Valve Announces It's Handing Its Banning-Keys Over To Game Developers
from the trust-us dept
In the wake of the recent flop that was Valve's attempt to create a platform for paid game mods, you'd have thought that the company would be on its digital toes when it comes to being gamer-friendly. I have no interest in piling on Valve or the Steam platform, given what a great example of how game developers can make money in the digital age, but I was a bit surprised to learn that the company just announced it won't be in charge of banning gamers from games any longer. Instead, it's turning the keys to banning gamers over to the game developers themselves.
Because nobody likes playing with cheaters. Playing games should be fun. In order to ensure the best possible online multiplayer experience, Valve allows developers to implement their own systems that detect and permanently ban any disruptive players, such as those using cheats. Game developers inform Valve when a disruptive player has been detected in their game, and Valve applies the game ban to the account. The game developer is solely responsible for the decision to apply a game ban. Valve only enforces the game ban as instructed by the game developer. For more information about a game ban in a specific game, please contact the developer of that game.Now, when anyone, including the Steam announcement above, talks about reasons to ban gamers from games, cheating is always brought up. And, indeed, nobody would be wrong to suggest that gamers cheating in online games reduce the fun-factor for the rest of the gaming community. Would it be better to exclude cheaters from games? Yes, no doubt. Is Valve's announced plans above to turn the responsibility for banning games from its platform make for a good way to go about this? Hell no.
Why? Well, because giving that kind of control over to the game developers shifts the balance of power when it comes to being banned from games and the reasons why a player might be banned. The nice thing about Steam is that it has two sets of customers: both the gamers themselves and the game developers on its service. Therefore, when Steam is the one administering the ban-button, it essentially serves as an arbiter. It might be an imperfect arbiter, sure, but having all the power to ban customers from games residing in the hands of developers takes us from imperfect to completely broken. Whatever the developers say goes.
And developers haven't always proven that they can be trusted with lesser forms of this power. Imagine Derek Smart in this scenario, no longer having the power to simply blanket-ban gamers from the Steam forums over negative reviews and comments, but now also being able to ban them from his games. Other developers have already attempted to ban players from their own single-player games over forum issues, so imagine what's going to happen now that there is no "trying", only "doing" when it comes to bans.
Steam made its mark by being fairly friendly to gamers in a myriad of ways. Giving this much power over bans to game developers is a step in the opposite direction. It would be a strange decision at any time, but now it seems particularly odd.
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Filed Under: banning, cheaters, developers, gamers, steam, video games
Companies: valve
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Valve need to be very careful here, otherwise they'll alienate all of their customers, which is not a successful strategy.
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If it is ONLY on steam then I wait for a huge discount like 50% to hit before I will buy it. I have the policy if if it has DRM that is an automatic devaluing of the product and my future playability therefore the product is just less attractive to me and my wallet.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Anti-Cheat#False-positive_detections
It's hard to say how this will impact the Steam community, but I guess we're going to find out regardless.
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Already reviewers like Jim Fucking Sterling Son are being abused by negative reviews of these turds by having their videos pulled due to copyright disputes that never make it past the automatic Youtube systems into a real court.
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You missed another huge problem.
Given how low some indie devs are willing to go, does anyone more intelligent than a potted plant(or the politicians advocating backdooring encryption, whichever is dimmer) think giving them the power to ban people from steam entirely is a good idea?
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Re: You missed another huge problem.
It mentions a *game* ban, not a ban from the whole of Steam.
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Consider writing Mike a check to have that development paid for then.
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The problems will be related to "early access" where a few developers can really screw it up for steam. Selling "early access" and having thin skinned developers ban people for abusing bugs or talking crap about the game in that part of development is enhancing the already existing dilemmas this feature brings.
I think TotalBisquits refusal to recommend early access will be even more justified, given the potential ramifications of this change.
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they get the cash and publicity for allowing the games to be sold, then they wash their hands of moderating what happens on their platform.
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They had zero responsibility for monitoring or policing Skyrim mod content, still took the same cut. Giving developers the job of policing bans. Still keep the same cut.
Easy way to make more profits, get other people to do the work but don't change what you charge.
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And really, you'd think Valve would do a LOT more soul searching before they roll out huge changes like this. Like, maybe test it out on a handful of smaller games? Or a new game just starting out on Steam to see how it gets handled there?
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They go at it with the ban hammer already the second you say anything negative or comment in a way the developer does not like it.
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I can see both sides of this
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Because it won't be long before the lawyers get invovled
Now that risk will be shouldered by the developer. They will have to make sure they keep the evidence of cheating and the decision for banning for a couple of years, as the statute of limitations for this sort of claim is about that long. Don't have the evidence? Uh-oh.
Steam doesn't want this headache. I suspect this is why Steam has banned very few players at all.
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Bah. I disagree. For me thee fun with any computer game is to discover the programming flaws, glitches or repetitive patterns to use to my advantage. I don't consider it "cheating" if it's something the software allows.
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I find that part fun too. Watching something like a gold exploit tank a in-game economy like a dot com bubble is interesting to me.
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I understand what you're saying here, and I've long thought that there should be special "cheater servers" where players who enjoy that sort of thing can get their kicks without harming the game for those who don't. The problem is that those cheaters wouldn't stay on those servers, so in the end, cheaters just end up ruining everything.
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Not really. To be honest, the things that I actually enjoy exploiting really don't have much to do with other people. Like figuring out a how take down a super high level monster all by myself as opposed to a co-opt effort with other players. Or how to purchase a guild house without actually joining a guild. (I always hated guilds - always full of newbies asking for you to level them up). Things like that.
Back in the late 90's one of the first online MMORPGs I played was something called "Faldon". They were going through a lot of growing pains trying to figure out in-game economies and such and ended up having to do character wipes pretty often because of exploits. But the whole experience was still a hell of a lot fun anyways. That game is still around but the graphics look pretty crappy on today's high-def monitors.
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Bad example
Valve is not the great example.
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