Q&A with Valve's Steam Support - Ask your questions here!

DerrickG of Valve's Steam Support group has graciously volunteered to answer questions from the community. Ever wondered anything about Steam Support? Ask it here! (Please keep in mind, however, that they may not be able to answer questions about specific accounts or cases.)

Please note that I will only be forwarding along serious, non-trollish questions. So please keep that in mind when posting.

I will be closing this thread on Monday January 28th so that gives you a full week to think of a good question. Ask away!

*Edit- Reopening this for a little while today to let anyone else toss in a question.

Hey ya! 1st of all thanks for doing this I really appreciate it.

1 question - I heard steam might ban some(random?) accounts make too many empty steam trade via steam trading window. Meaning items received from 1 side only. So am wondering if this is true at all. Thanks in advance =D

I'll just post my question as well;

About how many techies are there in total as in most of my cases i have been helped by three different ones.

Also big ups to DerrickG and his team of Techies.

Question: Why can't Valve (Steam support) return items when someone scammed you in a trade, when you have all the proof etc?

I apologize if this the type of question you were expecting, but I really would like Valve to help us users who purchase Catleap monitors to not have our color profiles defaulted when a game is in fullscreen mode. Not all Valve games have the borderless window mode.

Interesting thread, will be watching thank you for this opportunity Helen and Derrick.
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1. It seems (to me) that Valve trade bans and probation are only temporary. Is this perception correct and if so, why are they only temporary tags? Are repeat offenders punished via permaban from Steam?

2. Has there been any developments in a Steam Rep-Valve partnership or some sort of increased official recognition/affiliation or communication?

1. When do we get Half-life 2 Episode 3

2. When are you going to stop all the duping

Hey!
Thanks for the chance to ask things that we are curious about!
I do have a question about revoked games which interest me mostly because i had a situation related with this subject. I've created a ticket lately but not sure if i can get any help. After trading games with people, games got revoked after some time later and they disappeared from Steam Library. How Steam Support can solve those kind of situations? I mean, how will be the process, i'll get my games back or they gone for good? How to prevent those kind of scamming attempts since we cant know if those guys has been bought their games with stolen credit card or not.

I actually have a few pertinent questions that I would love to be answered:

1. I understand that Valve does not endorse RWT (Real world trading), however, does Valve have anything against it?
2. When submitting a support ticket for TF2, we have the option to report a scam. What does Valve consider scamming?
3. When trading between alternate accounts, perhaps due to having over 2,000 items in your BP, (Some people, amazingly, do,) do these high value, one-sided trades get flagged for investigation?
4. Does Valve have anything against one-sided trades? For example, giving away items or selling an item for real currency.
5. I understand that Valve returns items once when hijacked as a gesture of good faith, although the FAQ says that items will never be returned for scams, or where the user was inattentive, I have heard of situations where users have rarely had their items back in this case. Is this just the investigating admin being in a good mood, or is it a outright fabrication.
6. Will Valve ever provide a warning or notification upon unboxing an Unusual that it is extremely valuable and the user should do their homework into its value before trading it.
7. Is, or will Steamrep be partially associated with Valve?

Thank you very much for taking the time to read these questions.

Question: If valve can not provide "investigational" support for scamming like steamrep does, does Valve plan to work out a better educational system for people who are just starting to trade?
Addition to question :
COMMENT: We would LOVE to help by writing up some sort of FAQ that you can review, tweak and point to when new accounts start trading (say for the first 30 days of trading). You have a tutorial on how trade works built right into the trade module, but you do not give any support resources to help prevent/educate new traders about scammers and the factg that so much occurs (especially against new players).

Hi, Thanks for the chance of asking question.

I am just wonder whether I will get banned if i use third party software (such as sandboxie) to log in 2 account in the same computer? I am not using that for cheating, playing afk game or whatever, i just want to do some trading between my main account and my alternative.

SteamRep made months ago some announcement that this wasn't so. But it will be a nice one to let DerrickG answer.... for things change every now and then without notice from Valve... I see other questions I know answers to as well, but the above I wanted to address quicker (and ofc if Derrick says some else, I'll stand corrected).

Questions I do have:
- Is any been doe with the on-profile "misconduct" reports? and if, what exactly? In the past I read several things regarding this, from "please keep filling these in" from a valve employee (sorry, don't remember who) being explained as being statistics, up to being "dead", no use.
- Hows the new house? All unpacked yet? Any cats?
- About Steam Market: With a "chargeback" on money vs steam, while that person bought items and traded on etc, what does then happen exactly to the seller of the items? money charged and items back to them? or just nothing? I ask for my concern is that such money may have been already re-spend on something else (games, other steam market items, or mann co store etc).

I'll try to figure more good questions... for once having a answer would be nice

I've used sandboxie for a number of accounts, there is no problem there.

Hey Derrick, thanks for offering to ask questions. There's only one that I'm particularly curious about, there's been a number of Tournament items with deleted tags, do you know if they can be restored? I don't have any, but quite sad to see people with otherwise valuable items but that were accidentally erased.

1. Sometimes when i look at all the same replies given to different people's tickets, i feel Steam support has a automated answering script so that actually valve employee doesn't have to even read the ticket at all or just take a glance at it.
Is that right?
2. How many tickets does one employee processes a day? And how many tickets are newly created everyday?
3. what find of questions are most frequently asked? I GOT SCAMMED? I forgot my password? My account got hijacked?

I can guarantee you that what you're referring to was not an automated answering script, but instead an actual human being scanning what you wrote (ie not reading it all the way) then copy pasting something from the company FAQ. Whenever I see this, I lose my s✿✿✿. These people should lose their jobs.

P.S. I've actually had quite good experiences with Valve support in the past. This is mainly about the many customer service employees across multiple industries that pull off this bullshit.

Another question/request that I have is:

1. Would it be possible for Valve to send out global messages to every single account on steam (like the notice to contact steam support in the case of revoked games in the steam client) when new features are released into the public? The events that are most salient in my mind is the dota 2 unusual essence eggs, and Steam Market and the rising number of scams that arouse from the issues with those two features.

While I am happy that new content is released and that there is a responsibility for people to research trading, the number of scams, involving the hidden egg contents and /me command pretending to be a valve employee or transferring steam wallet funds, exploded as there was not alot of education and awareness.

IMHO, it would benefit both Valve and SR if there was a popup type contract where it warns people about the recognized scams going around at the time. Steam rep has banners that are sort of what i am thinking of, but Valve could expand on them and bring awareness on issues that affect the entire community. It could even strengthen Valves trading policy by requiring users to acknowledge that they are aware of the notice.
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tl:dr
What is your thoughts on a global message system from Valve alerting the community to common scams/news to take note of? Could something be initiated as such?
Could the use of /me command be restricted/changed?

I have a question!

Dear Derrick,

What is your favorite breakfast food?! Is it bacon?

I would like to ask too:

- Do they track or search for those who use the TF2 economy as a way to launder money (Like those russian mafia with tf2 keys that was a topic a while ago)
- Does the "Report user/group for violation" actually works? I've never seen any groups/accounts got any sort of visible action taken against them by reports.
- What happened to "Player of the week" on groups? It can still be chosen, still it doesn't show anywhere but the admin tools.
- How big is the Support staff? Are they planning into hiring more people to make the ticket queue go faster?
- Support doesn't remove VAC bans because they can't? or they're simply not allowed to (But they can)

That are some

My question is:
Have you ever thought about hiring people who do not live in US and do not want to move there as a bilingual support tech? Do you think it will be possible to do this job remotly some day?