Valve is all about fairness in gaming.
According to a new entry in Steam's support pages, more restrictions are being introduced to further deter cheaters from taking advantage of the platform. For starters, players will no longer be able to stockpile certain games for later trading or gifting.
This particular restriction doesn't appear to be live yet as of this writing but it's only a matter of time before Valve makes it official. After all, information about it has already been made available to the public.
Games that have Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) and Game Bans enabled can still be bought but only one copy of a game may be kept in an account's inventory or it must be gifted immediately. And if an account gifts a game to anyone who gets permanently banned in said game, that account will no longer be able to send that game again as a gift.
Why the sudden strictness in gifting? It's because gifting can be manipulated to facilitate cheating. Say, one user was banned. That user can send a copy of the game they were banned from to another account (that's also likely theirs) to continue their shady escapades. However, this isn't to mean that everyone with a stockpile is a cheater. Valve is simply pointing out how the gifting process can be used by unscrupulous folks.
When VAC kicks in, cheaters will be banned from secure servers for multiplayer games permanently. The system varies from Game Bans in that the latter are initiated by game developers for malicious behavior that doesn't fall within the scope of VAC. Game Bans can also range from minor ones lasting a day to permanent lockouts.
According to Valve, these measures were set in place to ensure the integrity of the multi-player experience in the online gaming community.
"We understand that the restrictions on buying to inventory may be inconvenient for some legitimate users, but we believe that these steps will reduce the number of cheaters [they'll] play against," the company said.
Earlier in July, Valve also sent out cease-and-desist notices to third-party websites using Steam for gambling. It was in response to a lawsuit that alleged that the company knew of these websites and was profiting from them, at the (literal and figurative) expense of Steam users.
Valve's Erik Johnson, however, clarified that the company has no business relationships with the gambling websites and that Steam does not have a system in place that converts items in games to actual money.
Photo: Les Orchard | Flickr
