Hi all,

I recently fell victim to developer blackmail and revenge tactics after their game got removed from Steam for employing scam marketplace items.

Here's the story as to what happened, how I got the ban overturned, and why Steam needs better support when it comes to these.

Overall, Steam Support should really allow a more personalised and direct appeal system for this kind of stuff. I admit I'm in a privileged position when it comes to others, but it shouldn't take someone having a direct line to Steam to get a game ban overturned.

Everyone needs the ability to appeal, end of.

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Sentinels_of_the_Store/announcements/detail/813567935677203784

1 month ago

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Steam support has sadly never been good. It generally feels like Valve tries to have their support be as small (and powerless) as they reasonably can get away with, and they have a history of not overturning developer decisions, even from devs that they've banned due to abusive behaviour, unless it starts getting media traction. So as much as I would like to see Valve do something about it, I doubt they will, unless they're forced to.

1 month ago
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Auto-moderation has become a problem. Especially when the store is overrun with trash and scam games and they're now letting "developers" use moderation against the people doing the moderation for them? Well done, Steam.

1 month ago
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Sadly they where always inclined to do absolutely nothing as long as it made them money. Nothing unique, but capitalism in a nutshell.

1 month ago
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True enough. A good boycott would set them straight but I doubt there would be many users who care enough compared to the millions of accounts they have buying trash.

1 month ago
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I really hope you can help more users with false bans. It shouldn't be your responsibility, but if not you, who else will? Steam support won't...

1 month ago
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I'll certainly do my best.

1 month ago
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There's only one actual human in Steam Support who actually pays attention to the content of a support request (whose name I don't recall ATM). All the others treat you like an inconvenience at best and an enemy at worst.

1 month ago
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I think that person banned me from many any new unban request

1 month ago
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Youch.

1 month ago
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im permanently banned from pixel pirates forums from using the frowning snowman emoji, once
that dev is a ban happy scam artist that tricked soo many people

1 month ago
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now imagine that affecting your reputation permanently with a big stain on your steam profile

1 month ago
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Good to see that you were able to get yourself unbanned.

Did you questioned your direct contact from steam why the normal support, that is available for everyone, wrote a copy & paste answer that can be shortend as "the devs have the control about the ban feature and we don't care/it isn't our problem" and how and when this change to a real handling of such unban tickets ?
In your case you had a lot of infos that it wasn't a legitimated ban, so each human that had handled that ticket should have seen very clearly that the dev used the ban as weapon.

1 month ago
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I did, but as you can probably imagine, that point was evaded, likely cause it's unprofessional for them to criticise a different support representative to someone not affiliated with the company while having it on record.

1 month ago
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Thanks for the info.

From my point of view it would be professional from them to write something like "Our manual about how to handle such situations should be re-written/changed, because it is obvious it doesn't included cases in which the dev/publisher use bans, in single player games, as weapon to silence/against members".
And it would be possible without to attack a other staff member or saying that they made a error.

I have really tiny hopes that something changes to the better with the steam support (for the normal users).
I think the chances are higher to get a, positive, reaction from Gaben when someone write him a mail as a positive one throught the common steam support way.

1 month ago
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