NO MORE Family Sharing (fully explained & fix suggestion)

[Isei Akiro]

Alright, for those who don't know, Family Sharing on Steam is a feature that lets you share a copy of the game with one or more family members so each one has their own progress on their own account. This feature allows only one account to play the game at a time so it acts a lot like a physical copy.

The problem:

The developers have, without any announcement, disabled this feature, leaving a lot of legitimate users in the dust. This was (I assume) done to prevent cheaters from having a "master copy" and sharing it to multiple accounts of theirs that may or may not get banned. Cheaters therefore can buy the game once and ban throwaway accounts using this feature and make new ones as needed. How this personally screwed me over is explained below.

Opinion/Personal stuff:

I dislike this change since it also messes with real use cases such as mine. My sister and I share a VR headset (Quest 2, if you care) but, naturally, we want separate progress in all games. We bought almost all of our VR games on a shared account and have been using the Family Share feature to have progress logged on our main Steam accounts. Since only one of us uses the headset at a time the "one user at a time" limitation was not an issue. We are both bummed to have to buy the game if we want to keep playing in the same way.

Suggestions to fix this mess:

Let's get this out of the way first, disabling the feature outright with practically no warning was, for lack of a better word, a bad move. I am almost certain that Steam's API supports getting the ID and all kinds of other information of the "master account" when you use the Family Share feature, which would let the system ban that one AND the account that's using the copy, as well as any other account that tries to Family Share a banned copy. This way if a cheater gets banned on a throwaway account, the account that actually owns the copy also gets banned, and so do any future throwaway accounts they create.
This, if implemented correctly, fixes the cheater problem to the same extent as disabling the Family Share feature would, while also not screwing over actual families using this feature. This technically does screw over people whose siblings are cheating in the game but this case is extremely far fetched and in my opinion the ban is deserved since we ARE dealing with a cheater in this case, after all. Banning a family because of a member cheating is more okay than outright disabling the feature and leaving ALL the legitimate use cases, with no cheaters at all, in the dust.

TLDR:

Family sharing is gone because of cheaters abusing it, this of course screws over actual families using the feature. The way to keep the feature and get rid of cheaters to the same extent is to ban all accounts associated with the "master copy" including the account which owns it.

MANY THANKS to everyone who read the post, I really hope it reaches the devs somehow although I doubt it... and sorry if my English is a little off, I am not native.
I love this game and I wish it gets the best treatment from its developers and the community! (I really want to keep playing but I will wait for a sale or something)

<3

[LigmaLlama]

No family share? WHY?

.. I mean seriously?

[Tsukae]

yea i tried to play with my friend today and I waited for like 40 minutes to install a ~50mb update and it turns out it was disabled yesterday

[Fr0styJack]

wtf they turned off family sharing ??

[Lmaolikeacow]

less cheaters/abusers and honestly at this point just support the game if you play it so much don't be a bum

[Fr0styJack]

family sharing only allows 1 person to use the purchased license at a time? this is no different the sharing your physical copies of a game. disabling it is grubby.

[Erin]

RIP Pavlov I guess

[Lmaolikeacow]

Originally posted by Fr0styJack:

family sharing only allows 1 person to use the purchased license at a time? this is no different the sharing your physical copies of a game. disabling it is grubby.

also is used to circumvent bans on servers so good riddance less trolls.

Originally posted by Erin:

RIP Pavlov I guess

more like rip broke

[Emperor Void]

Does this mean less squeekers?! Hell yeah if yes!

[Lmaolikeacow]

Originally posted by Grunty:

Yeah not spending $2.5k on a PC then $400 on a VR headset and then $20 on a game and then have to buy the game multiple times lmao what's wrong with these devs fr

multiple vac bans on record lol stay salty cheating child

[Shy]

You will be missed dearly.

[LigmaLlama]

Originally posted by Lmaolikeacow:

less cheaters/abusers and honestly at this point just support the game if you play it so much don't be a bum

Already support it by buying one copy... they aren't god, they aren't hospital workers and such, they don't need multiple of my purchases!

[Aque]

totally agree, I wish they would do this

[danimourinho]

Agreed ,i hope they fix this

[*******51365]

why would some one do such a thing? this is like top tier evil. I am willing to find a way to pirate this game, JUST so i dont have to give the devs money for cutting me off.

[Plex]

Of cause the problem is that the defs just can’t find were to click… Thank god you have the solution. And you are “almost certain”…

Oh, it doesn’t work that way without VAC anticheat? The anticheat of pavlov is’t VAC?
That’s not problem for your solution is it?
If you acknowledge the problem with Family Sharing in a multiplayer game were cheating is a thing don’t you think that the defs checked what is possible to prevent this?

Games like Rust, Fall Guys , Conan Exile all had problems with Family Sharing because of cheaters. Perhaps its not an easy oh look a buttom solution? Yes you have the solution that would work. But the defs of pavlov don’t have the control over the solution.
Steam need to providing the tools there.

A Edit: Pavlov is normally part of every steam sale. Sadly I checked and the next steam sale is most likely on Halloween. Perhaps they could give a discount now for the people who used to family share? (@Junt?)