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Comment by NamTaf | Hacker News Reader

The good thing with Valve is that although they make comically terrible mistakes like this, they know they're bad at getting stuff right and put traceable information on everything

Get falsely VAC banned? They'll detect this and know exactly what happened and revert the issue. Have your account hijacked? They'll trace exactly what happens and fix it all up. Not to mention that this change triggered the standard 'you can't trade or market any games/items on your account for 7 days' block, so even when someone takes your account you don't actually lose anything.

Valve makes some incredibly bad bugs in their software (games as well as Steam itself), but at least they track and trace everything so they can unwind their screw-ups.

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Disclaimer: I currently make my living thanks to valve software

Hah, maybe if you're lucky enough to actually hit a human. Valve has ludicrously terrible support. There have been tons of reports of 1-2 week wait times after submitting a ticket, only to receive an automated response with nothing to do with the actual ticket (even experienced this myself a few times, not fun).

People are quick to praise valve but I don't think it's truly deserved anymore. Sadly the days of them caring about their products and communities are long gone..

I wish it was only one to two weeks. It took me nine years to get my primary Steam account back after a billing error on Valve's end. Tickets would normally come back with, "It's banned and we won't tell you why." Not VAC banned, just banned from being used.

The days of caring never really existed in the first place.

Something similar happened to my sister's account five years or so ago. I got her a game as a Christmas present, Valve wouldn't let her log into her account, and they never responded to anything. She has a different account now and that one was never recovered.

That's true. In my observation it tends to be that their tracing alerts employees to a problem, which they then proactively fix without the end user having to contact support. When it requires human intervention and isn't caught by their own systems, it's another matter entirely.

I'm pretty sure I was hit by a bug during the recent sales event and submitted a ticket, but to this day never heard back. Their human-based support is Google-level bad.

I dunno, I submitted a ticket a few weeks back for a refund and got a human. I guess his first reply was canned but when I called him out on it, he was helpful and provided me with a full refund. (I had added funds to my Steam wallet to buy an item on the marketplace and then got a 7 day market ban making me unable to use the money. A few mins later the item I wanted to buy had already been sold.)

> Hah, maybe if you're lucky enough to actually hit a human

To be fair, Valve is probably not fit to have proper consumer support since they are still a very small company (with a HUGE customer base). Unless they decide to invest in headcounts to have proper support, that is.

To be fair, last I checked valve is a multi-billion dollar company, not some small-scale startup. They could easily build out a quality support infrastructure but choose not to.

> multi-billion dollar company

checked with what? Valve is not a public company nobody actually knows how MUCH they earn. you can only estimate it.

> not some small-scale startup

They are very small scale in terms of employees numbers. Check your facts.

> They could easily build out a quality support infrastructure but choose not to.

For that statement, I agree with you.

At any reasonable estimate of Valve's revenue and valuation multiples, they're easily a billion dollar company, I'd be surprised if it was as low as only $1B. They have nearly 500 employees listed on LinkedIn[1] which is probably a decent estimate given people who've left but haven't updated their profiles and those without profiles in the first place. That's not a small company by any stretch, and I think we can all agree they're purposefully making the decision to not offer competent support.

[1] - https://www.linkedin.com/company/13922?trk=tyah&trkInfo=clic...

> I'd be surprised if it was as low as only $1B. They have nearly 500 employees

> That's not a small company by any stretch

Please, give me more examples of billion dollars companies which have only 500 employees.

Instagram. Oculus. WhatsApp. SuperCell. GungHo. Mojang. Twitch.tv.

It'd be easy to go on. And I'd bet there's no way Valve is just a $1 billion company.

I don't know about all of them, but do you realize that we are talking about 1B$ ACTUAL revenue in current dollars of sales, not valuation ? These are two very different things.

I'm pretty sure the discussion was about valuation / market cap:

> At any reasonable estimate of Valve's revenue and valuation multiples, they're easily a billion dollar company

They already most likely already have a billion in revenues.

How about valuations based on revenue then...

If they already have one billion in revenues their valuation is likely much higher than that.

Instagram, Oculus, WhatsApp, Twitch.tv don't have a billion dollar revenue.

That was precisely my point.

> They are very small scale in terms of employees numbers. Check your facts.

bluejellybean was clearly not disputing that their current headcount is low. Their point was that a billion-dollar company is not "small-scale," no matter what their headcount is. Check your own facts before you get snippy.

This is no excuse. A company that fails to scale its customer support along with its customer base deserves every ounce of criticism they get.

I'm not saying this is an excuse. They are just not investing any headcount in it. That's a fact.

They may have logs but they don't have perfect logs.

I know people who got banned for having debuggers open not attached to the game.

The VAC system is also incredibly intrusive. It was scanning random processes on my computer, and I know this because when I tried to recompile my program, it failed because it couldn't delete the executable because Steam had an open handle on it...

You would never hear about Valve failing in these cases because no random person would trust testimony from random people over Valve.

Umm...I guess 'citation needed' on the VAC ban part? Valve has a very strict zero-tolerance policy w.r.t VAC bans. As far as I know, reversals are rare and only happen in mass when VAC bugs out and detects a legit program as a cheat which results in an incorrect ban wave which then gets reversed.

I'm pretty sure that if I got access to your account and got your account banned, you'd be SOL.

On the other hand, VAC bans now only affect the single game that the cheat was used in, so your entire Steam library won't be trashed. Exceptions to this include early Source games (e.g. cheating in CS:S will get you banned in TF2) and HL engine games (e.g. CS 1.6 ban also affects DoD)

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7849-RAD...

Yes, if you get access to my account and get it banned I'm SoL except if it were through some fault of their own. Same with items. [1]

They've reversed several waves of bans, with a number listed here [2] that you can follow the links through on if you feel like doing so. It's very rare but it happens.

[1]: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=6633-TAN... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Anti-Cheat#False-positiv...

> Valve makes some incredibly bad bugs in their software (games as well as Steam itself), but at least they track and trace everything so they can unwind their screw-ups.

Well for the recent but on Steam Linux that erased your hard drive if you moved the Steam library folder somewhere else, there was nothing they could do to "unwind their screw-ups", except fixing it in the code once the damage was done.

Steam on Windows has some odd behaviour too [1].

    Warning:
    The uninstallation process deletes the folder Steam was
    installed to to ensure it is fully uninstalled. If you accidentally
    installed Steam to a folder containing other data, for example
    C:\Program Files\ instead of C:\Program Files\Steam\, STOP!

[1] https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=9609-OBM...

I'd expect most software uninstallers to do the same thing. That's why we should use package managers instead of letting users choose where to put things (or fully encapsulated app objects rather than using installers at all).

Most software on Windows only erases files that it installed, and leaves the directory in place if there are any other files remaining. Sure it may be annoying to clean up if you mind orphan stuff, but it's way better than the alternative.

>the recent but on Steam Linux that erased your hard drive...

Link to said bug: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671

Emailing Gabe directly was helpful in getting a WINE issue debugged in the days before native Linux support (actually turned out to be a Linux kernel bug). I don't want to encourage people to spam someone whose time is surely scarce, but perhaps if all other avenues are exhausted and the stakes are high, this may be a reasonable approach.

By the way- for security issues, their security@valvesoftware.com address gets /very/ fast, human replies. For example- when Steam Curators rolled out, you could use javascript: URIs for links to "read full review". 5 minutes after Curators was released to the public, I discovered that. 30 minutes later, it was fixed.

That said, that's just their web app; getting issues fixed in games is MUCH slower.

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