i dont see any definitive proof that these people were actually banned for coal farming, they could have done other things.
as far as i know only 1 person has been banned for farming, and thats because they have thousands of dollars worth of games in the gift inventory.
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If you snoop around a bit, you see that 4 people have been ban that posted in one of these threads.
There are probably others too who got ban but never posted on the forum.
Anyways, why should you worry that much about proof unless you farmed.
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I've seen other people banned, but the ones i saw banned were often spammers or harassing people in trade threads.
I've seen people with excess of 500 coal on steamtrades and SPUF, but their accounts haven't been banned yet.
And those are people that have had that amount since day 2.
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Some people actually bought that amount of coal. I've seen a few people buy coal at less than 20cents per coal. They could just easily run a query and see if there was X amount of accounts made by this ip. Investigate it and determine if they should suspend those accounts.
Besides the thread now shows a few people saying they had a hundred(s) of accounts. Which is sad because we'll probably not have such an amazing sale event like this again.
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Steam doesn't ban your ip, it bans your account. you can move to mars and connect wireless from there and you would still be banned.
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Serves them right. In my opinion coal farming is a form of cheating and should be punished.
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it's steams fault making such a crappy system with coals and coupons for wintersale while letting people make multi accs and join the event so easily..
It's like leaving your wallet on the ground in the street and then trying to catch the thieves.. Well in steams case they have like all the rights and can ban anyone in that hunt, personally I never support the idea of account bans and robbing people out of their games which were purchased properly coz of a matter regarding other purchases or rules..
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Indeed. There's too much incentive not to farm. I was about to actually do it myself, but then I knew about the risks of doing so.
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'It's the drug dealer's fault my child is addicted to cocaine. It is not my fault for not teaching my child cocaine is bad and to not do cocaine.' Morality is not taught as well as it should be any more, and people feel entitled to try to take advantage of a situation rather than seeing the spirit of the idea and taking it for what it is. There's always those people who try to push the limit beyond reason.
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"Crappy" system? No. People are the only "crappy" thing in this situation.
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Read the TOS, and you'll understand why they do it.
Because they payed 50USD for a game it doesnt give them the right to do whatever they please with it or the plattform the game is contained, they reserve the right to do what they please with your account and games if you do something thats against their rules.
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They deserve it. It's not Valve's fault that the mother and father of these people forget to teach to these ultra morons that cheating is a bad thing. And farming is cheating. And the best is some of the clearly stating in these forums that they cheated and it's Valve's fault. These people should learn some responsibility and break some stones in the mines instead of playing with games.
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lol...you're far too serious about something that doesn't matter.
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Doesn't matter? Like has been said, some of these people managed to get thousands of dollars worth of games doing this. And I saw a guy on the trading forum yesterday who had over 4,000 coal to trade. People doing this will hurt our chances of having any unique contests or achievement hunts in the future, and before the banning started, were hurting the profits of game developers on a much larger scale than any pirate.
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It does matter, because a great deal of real-life money is at stake. It's a big deal.
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Keep telling yourself that when you're happy and proud to have lets say....30 coal earned in a legitimate way, just to realize someone suddendly has over 1000 coals without trading to other than his alt accounts, sound fair to you?
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Coals taken away, alts banned, and main account trade banned. >:(
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This is a good thing. If you can't play fair, don't play at all.
The thing I don't get is, if the time was spent on working instead of creating and managing tons of accounts, you'd have money enough for all the games you wanted - especially considering the sales.
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Because clearly playing games to get free games is the same thing as getting a real job and paying for games. It's not like the only thing you get from coal is coupons.
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Coal farmers were not playing games. They make accounts using bundle keys. Log in. Then get all the free steam community achievements and then trade their gains to their main account. Log out. Rinse and repeat hundred times. Sound kinda like boring office work to me.
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They could actually profit out of the games and stuff they got out of their alternate account farming fiesta.
Well, NOT ANYMORE.
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Did they have coal in previous years ? if so, did it carry over ?
I am glad to see people who exploit the system get punished.
As for a ban on their main account.... might be harsh since they did purchase the games on it.
I think a better choice would of been to remove all coal and items received from coal on their account and give them a 3 month suspension.
Did the guy who posted about the science coal thing get banned ? if not, he may be very worried... unless all his coal was acquired through legit other people and not alts. but still, he may be on their radar.
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People have always had their accounts DISABLED for messing with the system.
And as a note: an account disable is worst than a ban. If you get banned in a game or on an engine, you can still enjoy those games in single player. If it gets disabled... goodbye all games linked to that account.
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LAUGHING
Lokonopa, why I totally agree with your decision, you should add to the FAQ exactly what is or isn't allowed, just to be clear and so there's no loopholes.
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I think its something fairly obvious though, tell me WHERE are words like that opnely accepted in a forum where the audience range goes from 14 to 50 years?
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What's wrong with the avatar? The word "nigger" was used for comedic purposes (which is obvious because cute ducks usually aren't gangstas) and not in an offensive way. And banning it in general just because it once was offensive or can offend angry old racist black people is as stupid and silly as banning swastikas, 9/11 jokes or the word "fuck".
BTW, if he's banned, he probably won't be able to read your post.
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Yeah, I know that, I'm not retarded (and I have experience), but you should always assume that everyone's an idiot until proven otherwise. Besides, it's just uncomfortable, like you need to cheat the system to find out why you need to cheat the system.
Wait... did you just suspend me... because I annoyed you again? ... nice :)
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As a man with a Somali with an avatar, I find his banning of the word to describe my people to be quite offensive.
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The "N" word as you call it, is just that, a word, it's not the word that's at fault, but the person behind it, if the person meant no malicious intent by saying it, it is no worse than any other word. please go youtube louis CK on the matter.
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how dare they get more than me without having to work for it! nothing makes me angrier than other people enjoying themselves.
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Nice to see some action being taken - personally if I were them I'd set it so that they couldn't craft anything but coupons, and their coal wouldn't count for the final draw.
Seems like if they wanted to be pretty draconian, they could have tracked all coal from square one and busted a lot of people using alts. Not sure how much good that would do as I bet they'd just continue to create more alts.
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Account ban seems excessive, like Walmart coming into your house and stealing all the stuff you've ever bought from them because you entered a contest of theirs more than once.
Removing all items obtained by them via the event (rather obtained directly from as a gift, or traded gifts to obtain it) and barring them from future events seems much better alternative.
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Should we really feel sorry for people abusing this holiday event and reducing each other's chances of winning the grand prize?
In making coals and coupons tradeable, Valve trusted us to be generous in this time of the year, and gift the coupons/games to your friends.
But obviously, some people only see a way to make profit out of this generous but naive system.
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The difference is that you have to accept their terms of use before using their service. They also don't sell games or physical objects; they sell licenses for them.
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It's about time Valve did something about this. I hope they're hitting people who use SAM to cheat the objective achievements as well.
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I do wonder how could they do this, considering there are lots of achievements that can be modified locally, and some others dont (like some killing floor ones, that unlock certain skins), i guess that if they want to "fix" that, they should force every achievement from now on to be modified only by the client instead of locally, which by the end its a lot of work for such little timeframe. (either way i think they should do it)
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And makes their entry void. But let's not get into details.
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However, some are getting their accounts reactivated!
http://cs5920.vkontakte.ru/u38062009/-14/z_ddb1726e.jpg
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lol, but they can't participate in any future events and the exploited gifts they got are now invalid. So, basically, they still wasted their time and still got screwed over.
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But they still got their $1k - $10k account back.
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Just because the event is over does not mean they will stop banning people.
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^this
If they have 500+ accounts (I mean wtf?!?!?No life?) they got more or less 8 objects (f2p and steam achiev.) per single account: 4000 objects!That means a LOT of games.
And if it was only coal I bet they offered 100+ coal for a Skyrim giftable copy (the most wanted game in Steam Community)...and they took it!
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I was offered 260 coal straight up for Skyrim. I declined. Trading a game for what amounts to a pile of lottery tickets from someone obviously scamming the system doesn't sit right with me.
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Seems like coal farmers (people with a lot of alts for the sole purpose of coal and games from the winter event) are starting to getting ban from Steam.
Your thoughts on the matter?
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2402567
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2402963
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2393269
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