I mean not sure what the solution here would be other than leave the family you're in if you can't trust them not to cheat.
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The problem is how the feature was implemented. It would be nice having the power of not sharing some games and not having to mark them as private to do that.
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Yeah this is steam's fault, I agree. You should select the games you want to share not be forced to share everything that's not private. That just makes no sense. Problem is there's nothing SG can do about it other than let users hide their games and trust you know what I mean?
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I agree. If I wanted to share games with my sibling's children (so it's actual family sharing as Valve intended) I might not want to share certain games with them, games that I might not want to hide since I want to play them. So this was a huge oversight from their part.
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But you can choose what games you want to share with children, just not with adults.
For Child members of your Steam Family, you can restrict the games that they can play via parental controls.
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Kinda, but you can either share all games or share none + the ones you select manually. What is missing is to share all minus the ones you pick manually for exclusion. So I just share all games with my kids.
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Huh? Back in beta I think I've read that Valve allows to select games specifically for family library sharing, did they remove that feature or there was never one to begin with?
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Wouldn't the solution be to only share your games with people you trust enough to know that they won't get you VAC banned?
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seems like sharing is for children in family, and they can do stupid things that can get both vac banned
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From what I read in the announcement if the account is set as "child" then the "adult" accounts can limit what games the children have access to without the need to private said games, it's only to prevent other adult accounts that making a game private is the only option to avoid sharing said game.
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seems like this is the modern version of "I didn't aimbot in Counter-Strike, my younger brother did!!!!".. except this time around it really might have been the younger brother who did the cheating.
regardless, the lesson is still the same: don't share your account with people that can't be trusted, even if you're related.
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just don't use steam families to share games with strangers who can get you VAC-banned and just share it with people you trust - like your family. problem solved.
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The problem is that your family, that you trust can get scammed from their account, using this feature without extra protections just gets your account at risk of being banned.
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Then properly teach them about the dangers of the Internet, and if you can't trust them with that set their account as a Child account?
I agree with you though, privating a game being the only option to prevent a game from being shared can lead to problems, but in the meantime you could do the above.
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Using your logic:
A person can break into your house, hold you at gunpoint, use cheats on VAC enabled games on your account while you're tied up on the floor and then leave. It's "possible"
But that'll never happen.
Why don't you just require your family to use 2-factor authentication instead?
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One thing is more likely than the other, 2-factor authentication is also not a totally effective solution.
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It isn't, but then again - the possibility that a family member will get their 2FA hacked and the hacker will play on VAC-enabled games is almost null
Or, you know, communicate with your family. If this new feature causes so much stress to you, you might want not to share it altogether.
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It is effective enough to avoid VAC Bans.
Most cases of people being hacked while having 2FA are related to session stealing, and in those cases, the users aren't able to play.
I haven't seen ANY case in the internet of people having their accounts with 2FA being hacked, and the hacker getting them a VAC Ban, and while it's possible, it's EXTREMELY unlikely.
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its locked to people in your same household... so... if they do stupid things... you know where to find them
can't even invite my own brother to my steam family.
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As a side-note, it's nice that now multiple people can use the same library simultaneously (while playing different games). And accepting the family member invite from the same ip address that sent it appears to bypass the "same household" requirement.
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And accepting the family member invite from the same ip address that sent it appears to bypass the "same household" requirement.
Hm... that probably will get patched very soon but interesting. I wonder if it will help me though because my gf is in another country in the euro zone about 50% of the time but it's worth a try.
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I'm probably closer to stop using steamgift than not using family share. I would like a solution that could work for me that enable me keep using both things
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This would be more compelling if you engaged in the gift giving part of Steam Gifts.
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How about you stop personally attacking people with your elitist opinions instead of contributing to the actual discussion. So sick and tired of people like you constantly trying to assault people for not living up to your self-imposed standards.
Anyone is free to use the site however they want as long as they comply with the rules. You're just gatekeeping and chasing people off for not interpreting SteamGifts as SteamTradeRandomGamesWithEachOtherOrGetFlamedByVigilantes.
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I'm only seeing one personal attack. You attacking me. It might be time for you to reflect on your interactions here. This might not be the site for you.
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"to not share some of the games you need to mark them as private"
Wait, can't you add other family members as children, and not allow them to play certain games using Parental Controls (therefore not marking them as "private" or anything)?
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You could, but the other persons aren't children, and would be kind of sad needing the authorization of someone else to buy a game while being an adult
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I would guess that the "child" account can still buy games on its own -- the "new payment option" would be only if the "adult" wants to pay for the "child"... no?
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Correct, the child purchase requests are for an adult account to pay for a game the child wants to buy
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I'm a bit thick but can you explain what you see is the "problem for steamgift users"?? A VAC ban or the being suspended for marking games as private?
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If I don't mark as private some games on steam, I could get banned there. If I mark those games as private, I get banned here (steamgift)
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The Steam Family view is still there as it was before. Can´t you not just check which games your accounts share from there?
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You can set up the family view option on the PC of your family members, and limit the accessibility of your games
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This does not appear to be true (at least for the moment)
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Maybe those who had it enabled still can do something with it, I dunno, but I see no way to turn it on now. Can you point me to the way to do it?
Also, steam explicitly says that it gots replaced with new feature:
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You can do the same thing as Family View, but you need to add someone to your Steam Family as a child account, then limit what you share. Salmase doesn't want to do that because the people are adults, but the functionality is there
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In the Steam client (can't see how in a browser, hence my "for the moment" note), go to settings -> Family. There is the new "Steam Families" feature info, but under that is "Family View" which has a button allowing you to manage it.
For reference, I previously did have Family View enabled, so I cannot speak to someone trying to set it up for the first time.
Edit: Image
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That's weird, I have it and never had family view set up:
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Did you maybe (like me) have it already set up before the new feature arrived?
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Maybe many years ago (I don't think so)? Well, it's disabled now.
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Are you on stable client (not beta)?
Is it the latest version?
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The manage button points to this link: https://store.steampowered.com/parental/set/
Can you try accessing it?
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Yes, it opens and seems functional. So at least this way is possible. Thank you!
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Glad the wife and I both have our own accounts :)
Not that it matters she favors the PS5 anyways these days
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Lol, all this crap about "only people you trust", like those folks not only never had kids, but even never have been a kid. When my kids were 14 or so, ofc I did trust them, They even did have a limited emergency access to our bank account. I would never though leave in their reach more money, that I could afford to lose... cause kids are just kids. And VAC banning is not the only problem, as I just have in my library some games, that I wouldn't want my 14 y.o. to play... some of those most likely won here.
So, if there is no other solution, but hiding the games in your library, it seems, that you can only hope, that Valve will later fix things, and till then just ask mods here to suspend your account on your request until it's solved.
Unless you can build yourself a macro/batch file/or any such, that would unmark your private games once per week for a few minutes, turn your profile public, run SG sync, turn it back to private and mark the games again as private. Maybe someone here could even make such program/add-on for all of those affected, as for sure you are not the only one. Because AFAIK you need to sync just once per week, and for the remaining time your profile can be set to private.
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Add them as children to steam family, and you will have control over what they can play and even how much. You don't need to make games private for that.
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Well, wouldn't this be a general solution then, to add everyone as a child? Or would it not work, because of Steam knowing declared dates of birth?
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It would work, but then there will be issue for those "childs" - they won't be able to leave the "family" (at least without steam support help) and "parent" will have control over what and how much they play, so "parent" can easily block their whole library from them. I wish there was an easier solution, something like "don't add people you don't trust", I dunno...
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The solution is easier than it seems. It's my library and you can access it on my rules - so I add you as a child and you can't play my vac games, but you must trust me that I won't mess with your account in any other way.
That, of course, won't work well when people have similar amount of games and just want to share them, but in such case they bear a similar risk, right?
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As I already said in this topic - it's all a matter of trust. Don't add to family members you don't trust, and don't join families of people you don't trust - and you'll be fine.
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Actually, you did give the best solution. "Turn your profile public, run SG sync, turn it back to private and mark the games again as private" this is something I can do.
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Yeah, but you'll need to do that once a week if you want to keep using SG. :-/
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I enter the site once per day, and putting the private tag and take in it out is a couple of clicks. I can do that once a week as a temporary solution.
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Its family as CLOSE relatives, same flat or building or its intended as friends living in the same city, country etc ?
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Intention was household only, but so far it seems to be restricted by country.
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How about not adding to family people you don't trust?
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This is ridiculous. Maybe the best solution is to divorce your spouse and leave your children. Then you can live in the mountains surrounded by a faraday cage and look at your steam account once a year under supervised conditions and bask in the glory that is your non-VAC banned account.
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if you're divorced, you cant share with your kids?
if you move abroad to work, you can't share with your family?
if your siblings are dumb enough and cheat in games you get banned?
also ironically i know someone who cant share with their partner that live in the same house because they can't open a bank account in the new country they are in now and steam considers them to be from two different countries.
it's kinda sad how THIS is the best store/launcher on the market...
like there is barely anything to compete with and somehow every other company does it 10 times worse, the level of incompetency is incomprehensible tbh.
the only good thing about this is that you can both play games at the same time unlike the old dumb system that was also made by valve, and seeing how often they update the store, we might get a decent working system by 2040.
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Cute how you manage to blame them for something they offer, that they aren't legally or morally required to offer by any means. Weird form to express gratitude.
The only sad part here is people like you suggesting that Steam could be far more accommodating, as if not everyone would know how heavily people would abuse the system if they lowered their restrictions.
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"Cute how you manage to blame them for something they offer"
if someone offers a bad service, it makes complete sense to complain about it, i'm not receiving charity, we're paying literal billions of dollars for this service, so they are not "offering" me something, i am literally paying them for that service.
people complain about epic games launcher and all kinds of services all the time, so i have no clue why is it weird that someone would complain about steam in specific, a service you pay for every time you buy anything from them.
"that they aren't legally or morally required to offer by any means."
once again, they are not "offering", they are getting paid for a service, just like every other company.
"Weird form to express gratitude."
gratitude for a service i am paying for and getting the bare minimum from?
like change the subject to epic games and imagine people complaining about the launcher and store, and you'd come and say "why aren't you thankful for what they are giving us? you should be thankful we can buy games from them, show some gratitude towards them please"
and that's a store that gave away like 500 games away and still can be criticized.
"as if not everyone would know how heavily people would abuse the system if they lowered their restrictions."
you mean how like steam have access to your location but lets millions of people change their geographical location to areas with cheaper prices for years and once in 5 years changes their location back but still let them switch back to the cheaper prices 3 months later as if nothing happened?
and after a decade decide to finally change their regional pricing and make a new system where they put countries that make 100$ a month with countries that make 5 10 20 times more in the same region?
yeah, sounds like a very competent company that cares about people abusing its system when it clearly saw the abuse for a literal decade and did nothing about.
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tldr:
"Yeah, I know that people already abused Steam's previous attempts to offer beneficial features to its customers. And for that reason, I expect them to lower their restrictions on another beneficial feature, so that people can abuse that one too. And then I shall judge them as incompetent for allowing such loopholes."
Got it.
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i heard about selective hearing before, but not selective reading...
the real tldr; would be me pointing out how absurd it is that you don't want people to complain about a service they're paying billions of dollars to use yearly and saying it's something they're offering to us and we should show gratitude to mediocrity and be happy with it and be thankful they're even doing anything for us.
and that steam did nothing to stop the abusers or even care about that because they already make billions of dollars yearly, and only did a mediocre/bad change to their policy last year because publishers started noticing that and many stopped using regional pricing completely or making up their own prices.
so i guess you can keep on supporting mediocrity and thanking the people you pay for doing a mediocre job and not really caring since there is no actual competition.
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The point is that your complaints are about extras that they can offer but don't have to provide. Your complaints make only slightly more sense than someone being upset that their new car didn't find them their soulmate. It could happen but it's not what you actually paid for.
You somehow missed the opportunity to enlighten the world how you would have prevented people from abusing regional pricing. Companies such as Netflix didn't manage to stop VPN usage. Even autocracies such as Russia, China, Iran and others didn't entirely manage to close that option. But sure, Steam should have been able to do something! Otherwise it's proof of their mediocrity!
Regarding "selective reading" - you also still haven't revealed yet why they should enable people to abuse family sharing by lowering the existing restrictions. But I guess the logic behind that demand of yours is your ultimate secret.
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"You somehow missed the opportunity to enlighten the world how you would have prevented people from abusing regional pricing."
well, like i said below, i dont wanna waste more time arguing over nothing, so not gonna argue for or against anything anymore.
but i will enlighten you about this before i go since you requested,
steam doesn't require you to use a vpn or be in the country your account is registered to,
so all these people do is pay a couple of dollars to any account switcher which you can find by googling, and then they buy the cheapest game they can find, and many of them use the same card, and most of them buy the same game, and now you're in the new region.
so steam sees an Australian dude that suddenly moved to Argentina for 5 minutes and entered a fake address, yes the address can be 1234 sesame street, and bought a specific very cheap game, then he moved back to Australia and never went back to Argentina, even when he checksout steam shows him a drop down menu showing the Australian dollar as a payment option because it detects his real location, but ironically if he picks that option steam will refuse to go on and tell him he is actually from Argentina unless he wanna use a new credit card issued from Australia.
and in the past 5~10 years i think steam did one or two region reversal waves, which could be reversed back after 3 months again using the method mentioned above.
so yeah, steam already has all the data it needs, and did use that data once or twice, but why bother when you make a ton of money if the user pays 60$ or 30$, you're still making your money, because the Australian dude has 60$ to spend and since the games are cheaper he is gonna spend it all and get multiple games, instead of waiting for a sale for the one big game and spending less, and since steam gets 20$ from this if he buys 1 game or 10, they dont care, the publishers are the ones making less because they were gonna make 40, but now they make 20 and a different publisher makes another 20$.
so i hope this was enlighten enough for your, and there is more if you need to,
so to answer your question, steam has all the tools and data and money to act if they wish to, but it's not a problem for them because they make the same amount of money, if not more by simply not caring.
a little extra,
there's millions of people from poorer countries who have to do this same exact thing to be able to afford games because you cant really buy a 60$ game on a 100~200$ salary,
and if steam cared they could have invested a couple of millions into market research and system implementation to make regional pricing and payment systems for these regions,
and that's one of the reasons why steam is a mediocre incompetent company that don't really care,
and if the publishers didn't make a fuss about regional pricing 2 years ago, they probably wouldn't have updated their pricing.
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I see. You are right that Steam isn't doing the possible maximum to prevent region hopping. But to be fair, they have a pretty good reason as at the end of the day as it's impossible to prevent all such ambitions.
And while you certainly will disagree, it's a pretty solid reasoning for a company to weigh the benefits against the costs and burdens of tougher but ultimately futile countermeasures.
P.S.
Another wall of text but yet you again missed the opportunity to explain why Steam should make it easier for people to abuse family sharing.
It almost seems that you actually don't have any arguments in that regard and as this was the original topic (aka your complaints) I don't see a purpose in continuing this back and forth, about how Steam sucks otherwise in your opinion.
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"Another wall of text but yet you again missed the opportunity to explain why Steam should make it easier for people to abuse family sharing."
like i said in the 2nd line in the wall of text, i don't wanna waste time in pointless argument, so i just answered your question about info on a different subject,
but anyway, to answer that specific question,
first of all, what you're doing is similar to someone complaining about bots in SG and you saying "if you don't have a specific solution then don't complain",
or if SG solution was to open your camera to take a selfie for every GA you enter and you're upset with people complaining about this and saying "so do you want bots to use the website and exploit it?"
anyway,
steam isn't doing enough,
they have enough resources to come up with and support a solution that would make everyone happy,
but they choose to pick the lazy way of doing it and apply as much restrictions as they can, and if you were following the beta you could see that happen,
and keep in mind, people who wanna exploit the system will exploit it, and people who have genuine problems wont know what to do,
there already exists services to share games between people without buying it, mostly denuvo protected games since they can pirate any other game,
and there's a ton of people doing it for free too, there are certain chineese websites that can give you a username and password for any game you want, and any of those games have thousands of play time from all the people sharing the same account, and most of these account either use fake or stolen cards to get games and they're mostly banned account due to that scam, but they're still usable.
and if you give it a couple of weeks i can tell you exactly how people are exploiting the new system, meanwhile my friend living in the same house as their partner can't share the same library because their accounts are registered in different countries.
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a service i am paying for and getting the bare minimum from
Do you know what are you "paying" for? 24/7 access to all games you already bought, to download and play them whenever you want. That's it. Everything beyond that is considered extra. Valve doesn't do it solely because they are good, but to attract more customers which will bring more profits, nothing odd about that.
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i wrote a whole book but then deleted it because i don't wanna argue for hours over nothing, have a nice day man ❤
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To make things short, "Do you know what are you "paying" for? 24/7 access to all games you already bought" this is kind of true but is also false. You are also paying for the expectations of what you are going to do with that "game license" like sharing it with someone. Something you could do until the last announcement.
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You could also buy Steam games and store them as gifts in your inventory instead of activating them right away. It was great for trading later, even with people from other regions where games were a lot cheaper. Of course it was heavily abused and subsequently disabled.
I was in EU2 region, where some games were also cheaper compared to the "main" one. For example The Talos Principle was 20€ instead of 40. That "feature" is now gone also.
The point of the story is all this stuff surrounding Steam is considered extra as I have already said. Features will come and go, get changed for better or worse. But we are not paying any subscription for using the service. We have a ton of things more than any other PC or console store, and they continue to add to it constantly. Not everything is good (Steam Chat app is garbage), but at least in my case I got more than I have ever expected.
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Those extra things are the reason to use steam, if tomorrow epic gives a better sharing experience it could sway my choice of store. Features and expectations are always important. If steam goes too far into the restrictions of things, it could damage the store popularity (i doubt it), but is still something to think about.
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also ironically i know someone who cant share with their partner that live in the same house because they can't open a bank account in the new country they are in now and steam considers them to be from two different countries.
Every local payment method (cards, services) should enable switching.
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thanks for the suggestion, i'll let them know and tell you what happens.
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actually nevermind, my bad, i asked them and they said they don't want an account in that region because the games are more expensive there, and their humble account and all keys are set to the old region, so it would be too much hassle.
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Yeah the new system is basically based around Valve's idea of a mom and pop 50ies family. Sad
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ive been suspended before just for marking a game private i won here, i made it unprivate and my suspension didnt got lifted :/ (BS) i sent screenshots that i own it but it wasnt enought or something so i just removed the private thing but sadly still had to wait the 5 days... sometimes i feel like the mods just dont care lol
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I think Valve needs to add an option to hide certain games whether other members are a child or not. It was possible before the new family update.
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So if I won a NSFW game on SG and mark it private so it's not shared with my kids, then it's bye bye account? :-)
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Yes, I have a message from the mod Eiion, that said:" If you don't want porn game to show up on your account, you should not enter giveaways to win them because wins need to stay public and cannot be removed from the account "
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Thanks. I want porn games to show on my account, but I don't want them to show in my kids' accounts. ;-)
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Through the family menu you can set restrictions to kid accounts, to just be able to play games with X rating and such, from what I recall. So that shouldn't be a problem to set up.
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It says "Some products and user-generated content on Steam may not be appropriate for all audiences. Select these boxes to indicate which store products and community content this child can see on Steam:", are you sure it also works for products in the library?
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lol well that's really useful advice... considering the system changed and the games are in your account now soooo...
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Might be worth CG clean slating past wins and only enforcing that rule moving forward. He can literally just pick a date (like today) to be the launch point for enforcing that rule.
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Yes, then we can set every past win to private and win them all over again!
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I filed for divorce right after that announcement
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They really do need to add an option for "All games but ..."
Like said in this thread already, kids are unpredictable, while you'll obviously (hopefully) trust the adults, if shared with kids it's a risk and there's no way to let them play all the games but specific ones.
While its not a bad system, its rushed and not enough thought was put into it, so I am hoping steam will change this.
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Valve rolled out the new system to share games between accounts (https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/593110/view/4605582245626919823?l=english), and part of their functionalities are blocked for how Steamgift functions.
The new families system lets a group of 6 share games, but to not share some of the games you need to mark them as private, any person of the group could add another person, not like before that you could choose the person you were sharing with. If someone use a copy of your game and gets banned, you get banned as well. You can get VAC banned without doing anything.
As preparation for this change, I marked as private all my online dependent and VAC protected games (this includes games I won in steamgift), as a security measure for my steam account.
That got my banned for a couple of days here, until I unmarked all the games I had as private. I got a warning from the mods of steamgift. But this didn't solve the problem I'm in, and many others users could be.
We can't use steam families without a risk to our steam account, and I think as a community we should find a solution for this problem. Valve didn't listen to feedback during the beta period.
It would be nice seeing people opinions and solutions.
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