Privated games will BAN you.

For your information, permanently deleted games also can be undeleted.

Steam Support >> Games and Applications >> Search for a game >> It's not in my library >> Restore the previously removed package to my account

For API, both actions are same though.

They don't mean that the action is the same on your end in Steam. They mean that in both cases, your library will look the same to anyone else looking at it. In both cases, the game doesn't show up in your library, and there is no way for anyone else to know whether you didn't activate the game, you removed the game, or you marked it as private.

Same here too. The very first game is unactivated for me (I didn't properly understand how the site works back then), And they also said that this is final warning and the next one would be permaban. I hope that since they lifted it it doesn't count anymore, and if some of the won keys are revoked for some reason that won't result in nuked account

Setting a game to private causing a ban can be derived from existing rules undeniably as you just proved. I do still think more clarity as in a sentence like: "setting a game to private on your Steam account which you won on SG is against our rules" would avoid unnecessary antagonism.

At this point, it is probably being counted as part of this.

The relevant section (that would need to be updated to be more clear) is in the FAQ:

Does my Steam profile need to be public to use the site?
You'll need to switch to a public profile when registering, so we can confirm you have a legitimate Steam account that meets our minimum requirements. From that point on, you can use the site with a private profile. However, if you wish to enter giveaways, the site will ask you to switch to a public Steam profile once a week to bring your account up-to-date.

The part you're referencing explains process, not premise (though as canis notes far below, it's nevertheless quite reasonable to change the guideline section as well).

right

That.. seems unlikely. Unless you've got some ridiculously power-mad moderators (and it wouldn't be the first time, so not saying you didn't), standard staff practice is to resolve a suspension as soon as you restore the games to your account (nevermind that one: You wouldn't be commenting here if you were suspended, and bans are by definition permanent and in the case of SG only occur if you harass staff while already indefinitely suspended) . If you're choosing not to do that, while understanding how the site works, that's clearly your own decision. If they are, then you need to explain that more clearly so we can discuss that properly.

As far as being in the rules, it absolutely is in there. Privating is removing a game from public profile, that's intuitive, and considered basic common sense to the average SG user. Moreover, it's within the scope of Steam's expectations, so it's actually not necessary for this site to explain it in the first place. That is to say, it's not SG's rule or policy or anthing of the sort, but instead just a facet of underlying mechanism of Steam- ie, it's caused by something you yourself are doing on another site that interferes with the workings of this site, not by the site specifically targetting the action, or by you doing something on the site itself.

Basically, it's like being surprised that your fire burns paper when you apply it. Sure, the paper can say Warning: Flammable to be extra safe, but common sense is not to apply fire to things without considering the interactions first, and most people already can figure out paper being flammable by context, so it's not really expected of the paper manufacturers insomuch as it's just nice and helpful for them to add.

Moreover, as far as the service the action is actually relevant to, Steam absolutely explains what will happen if you private the game (as Gladmore notes below), and it's really on a user for using a function without reading up on it beforehand, especially when utilizing another service that may be affected by that action, though it would be convenient, helpful, and constructive for them to do so. Rather, if you didn't read Steam's FAQ for such a thing, why should we take it for granted that updating SG's FAQ would have helped make the information more visible to you?

I'm absolutely in favor of explaining things down to their essence to avoid confusions, but it's very much not a typical expectation, so you do have to expect to have helpful out-of-the-way information (eg, any overly specific interaction between any two services) like that be pushed into existence by request, not to exist on its own.


As the site does very much list the rule on removing games (as quoted by staff above) there's no further obligation from SG's side that SG needs to address. They absolutely can better clarify things in the FAQ (and that is indeed the inherent purpose of a FAQ), but that doesn't mean the reason for suspension isn't in the rules, that means the explanation for why that rule would apply to a given situation isn't.

You have a valid premise as far as the FAQ needing to be better clarified goes, but the rest seems to be entirely on your end, from having misconceptions on how Steam works (and everyone has misconceptions about something sooner or later, it's just a facet of our brains working differently from one another, combined with inevitable thinking hiccups on either end of any interaction; As such, asking for reduction in potential confusions for your personal perspectives is in no way wrong or shameful- it is, however, important to properly contextualize that a situation like that is due to how you interact with things, and not due to being victimized), to not intuiting stuff from the context provided site information or site discussions (and noone can make every logical connection all the time, certainly), to seemingly not obliging with fixing your rule violations (which actually does seem to be a genuine fault on your part).

You're absolutely not being treated unfairly or being victimized, and trying to extend the conversation into that territory just makes it unreasonable. For that to exist, an actual error or malicious intent or unfair treatment needs to have been expressed, and none of those are present, based on either the context or the information on staff interactions you've provided thus far. This is a simple communication error on SG's end combined with an excusable misunderstanding on your end. Neither of you are at fault (unless staff was unreasonably rude, or you were unreasonable about fixing the error once it was explained to you), and nothing is unfair. The site absolutely should help avoid future confusions by updating the FAQ, and you should absolutely take this as a learning experience, as this is the kind of logical connection I've seen come up quite a lot in my life, so it's definitely not a rare thing.


Put more simply, it's like complaining that something labeled as "Peanut Bread" has peanuts in it. Certainly, they could be clearer and add a "Warning: Contains Nuts", and absolutely should just in case, but it's still a pretty self-apparent situation to most people, and your having an allergic reaction would suck, but people'd be a bit skeptical if you told them you were victimized and that you're continuing to try to eat the bread and expecting things to be resolved by proving that you're eating it and that it has peanuts in it, instead of your switching to a different flavor instead.

Basically, the thread is a lot more reasonable than the title suggested to me it would be, but your presentation seems to be less on "let's resolve this confusion so it doesn't happen again" and more on "I made a mistake and you all should apologize to me on it because you all didn't go out of your way to make sure the mistake wouldn't happen". Again, you're not inherently in the wrong, but unless you can justify why SG staff is in the wrong, treating them as being in the wrong instead puts yourself in the wrong. Your mis-focus also seems to be distracting the staff members commenting in the thread from actually making the changes necessary, with them instead trying to defend themselves against your vague accusations and trying to explain their past actions. So yeah, your current approach just really isn't especially constructive. And while I absolutely get that misattributions or things out of expectation in life suck, you really didn't lose anything at all from this (unless someone rerolled on you while you were suspended, but that's extremely rare and unlikely). There's no permanent harm from a suspension, and win expectations for a few days away from the site are negligible.

So yeah, your response just seems a bit extreme, based on what's apparent to anyone else. Again, I appreciate that it wasn't a good time for you, but it's important you're framing and understanding the matter properly, rather than.. well, for lack of alternative phrasing, Karening the situation. If you really want to go out of your way to emphasize it being a staff issue, you could try and find past threads pushing for an updating on the site's FAQ on the matter. Though even if you did manage to find sufficient past threads, all it'd really validate is a general site neglect towards site rules, and that's pretty well established already. Still wouldn't reflect poorly on any current staff, who likely were unrelated to past threads entirely.

If you have any clear concerns beyond "this thing that happened to me sucks", such as poor staff conduct, absolutely bring it up. But for now, maybe focus on getting things improved rather than on overly fixating on what's already past.

Sad pricc? Calling names users, that do, what we are supposed to do, is quite out of space here, IMO. Is it that hard to admit, that you have made an error, not thinking through your actions, and that the whole mess is your, not anybody else, fault?

Some sad pricc reported me over a 6 year old game

Site policies state that you should always verify a user's activations before sending a win out to them, and to report any incongruities to staff for consideration if any are discovered. Calling someone a sad pricc (you can just say prick on this site, by the way, it's really weird having you intentionally spell it like you're trying to bypass a multiplayer FPS chat filter) because they're following site policies is weird :P

While it's a bit more iffy coming from a non-GA creator, it's still a common statement from staff (even listed in the guidelines at least once, for the calling out section) that any violations should be brought up to staff. If anything, if this was your first violation, then you should consider the staff member who suspended you as the offending entity, as staff have been allowed to do first-time warnings for years now. I mean, not that I'm encouraging targeting staff, just saying that sooner or later it was going to come up due to site policies on the matter, so the specific person reporting didn't really matter.

Well, staff do often self-report/resolve such matters, so it could honestly be a bit of an odd situation under the right circumstances.

BTW, Disney's Robin Hood references are always the best. <3

This one was already marked as permanent suspension, but some admin said exactly this after lifting my suspension: "next time it will be permanent" (i got confused), in my knowledge, the meaning of permanent is that i would basically lose my account forever, is this the case or these "permanent suspensions" are correctable and i can lift it with proves? This is the reason of my concern.

The only unclear thing is the users' understanding of how making games private works. If you understand what happens when you make a game private, then it's clear how this can affect SteamGifts.

Rules are clear in this matter. The Won game must be shown on a user account.

Won gifts must be activated on the Steam account used during registration, and they cannot be regifted, traded, sold, or removed from your Steam account after activation.

It's clearly stated in the rules:

Won gifts must be activated on the Steam account used during registration, and they cannot be regifted, traded, sold, or removed from your Steam account after activation.

My point stands. They won't be able to win that game again. No need to split hairs.
Also the refund window is like 14 days, it's easy to double check after two weeks, it makes no sense to do it years later. Let Valve deal with any refund abuse.

Who the heck is going to do that like 1 in a million

Again, easily fixed with a double check outside the refund window.

Whatever, imo it should be clearer in the rules, there's other people that suffered from this and received suspensions because of a certain lack of communication.

You can't be banned unless you harass staff while indefinitely suspended. Staff policy is that you can always return from indefinite (grossly mislabled by the site as "permanent") suspension by resolving any issues that led to the suspension in the first place.

Since you've went ahead and brought up your violations, I'll address your comment. You have past violations for not activating your wins, so yes, after a certain amount of those you do get permanently suspended, that's not "practically nothing" like you're making it out to be. So moving forward you need to make sure you activate all of your wins or next time you will be permanently suspended.

, i'm just aware that i could be perma-banned for practically nothing.

(my account is old, in the past i made real mistakes)

I think that's more because of the past mistakes, as you seem like a reasonable person and you won't make the same "privating" mistake, so you are surely safe.

(Also support generally doesn't hold mistakes against you that are possible to be corrected and you fixed it, as long as you don't repeat it)

I like the part "i could be perma-banned for practically nothing".

View attached image.

I've been here since 2015 and it took ENORMOUS community-wide bitching"persistent encouragements" just to get the various site policy pages updated two or three times in total. cg is unreasonably reluctant to take the time to keep them up to date. It was said a few years back that he made it so higher ranked staff members could edit it, to improve that situation, but since that point I haven't seen any of the countless update requests actually acted on, so I have no idea what's going on. So in short, it's a long-standing complaint about the site from the community as a whole, so you're in no way alone on questioning that.

There's no way for staff to know what's actually happened until the user explains to them (and even there it's purely just taking the user at their word on it, staff really can't tell in any way why a game isn't showing on SG), and once they do the staff should- according to staff practices up to this point- revoke the suspension as soon as the games in question properly show up again (ie, are un-privated/re-added).

There's.. just no place for leniency, since staff isn't making any concious decisions on the matter. Leniency is inherent to "get those games back and the matter'll be over", so it's really just a question of the user's own response to the situation (unless staff is no longer engaging in that practice, which'd definitely merit a discussion as to why).

That's what i want this discussion to be about, i agree, that's simple and perfect.