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[LordMelvin]

I had a 13 year old hotmail account I used for everything that had a weak password. The account got dictionary-broke so I changed the password to a strong one and promptly forgot it. Then I failed to recover the password 600 times and lost that old hotmail account.

At the same time I forgot my Steam password. I put in a help ticket to get my password reset and a new email address put together. It took about 3 days.

Steam has to protect your account from hijacking. At the same time Steam has to give you the ability to get access back when you screw up. In both cases Steam is protecting you from your own stupid actions.

There very few things only you can know about your Steam account. Password, CD keys, and credit card numbers. Steam assumes none of these things are shared, as they should. As such they are all vital for account recovery.

Let's look at what happen to me. I needed a password reset but didn't have access to the email anymore. Lets say my credit card expired recently and I had shreded it, losing the credit card number. If I didn't have the option to provide a serial number, my account would be gone. Unacceptable.

<snip>

User. Error.

Similar thing happened to me about a month ago. (lost access to old spam email account, clean OS install, new steam install, ) Took four days to sort out, but that included the weekend. Valve's not bad, all things considered.

[Soulwynd]

I've never had to use the support to recover an account...

But I've once tried to report a bug and the following happened in the course of a month and a half when the new UI was implemented:

1. I've explained the problem, giving all information, including drivers and programs related and even why the bug was happening.
2. They asked for the msinfo
3. Linked me to an article about surround sound on valve games.
4. I kindly pointed out the bug was with steam, not any games, but with steam.
5. They pointed me to absurd drivers that had nothing to do with my system.
6. I said I wasn't asking for help, I was reporting a bug and wasn't going to install drivers that are not even for my audio.
7. Bug never really got fixed, but it's better now, not sure if it was because of my report.

They did improve the audio stability over time and the bug is a bit more rare, but it still happens now and then. Steam fails to release audio channels when it's done with them (usually when you watch a movie with the client or use the voice chat), leading to some audiomod programs to get 'stuck' thinking there's still audio being used. Only fix is to restart steam. Their garbage collection appears to have gotten better, now it only happens once every couple months or so.


And that's my experience with steam support. It shouldn't be such a hassle to report a bug.

[DrKillPatient]

I've just recently noticed that steam is crappy. A better implementation of DRM that some other services that just limit you (SecuROM comes to mind), since it does have some semifunctional community features, but overall I don't like it too much. I've been using steam/playing the games a lot less since I got into Linux, mainly because they don't work too well and booting into Windows is a hassle.
I do believe I've lost all hope with any company that even dares to mention DRM. I think Valve is somewhat better than usual, but I find that they're sliding backward into entirely-commercially-centred evil, even though I haven't had any really bad experiences with them, I'm growing suspicious...