Your Opinion: Banning CD-key giveaways

I say ban them. I do not want people to lose their account without knowing what hit them.

Better safe than sorry, I guess...

I vote for limiting Steam Gifts to the actual Steam Gift system, not keys. It will help keep things on the up-and-up and prevent potential conflict down the road or issues that sour the Admins relationships with Valve.

There will always be dicks, (eg. the people selling invites for games or money) and if they're already lurking within the population we can be certain that weaknesses within the system will be exploited to someone else's detriment.

Dont ban them. Or make them require to send along a reciept or photo of the cd-key.

I vote for steam gift-able items only.
This eliminates account stealing, selling winnings, etc. which isn't what this group is about.
Its unfortunate that we would lose out generous offers from people like Spoonalious though, unfortunately....

Ban them!

There are certain titles that are only available through activating a key on steam... Prey is such an example. I was not aware that accounts could be stolen based on keys (is this true for the person who receives the key or gives it away?), so I am a little conflicted at this point between making more prey giveaways or being safe and not making else feel at unease. Good thing is, I clearly mentioned that I will be giving the retail product's CD-key that can be activated on steam so anyone that doesn't feel at ease can stay away.

The humble bundles are ok as long they work and have a gift copy of it lying around ... dark messiah everyone can get it free so ... they only do that for the points (which is useless). other steam game keys ... idk just give them away somewhere else then here.

I vote to ban them.
Every Dark Messiah I've seen is a MP key, which I already have, and I like having my account

I'd vote for keeping them but requiring a notice specifying they are cd keys, then those that don't feel comfortable with it can skip those giveaways.

It's impossible to highjack an account using a key...

steam support isn't a bunch of nimrods who wouldn't bother verifying vital info like the IP, billing address/name and previously owned games for instance.

Now hypothetically speaking if the culprit is a 1337 hax0r who is actually willing to waste his time on measly steam accounts and social engineer his way through all the person's vital info and billing records, then obviously you're looking at a far bigger problem on your hands than just temporarily losing access to your steam account - identity theft - there is steamguard which is enabled by default and disabled only by low IQ users who indeed deserve to lose their accounts if they opt out of this fool proof(well for most part hehe) security feature designed specifically to prevent this type of thing.

Go ahead and try to recover your account using a CD key that you used. All it does is send the account owner an email letting him know his username which he/she can then use to recover the password.

So then the only way to do this is to go straight for the person's email address and avoid the unnecessary CD key recovery option which pretty much renders this whole website obsolete based on just this one fact that the gifters have access to the winners email address.

Why not just ban Dark Messiah MP keys altogether since it's not even the full game and the multiplayer was actually developed by another studio which is why it's free now to begin with.

:(

I am conflicted on my vote to ban because there is a certain title that is currently not available on sale through steam (not in my region anyway) and can only be activated by the retail CD-Key on steam. My suggestion is: make a new account for retail CD-key activation of gifts... this way even if you happen to come across a "bad apple" (i.e. someone who created a giveaway and gives a retail CD-Key to gain access or hi-jack your account) in the future, you will not loose your actual steam account and if recovery of this alternate account fails, your loss is highly minimized. I don't know if you can have multiple accounts on steam though- is it against their terms of service?

I'm fine with it, personally, and all that fearmongering over the single incident makes me lol. Does the thief have access to my email address too? I doubt it.

Ban all CDKeys.

With the physical box and CD floating around, it's just too easy for someone to claim ownership of your steam account.

How about we ban giveaways? Come on, they're ripping developers off!

Prey giveaways are only possible with Keys

BAN BAN BAN

I'm with Cult, are you with me ?

imo, there is no real problem about that.
Actually a steam gift might also lead to a banned account, because some bad guy might steal some credit card, buy a gift and send it here. Once, Valve finds out, that gift was bought from a stolen CC, they will block your account. So how is it different from a CD-key problem?

Also how are you going to tell, steam giveaways from cd-key ones (if that game is distributed in both formats)? There are thousands of users here. Most of them hardly read the rules, so they won't even notice, if the rule is broken, when they recieve a gift. Another group of people might know about the rule, but they won't mind the key and won't tell you, the rule is broken, because they are thankful to the gifter.

There was not a single case gifting any profile-blocking games around here.
And those couple of cases with blocked profiles on the internet were resolved.

There is actually always a risk. If you don't want to take the risk, just don't recieve any gifts from the unknown sources, as steam advices.

Also note, those Dark Messiah MP keys are not infinite. Once, they end up, there won't be any more of those. There were a bunch of Speedball 2 Tournament keys on that Pollish site before and they are out for some months already.

That decision will just lower the amount of gifts, but it won't change anything.

If you want to stop Dark Messiah MP giveaways, just stop them, not all the cd-keys.
If you want to stop those shady humble bundles around, stop them too.
If you really hate those RUSE (though, it seems to fine right now) stop those giveaways.
But i don't see, how are you going to stop CDs... unless the site actually gets that gift link/CD-key from the gifter. And the purpose, you don't want to do that makes sense.

Don't let there be any CD keys, only games that is coming from steamstore and that they are giftable through steam. Any CD keys that the owner still owns the case should be banned for the risk of scamming.

My opinion: only gifts via steam system.
Every CD-Key could be a risk for the winner of the contest: we can trust the contributor, but we cannot be sure that his retail boxes (for retail cd-keys) will never be stolen or his email account (for DD retail keys) will never be hacked.

but how will you ban them?

then what will i do with my 3 copies of prey?

P.S: could someone (important) contact steam support with that problem and ask if we can use the giveaway URL to prove that the gifter willingly gave the key away to the winner? (the winner should definately also keep the email he received the key with)

even if they got your password, they can't log in with steam guard in place anyway. So you win the game and they can't get in. I say leave it the way it is.

besides for them to get your password in the first place they need to know your steam login name, and if you keep your nickname and login name the same you are stupid. But even if they get that far steam guard stops them.

So is this in effect? I entered into two giveaways yesterday, one for the Valve Complete Pack, and I woke up today to see they are gone? I can't seem to find them. Any help?

I am AGAINST banning CD Keys.