Severely Limit Family Share

[Vas]

Family Share allows people to bypass bans and cheat infinitely games that aren't VAC enabled. I've had a friend tell me that he knew someone who was banned for cheating in Ark Survival, and all he did was make a new account then family share his game to that account and cheat some more, endlessly cheating against the enemies of his. Never actually getting banned on his own account. Continiously making new fake accounts to cheat with.

This friend of mine also himself uses Family Share to exploit the game by making sure people can never find his main account while he plays the game, so he can troll and grief as much as he wants and when people know that account too well, he just makes a new one and family shares the game to himself again.

Family Share needs to be FOR FAMILY ONLY, and perhaps roomates. However thats not how its used. In its current state, Valve may as well just name it "Share".

Perhaps, instead of verifications and such, people should be locked from inviting another profile after removing one. Some sort of timer between adding new profiles. "Sorry, you've added 10 profiles in the last 3 months, you must wait another month for your adding count to replenish". Or something similar, this wouldn't hinder actual families or people legitimately using Family Share. This would only hinder people who share their profile willy nilly left and right to any random person who asks, or to their own newly made accounts.

One thing you could do is require an account to own a game on it before it can get family share. At least then Valve would make money off it, a bit, as well as some game developer somewhere.

Developers should also be able to put their games on the no share list. So that a game can not be shared via family share. That way Wildcard can lock the game down so it can't be shared.

Anyway, I just want a stop to the abuses that people are doing to the system with Family Share. Cheaters roam free because family share. Griefers get away with trolling infinitely in MMOs that use steam IDs too because of it.

If it wasn't going to increase Valve's work load, I'd suggest verifying a person through steam support before they are allowed to be added to someone's family share, but eh. Guess that'd put too much work on an already small team.

[Seretti]

Please, read: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=3784-QLBM-5731&l=

A couple of points you bring up that are being mentioned in the article:

* You may authorize Family Library Sharing on up to 10 computers at a given time, and for up to 5 accounts

* Your Family Sharing privileges may be revoked and your account may also be VAC banned if a borrower cheats or commits fraud. In addition, VAC protected games will not be shareable.

[Vas]

Well, this only protects VAC, but for Ark, it appears to be a massive issue because its still happening right now that people are sharing to new accounts repeatedly and bypassing bans on other games that aren't VAC enabled so I believe further restrictions need to happen, further limitations. Time limits on sharing, or worse, verifications of who you're sharing to so you can't just make a new account and share the game to yourself so you can cheat some more in another game that bans you for it.

[Gwarsbane]

If its a massive issue for Ark then go bug them about it. Tell them to ban the original account owner too and not just the one who cheats with their anti-cheat tech that they use. Thats not a Valve related issue unless they are using VAC and its already done by VAC.

And how does Valve verify who is sharing what? By IP? IPs can be spoofed. By government ID card? Not every country has one, and no country will allow a game company to access that government information to actually verify its legit. There is also the tiny little fact of... 150 million + active accounts with 400 people that work for Valve. Scanning the ID will not work, it can be photoshopped. Same with taking a picture with you and the ID in the picture. They can't send it in, thats dangerous to send your ID in the mail and also expensive for Valve to send it back. Talking to someone over the phone proves nothing, and agian the 150 million active accounts and 400 people at Valve...


Seriously this has all be asked before and its all be rejected before because of all the issues.


Time limits doesn't stop people from cheating.

Again if a game doesn't you VAC, you need to go convince them to ban not only the person playing, but also the original owner of the game too. So ban the same account playing and the CD key for the game that that person was using.

[Vas]

Banning the original account owner won't do squat, they can still family share to alternate accounts to continue cheating and breaking rules.

The time limits prevent a person from sharing his game to 10 accounts, cheating in all 10, then within the same day making 10 new accounts and sharing to those 10. A month long wait before adding a new family member to his account would be a LONG time in between his getting to cheat or troll, it wouldn't be worth it really.

I still think Family Share is exploited in many other ways, for the fact that people can share their games out all the time with any random person and such and those people can play for free and never really pay for th game.

I'd be fine with Family Share, if it worked only on a local network. Steam clients on the network talking to each other via LAN/WLAN only. Of course a fake LAN can also be made but, it'd still make it a little more difficult. Anyway, I dunno. I just know Family Share is Valve's thing, and Wildcard (Ark) admins ban via steam ID, and banning all these family shared accounts does nothng. I don't think Wildcard has the ability to detect who the original account owner is via these IDs that they ban.

[Gwarsbane]

From what I understand, when an account is banned, at least with VAC they can not familyshare that game anymore.

Again, since you say its not a VAC protected game, you need to talk to the makers of the game. Tell them to not only ban the person playing the game at the time, but also ban the serial key for the game so that it can not connect to their servers anymore, which would mean that sharing it, even if that steam account is banned, would not work. because they would not be able to connect to the games servers. At best they would be stuck with single player.

Family share will never be limited to local network because even if they told it to, its easy to get around by spoofing IPs. And people who are willing to cheat with something like this will do anything and Valve knows that.

And yes they would have the ability to detect the serial number of the game, they would have to have that so that they could make sure every instance of the game playing on their servers is a legit version, cause if they detect 2 of the same serial they could disable that serial. Its easy enough to do that I have seen it on past games a decade or more ago.

[Vas]

And what about the fact that people use this Family Share thing to get around without others being able to find their main steam account?

Such as, in Ark, during a war. Players will use secondary steam accounts that no one can trace and do whatever they want to whoever they want and when the war is over, they can go back to their main server and not worry about anyone finding them.

If you've ever played Official Servers in Ark, you see people make use of all sorts of exploits in the steam system, such as 50+ people all named "123" because steam can't process names that are the same, in an online list so all of them show up as a single player, so even if there are 50 people online in the server, only 1 person shows up. That is absolutely a steam issue, but not related to this topic. I'm just pointing out that Ark is one of the top games I've ever seen where players exploit the ♥♥♥♥ out of steam's holes. Family Share being one of the most used methods of griefing.

Its no longer "Family Share", its more "Hide My Gaming Ass".

[Gwarsbane]

If people don't want to be found by other people on steam, so what? Why should that matter to you?

The only thing that should matter is if the devs/publishers of the game include something on their end to be able to block people like that.

If people are using the exploits, report the exploits to get patched and report the people to the ark discussion areas if you are allowed to do so.


Again it would be up to the devs to build something into their game, to know the actual key of the game from someones thats playing, no matter if its family shared or not. People who family share a game DO NOT GET A UNIQUE cd key for the game. They get the one that was given to the account that bought the game. So if your game has a key of 12345678 and you share it with another account called Vas2. That game also has a key of 12345678. Why? Because you can not play it at the same time as the account Vas.


You are barking up the wrong tree here. YOU need to go bug the makers of the game Ark and ask them to do something about it. Valve will not do anything about it because ITS NOT THEIR GAME. Convince the Ark people to include VAC in their game, or make their anti-cheat better and include info to block family share cheaters.

[The End]

Originally posted by Vas:

If you've ever played Official Servers in Ark, you see people make use of all sorts of exploits in the steam system, such as 50+ people all named "123" because steam can't process names that are the same

This problem and the problem with bypassing bans (If that even is possible) is all on the developers of the game, they have the tools to prevent things like that, there is a reason we have a unique identifier on Steam, all they need to do, is use it.

This is not a problem with familysharing and it's not Valves problem.

You need to go and bug the developers of the game, to fix their mess.

Originally posted by Vas:

Family Share is garbage for gaming now, it allows people to play games for free without ever buying them.

How is it a problem to you?

Originally posted by Vas:

unless you contact valve to explain the situation like "I'm a father, setting up an account for my wife and 3 children, I'd like to family share with this, this, this and this account. Here's my proof that these are who I say they are."

Valve would never waste support on things like this, did you even consider the workload your "solution" would add, sorry, can't take this serious.

Originally posted by Vas:

Proof can be each account owner holding a paper or cardboard thing or whatever with their account names on them, standing with their family or friends or roomates, getting a picture like that to send that as the proof. The image should be bound to each account and used in the future should someone try to alter their family share people later and claim the same thing, so you know that its being abused again.

Are you even serious? I can't believe you think that would be a good/working solution to anything, if anything, it sounds stupid imo.

[76561198001062896]

so basically shooting yet again pigeons with cannons

everything you suggested could be easily bypassed. Honestly OP you should really think over your ideas

you do realise I could literally photoshop random pictures together and show it as proof, right?

[Yuuta]

Originally posted by Vas:

50+ people all named "123" because steam can't process names that are the same, in an online list so all of them show up as a single player, so even if there are 50 people online in the server, only 1 person shows up

On Steam and some games when someone has the same nickname as you, they get numbers next to their nicknames (For example, if you and I will play on the same CS:GO server and you name yourself "Yuuta", your name will change to "Yuuta (1)" or "Yuuta (2)").
If that's not how it works in Ark, you should be asking Ark developers to implement that, not Valve.

[Vas]

Originally posted by Yuuta:

On Steam and some games when someone has the same nickname as you, they get numbers next to their nicknames (For example, if you and I will play on the same CS:GO server and you name yourself "Yuuta", your name will change to "Yuuta (1)" or "Yuuta (2)").
If that's not how it works in Ark, you should be asking Ark developers to implement that, not Valve.

Its not Ark though, its the steam client. In the overlay, you get a "view players" button, when you look at this, it shows in the steam client, all the people connected to the server.

http://steamcommunity.com/id/VasVadum/screenshot/91604190946255588
http://steamcommunity.com/id/VasVadum/screenshot/91604190946255852

On top of not being able to find their profiles, many of them are likely using Family Shared profiles so even if they do get caught, they just make a new one.

---------------------------

Perhaps, instead of verifications and such, people should be locked from inviting another profile after removing one. Some sort of timer between adding new profiles. "Sorry, you've added 10 profiles in the last 3 months, you must wait another month for your adding count to replenish". Or something similar, this wouldn't hinder actual families or people legitimately using Family Share. This would only hinder people who share their profile willy nilly left and right to any random person who asks, or to their own newly made accounts.

One thing you could do is require an account to own a game on it before it can get family share. At least then Valve would make money off it, a bit, as well as some game developer somewhere.

I just want Valve, to find a way to stop the Family Share abuse, thats all.

Developers should also be able to put their games on the no share list. So that a game can not be shared via family share. That way Wildcard can lock the game down so it can't be shared. I know some of you would hate this, but, we already know valve takes extreme actions that punish the innocent just to keep the dumb safe, so why not take extreme actions to keep these people from exploiting Steam?

[Tito Shivan]

Up to ARK's devs to fix this. The Steamworks API allows to know when a user is playing a family shared game (and the original owner of the game)

[Vas]

Alright then I suppose. :/ I guess I'll open another dicsussion related to the other issue I described in my previous post.

[Vas]

@Tito, can you lock this discussion?