does happen, your account will only get locked temporarily, until the issue is resolved. you won't get banned.

All they need to do is wait until they have been paid before honouring the sale. Inform the customer of the issue and lock that particular game from being player, activated or traded. If they distrust the customer then they can also refuse further sales until the matter is resolved. Locking customers out of their accounts for payment issues is completely inappropriate, especially since they are specifically forbidden from doing so.

Situations that actually warrant locking accounts are the sort that don't happen by accident or user ignorance. Coal farm alts with no monetary investment should go, naturally. Accounts used to DOS or perform brute force attack on Steam's infrastructure are another, as are publicly shared accounts. Stolen accounts should naturally be suspended until returned to their rightful owners.

Beyond that granular restrictions are what's needed. Don't allow trade risks to trade. Forbid payment risks from paying for games, if you will. But don't ever consider using your control over your customers' libraries to "punish" them.

It's ok. Since you buy a game, you shouldn't be restyricted from it, unless you buy it for stolen money.

Nice change, not that the previous rules or the new ones ever have or ever will affect me. *shrug*

Happy to hear this and I'd have been happier if this was implemented before I had to deal with their account locking. Ah well, better late then never I guess.

Steam allows people to play the games that they've bought.

This shouldn't be big news, this should have been the way it was from the start.

Except in some cases where they go out of their way to stop you.

Okay, dumb question, but: Has anyone from Valve come out and made an official announcment about this?

This was a post made by a Volunteer Moderator on the Steam Forums. So I'm wondering if this is really a change in policy or a volunteer regurgitating hearsay. Remember it was a Volunteer Moderator who made the comment about Steam unlocking all games should Steam go out of business, but official Valve employees all pretend they don't speak english if you ask them about it. So I'm suspescting there may be a bit more (or less depending on how you see it) to this "announcment".

Some of those links at neogaf just lead to a message that says "this account appears to have been used for fraudulent activity" or" this account may have been accessed by someone else"

example:https://dl.dropbox.com/u/21565521/sekrit/support2.png


so....that's not a good sign


Edit- never mind I'm an idiot. I thought those links were saying that the forum account of the OP was used for fraudulent activity or may have been accessed by someone else, which would mean that the original post shouldn't be trusted. But like I said...I'm an idiot

As far as I'm aware this is already how it works, It certainly has been for me on the odd occasion that Paypal has been a bit flaky.

Well they could not simply unlock all the games, I doubt they have the rights to do such a thing if steam ever went down in a blazing glory. Steam games are actually subscriptions after all, and so are probably dependent on steams containing existence. The only thing I imaging them doing is making any Valve games available to people.

As to the topic of the thread http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showpost.php?p=30324377&postcount=50 the mod went through an awful lot of trouble to make the screen shots and right out lie if it isn't true.