Helldivers 2 has caused over 20k Steam accounts to be banned | Hacker News Reader

Helldivers 2 has caused over 20k Steam accounts to be banned

videogamer.com

70 pointsjosephcsible109 comments

If you don’t read the article or do not have showdead on in your profile, you may miss that it is related to players according to the article from Russia or Belarus using VPN’s to bypass restrictions.

“Players in these countries have taken to using VPNs to change their location to be able to access Steam in other parts of the world where the restrictions aren’t in place. (…) Valve has smartened up to this practice and has made it difficult to do and many users are banned once it is discovered.”

Players actively banned in two countries, enforcing the

Helldivers 2 has been delisted in 177 countries, despite the repealed PSN requirement

shitshow that has surrounded the release: https://www.videogamer.com/news/playstation-secretly-locked-...

TBH this is a difficult story for an outside such as myself to get across the current state of play; there are many press articles outlining different aspects of an evolving clusterfuck of release requirements and walkbacks.

Sony's decision to forbid people in certain countries from playing Helldivers 2 was bad policy, and caused a lot of backlash.

I'm surprised Valve would support Sony's rather unpopular side in this issue. They should be encouraging the use of VPNs to bypass arbitrary and unfair geofencing.

Sony is a joke of a company. Players from Central Asian countries used Russian PSN for years because Sony did not have a local presence. After leaving Russia and Belarus, they still refused to establish presence in those countries because it then might be used by players from Russia and Belarus to circumvent sanctions. So according to them it's fine not only to collectively punish people of those two countries, but also to drag in completely innocent third parties because of what might happen.

IMHO what they actually think is "you're not worth our money to bother to go through all the bureaucratic processes", and it would be far less insulting if they just said so directly, but I guess this may have something to do with Japanese notions of politeness.

The best thing people could do these kinds of situations is "buying" their games on the closest torrent tracker. What I actually see is people spending money on VPNs and payment cards from far away places to still give them money. (I don't do either, fuck them.)

Valve bans people using VPN because it has localized pricing. They had an issue with people switching to a Russian IP to buy a game and pay only a fraction of the correct price, so they started banning these people. So no, they're not taking sonys side. They're just protecting their bottom line, and people trying to evade geo locks are just also affected

It's been a thing for years and non-US PC gamers have hated it just as long, as there is a lot of censoring in some countries. (Which you now have to either live with or pirate)

Simple solution: allow people evading geo locks or censorship to do so, as long as they switch to high cost regions.

I thought the pricing was based on the card's billing address?

I believe it is nowadays, yes. So my phrasing was incorrect wrt the current situation I guess. People currently trying to evade the geo locking will likely either purchase an account, a US steam key through other sites such as G2A or simply get a prepaid US visa

I think the point I made was still applicable though, despite VPN no longer being an option to purchase the game. The used method to evade the geo locking doesn't have an impact on the game costing different amounts depending on the area.

I am in the EU and use a VPN with servers in other EU countries and don’t particularly try to hide my location from Steam when it comes to billing, but this still feels kind of worrying. What if they also suddenly decide to purge my account with all of the games I have?

Or, for example, getting an affordable non-region-locked (global) key, or even a key that’s no longer for sale on Steam itself (like the first DIRT Rally game) from gray market sites like G2A.

Revoking any product that they find problematic or refusing to activate it, I could understand. But blocking the whole account? Kind of crazy.

AFAIK a steam ban in this case just means that you can't buy stuff or activate keys anymore. You should still be able to play previously purchased games.

So from then on you will need to have TWO accounts? Or what are you supposed to do, considering most games are played using Steam?

You’re supposed to not get banned I think.

Getting banned by an impenetrable, omniscient entity is exactly the dystopian Panopticon future (well, present) people want to avoid.

Follow the rules then. Their appeals process is fast and human.

Oh man, how did I not realize that tyranny is actually great to live under if you just follow the rules, thanks!

If you've got nothing to hide, why are you afraid of the mindscan?

I assume in this case it's because of sanctions against the countries involved which could cause Valve to be prosecuted rather than because of VPN use in general

Not sure why Steam is in the headline as the cause when this is really on Sony. Adding region restrictions well after release was a terrible decision on their part and I think Steam being very lenient with refunds was the best they could do given the situation.

What? Sony can ban Steam accounts (as in banned people can’t use their Steam accounts any more, not just in Sony games) and those banned by Steam should thank Steam for generous refund policy?

Edit: I have to reiterate: people are banned from accessing Steam games, not this one game or Sony games. The puzzling replies seemingly believing in the latter won’t stop coming.

It begs the question: Is this the downfall of steam?

No, even completely pulling out of Russia wouldn’t be the downfall of Steam. But I don’t know how this is related to my comment, which is response to a puzzling comment claiming that Steam has nothing to do with Steam account bans, and moreover people should be thankful for their leniency wrt refunds.

Why would it be? Gamers literally rush to defend the platform when competitors appears and they have effectively a captive audience as games aren’t portable to other launchers.

> Gamers literally rush to defend the platform

Could also be an effective paid PR team. Just because 'everyone' on the internet appears to have one opinion doesn't mean it's real.

Sure, but in this case the noise was loud enough and widespread enough that I suspect it wasn’t.

Everyone also have a good opinion on Steam IRL around me .

In my case I’m seating between two chairs. Steam is a good product, they have mostly respectable policies and I’m happy to "do business" with them but I can’t really forget that their DRM is everywhere, that I don’t own my games and that, say, Google also used to "not be evil".

I love Steam today but what will happen of my games collection when Valve’s infinite money printing machine will start to fail ?

This is why I generally tried to support physical games that are playable on release. But that is a losing battle. It’s still likely that I can drop in a brand new PS5 or Switch game and play it with no network connection, but I expect that to rapidly change in the next five years.

This is pretty much not possible on PC anymore outside of outliers.

Banning some thousand Russian and Belarussian accounts? No.

> Sony can ban Steam accounts

Sony is not involved in Valve's decision to ban accounts for bypassing region restrictions, though they did contribute to the surge thanks to the bungling of the Helldivers 2/PSN situation. I suppose the question is should Valve be lenient to these customers considering the extenuating circumstances.

> Sony is not involved in Valve's decision

You don't know this.

There have been countless situations similar to this where license holders have demanded that platforms enforce restrictions. Especially in cases like this where you're dealing with countries that are under sanctions restrictions.

Point out a single instance where Valve has been caught banning accounts at the request of other businesses. Of course you're welcome to make all the wild speculations you'd like, but I'll stick to reasonable conclusions in the mean time.

It is standard practice across the entertainment industry including video games.

Rights holders will demand that platforms enforce their restrictions. Which is exactly what Valve is doing.

Of course Valve has policies designed to meet the expectations of rights holders, that's a given and I'm unaware of any serious business on the planet selling goods created by other companies that doesn't have such policies and enforce them so they can continue to sell those goods. This is a blanket policy that Valve enforces regardless of the publisher.

Valve has been banning accounts for circumventing region restrictions for as long as the feature has existed, and long before Sony added their games to the platform. Just because these policies were designed to appease rights holders doesn't change the fact that it's at Valve's sole discretion to enforce compliance (at risk of losing publishers).

Let's be real here, there is no risk of losing publishers over not bending the knee to publishers over unreasonable demands (such as banning entire accounts). Publishers have been trying to stay off Steam for much more strategic reasons, and they have always come crawling back, admitting they fail at distributing games on their own. They would never seriously consider ditching the platform over petty grievances like this.

Dota2 and Smurf accounts.

No different to as to using the VPN.

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/valve-bans-90k-i-dota...

https://www.dota2.com/newsentry/3692442542242977036

1. Dota is from Valve, not another publisher.

2. I see no mention of Steam account bans in either link. Don’t know if you have additional information supporting Steam bans.

Banning unwanted players from a game is fair game. Locking them out of every other purchase too? Highly questionable.

No Sony cannot ban Steam accounts. Only Valve can do that. And generally only does it for reasons like circumventing geo-blocks, malicious activities like spamming and scamming, excessive chargebacks.

Various types of community and game bans are up to developers, but those apply only to single game.

Sony added region restrictions.

Valve is banning people for using VPNs.

This is on Valve.

Some regions (mainly Russia and Belarus) were not allowed to play the game (not a decision made by Steam) and then some players used VPN and were banned for that (by Steam).

Note that these are sanctioned countries

Very few services do this. Steam is not forced to comply unless there's an order to do so.

Even today, some people and companies choose to follow the law without being forced to. It might even be important from a business perspective to remain squeaky clean if you are in a dominant market position, when competitors are looking for leverage against you.

What law?, if there is a law you have to follow it, it being a law by definition forces you to follow it. Whether anything is done to those that do not follow it is another question. The issue is that there is absolutely no legal reason to ban Russians from buying games.

This seems like an arbitrary 'moral' choice, an honestly after the bs we've seen from Israel and the U.S, they have no moral high ground to stand on and criticize the Russians. Losing all your games is a massive issue, they are effectively holding your games hostage in an effort to exert politically motivated influence.

Add Docker Hub to the list, just a couple of days ago they banned access from all of Russia on their own accord. Judging by reactions of people I know from there, I can't say actions like this bring us closer to good relations and a peaceful world. They're having exactly the opposite effect.

https://habr.com/ru/news/818177

I don’t think anyone is counting on Docker or Steam to bridge the gap and bring about peace between Russia and the West. That’s up to Putin. One of the goals of economic sanctions like this is to coerce change in the target country by creating domestic discontent that bubbles up to the leadership.

There is always high moral ground to criticize russia.

The contract between Sony and Steam in this case. Sony has chosen to restrict the regions Steam can sell in. Steam could honor the contract, or just pay lip service to it and hope Sony don't care enough to invoke their lawyers.

What "leverage"? They're not required to ban VPN users, period. Not their responsibility. The Fed has to draft orders first. Valve is doing this of their own want.

Is there an actual source for this? Where is the 20,000 number coming from? There are no references to back up any of the claims in the article

This is a clickbait (or fake) news from a user (site has UGC feature) on a Russian news site, which some English-language news media for some reason used without fact checking https://overclockers.ru/blog/Dante/show/160459/Po-rossijskim... (you can translate it via google translate)

What was the logic behind Sony banning the purchase of games?, was Sony compelled by U.S law?. Was this done as a way to try and try to win brownie points and free pr from those reporting on it?.

I can understand valve enforcing the discounted price difference among countries but I don't like the idea of not being able to purchase a game at full price and play it because a company wants to virtue signal. All valve has is its reputation, bad move for them to shake people's confidence in their game collection.

It sure wasn’t to make a drama so occams razor here, it’s most likely to distributor rights

The game requires a PlayStation Network account, and those cannot be created in the banned countries. The controversy was caused by the fact that the PSN requirement and country bans weren't enforced on launch, so people bought a game that then stopped being available to them.

> The controversy was caused by the fact that the PSN requirement and country bans weren't enforced on launch, so people bought a game that then stopped being available to them.

From the article it doesn't sound like those people are getting banned though. It's specifically the people who use a VPN to purchase the game in another region. So it's not the people just trying to play their game that they bought on launch, it's the people trying to get around region restrictions put in place on the Steam store after the PSN requirement was added.

But why is PSN not in those countries

It is tangentially discussed further down. Despite appearances the internet is a fragmented space with different laws and regulations depending on the location of the user. The service provider has to account for this. And while many large cooperations just steamroll the smallest and disorganized entities (e.g. Liberia), this does not usually work with better organized ones (e.g. Nigeria). This can make it too onerous to run a given service in a given jurisdiction with a low ROI. For example, do business in Argentina, try to lawfully get your money out, and see how far you get.

https://ofac.treasury.gov/sanctions-programs-and-country-inf...

The list of countries not allowed to buy the game [0] is longer than the US sanctions list.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1csgabv/map_of_...

I'm guessing the PSN account requirements is to simplify customer support and moderation, so that all Sony PC games can be managed by the same teams and tools currently used for the PlayStation. This sounds like a reasonable decision all things considered. As for why PSN is not available in all countries, I imagine that's a more complicated situation involving legal and regulatory considerations.

So basically it's not safe to play any sort of networked game via your Steam account because you risk losing everything on your account.

Particulars are irrelevant. You paid years ago for a game and Steam will ban your whole account because of another game.

No. It's just not safe to try to skirt international sanctions.

No, what's not safe is to exchange ownership to a service. The number of accounts banned in this wave, compared to the Monthly Active Users of Steam, comes out to 0.01%, so one banned player for every 10.000. It's a shitshow, but if risk is part of life, especially when using a service, and then going consciously going against the terms of the service.

Details. Perhaps you two forget that those banned accounts probably existed before said international sanctions and they lost all purchases, even the ones that were legal at the time they were made.

I'm not talking about the sanctions at all. In my opinion, and even according to the article, the thing is about banning users who use VPNs to defeat geofencing, and region pricing. This was, at most, tolerated by Steam. I personally wouldn't mind if they banned more, but I'm not Steam, I don't know how to run such a large service. I'm sure there are many nuances.

The other thing is that there is no source cited at all, and no ban type specified at all. To me, banning means that a user can no longer log in. But Steam actually applies a wide range of restrictions to an account: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4F62-35F9-F395-5C...

The "20.000 ban" issue is further discussed on Reddit, where it's labeled as "misleading".

https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1d43qql/helldiv...

Also, I'd like to emphasize my original argument. The risk itself comes from trusting a service, and furthermore, from consciously violating the terms of service. And using VPNs to make Steam behave different is against the terms of service. Information can be found here, when searching for "proxy":

https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/

Yep, and Steam was known to be customer friendly, TOS be damned, until now...

Or perhaps it's just my impression because I don't touch the competitive multiplayer stuff.

Correct. Not your bits, not your program (from their point of view anyway).

Even relatively simple games tightly integrated with Steam are basically rendered non-functional after getting in the poor graces of the facilitating platform. At that point, your only hope is to learn the way of the Linker, and brush up on Reverse Engineering skills and you might be able to get something working after excising or replacing the library call implementations of the people who banned you.

The source for the news is a clickbait farm with low quality rage-baiting content and no information about its sources (overclockers ru). The Sun but about games, phones and computers

According to user reports, most bans are not due to vpn itself, but cheating in games (mostly cs2), fraud (vpn + stolen card) and bots (I dunno about this one)

So no, it’s not because of helldivers Sony made a stupid decision, can’t deny this part tho

> Argentina where titles are often up to 60% cheaper due to the strength of the local currency

I assume they mean the opposite about the Argentine Peso?

No, they worded it like that to avoid saying something like 'due to the weak-a** currency'.

Due to the strength of the local currency being weak, is what they mean and then they omit spelling it out completely.

But yeah weird wording.

Semi-related, what's with Sony PSN being so common in games? Ghost of Tsushima, new God of War both have it.

Maybe fixable, but Ghost for example can't multiplayer on Steam Deck because of PSN. PSN not being available in anything but a handful of countries seems massively off-putting.

I'd guess that cross-play has kind of become an expected feature these days, and just using PSN directly is the easiest integration path? Seems wild to me that suddenly this one very restrictive player is suddenly what everyone uses. I do wonder what other factors are leading to everyone not just integrating with PSN, but being PSN primary.

So we are talking about more tech savvy users who use VPNs to violate steam’s rules. Rules like region (b)locking, largely for Russia… and taking advantage of price differences in different countries to get games for less money. Like cheaper prices in Argentina.

This isn’t necessarily about hell divers 2 players. At first I assumed this was about angry users who left negative reviews and got banned for brigading.

I don’t feel too sorry for countries who are banned because of sanctions or people who pretend to be from LCOL countries to save a buck.

Funny you said "I don’t feel too sorry for Russians or people who pretend to be from LCOL countries to save a buck." and then decided to change it. At least it was more honest before.

Steam still supports Russia? How do they do payments?

Presumably they have a Russian subsidiary company and use local payment providers. MasterCard and visa do the same.

Steam works in Russia, but it doesn't accept payments. Free and previously owned games can be played, but new ones cannot be bought. The usual way to circumvent this is via gifting from another account that has working a payment method, e.g. a Georgian or Armenian bank card, or simply playing bought games on the new account.

The biggest issue with this game is that it crashes to desktop constantly, maybe a conflict with Discord? and when it crashes it also somehow closes Discord. I havent seen a game actually crash to desktop like that, that often, in a long time. That's shockingly bad imo.

Couldn't the players who purchased legal copies of the game in territories when it was allowed and now is banned; couldn't they file a class-action lawsuit against Sony?

They bought a game and now cannot play it. Classic breach of contract and expected product that was paid for.

Funny thing is that Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Litva) are banned too.

What are you doing Sony?

there’s no PS Store in those countries. that’s why people can’t play it.

https://www.playstation.com/country-selector/index.html

Recently I've been getting banned all over the place.

Just last week I permanently lost Reddit access (even on new accounts that they can map to me) because I tried to bulk delete my old comments using an app.

A few months before that I lost Blind. I don't know why.

Neither site has been responsive when I ask for what they know about me using GDPR/CCPA

I've used the internet for decades and never been banned from anything before and I don't think my behavior has changed. I assume that sites are just getting real strict for whatever reason.

> Neither site has been responsive when I ask for what they know about me using GDPR/CCPA

Report the issue to your local watchdog

Yes. Still haven't hit the 45 day window on my last request but once I do boom

Thanks for doing this, wishing you the best

Sure. Any reason in particular why you're so supportive?

Most people I've talked to just say something along the lines "stop being a troll"

Cloudflare and Captchas are becoming far more aggressive in the last couple of months, too. I even failed a Cloudflare check for the first time ever recently, which was a bit of a surprise.

It seems we're sleepwalking into not being able to do much on the internet unless you have a profile paired 1 to 1 with your IRL ID.

I imagine a lot of it is connected with the upcoming US election and escalating conflict between 'east and west' going on at the moment. Though chipping away at enlightenment values in such a a manner is exactly how we lose.

is the game that good?

The vision and theme and gameplay is excellent. The game is absolutely riddled with bugs, though, and every update adds more. It was a massive surprise success from a small studio and they are really struggling to keep it together, the game is made on a engine that stopped getting support like 8 years ago. It's worth the money now but hopefully in a year it's a lot more solid technically.

>The game is absolutely riddled with bugs, though, and every update adds more.

Isn't that the primary gameplay loop?

Yeah, too many people just fight bugs and ignore the bots. ;-)

I enjoyed it for a time. It's a particularly well executed blend of co-op and third person shooting, like the Starship Troopers game I've wanted for a while. Amusingly, there was an officially licensed Troopers game that came out shortly before Helldivers 2, and it basically went nowhere.

I stopped playing because the developers don't wish for me to continue playing at my preferred difficulty, and lock me out of mission types and progression unless I play at the annoying, stressful high difficulties they prefer.

They truly hate their own game. It's been a while since I've witnessed such a fumble

It's honestly my most enjoyed game of the last few years. The feeling of boarding the Pelican right at the end of the mission never gets old.

It’s ok. I enjoyed Left 4 Dead and Deep Rock Galactic more. The game lacks content compared to those two, but that’s to be expected as its only been out a short while. Its theme feels like a homage to 1997’s Starship Troopers which gives it a strong identity.

Is a worse Deep Rock Galactic.

Please don't mislead people who are genuinely interested. These are two very different games

1. Bought the game 2. Drama 3. His country banned 4. VPN to play 5. Stream account banned and all paid games lost

Capitalism

This sounds extremely politically motivated, and is a very bad look for Steam.

Of course it is politically motivated.

Doing any sort of business with people from Russia or Belarus is fraught with danger.

Politics aside, these kind if situations happen which is why digital ownership is so important.

That's how you bring generations together and on the same side, bravo! Perfect shot to the knee.

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