Steam and VPNs

[VViperRR]

The Steam Subscriber Agreement § 3.A contains the following statement:

You agree that you will not use IP proxying or other methods to disguise the place of your residence, whether to circumvent geographical restrictions on game content, to purchase at pricing not applicable to your geography, or for any other purpose. If you do this, Valve may terminate your access to your Account.

With Destiny 2 migrating to Steam on October 1, I wanted to reach out about this clause. To give a bit of background, Destiny 2 uses peer-to-peer netcode. Because of this, a VPN is a near-requirement when competing in competitive content (such as a World's First Raid Race or a PvP tournament) in order to avoid denial of service attacks.

SSA § 3.A specifies three conditions where "IP proxying or other methods to disguise the place of your residence" (of which a VPN certainly qualifies) may lead to account termination:

1. to circumvent geographical restrictions on game content,
   
2. to purchase at pricing not applicable to your geography,
   
3. or for any other purpose.

It is this third condition that creates concern. Expanding just that third condition out (as "or" is qualified if any condition is met), the clause reads:

You agree that you will not use IP proxying or other methods to disguise the place of your residence for any other purpose.

Since the Steam platform will be required to launch Destiny 2, I will be running a VPN while using the Steam launcher come October 1. It would be great to get feedback from Steam regarding the use of a VPN when using the Steam launcher to run already-purchased content. Additionally, it would honestly be nice if the vague catch-all was not present in the SSA terms.

[Gwarsbane]

Messaggio originale di Viper:

As an aside, I'll wait for a forum moderator though to decide if your interpretation of the purpose of this forum is correct since a Steam Support person is the one that linked me to this forum and suggested I post here :-)

Steam support uses a automated script to tell people to post their suggestions here. Why? Because Steam support doesn't deal with suggestions or ideas. They deal with account and billing issues and thats it. Neither of which are what you want.

It would be nice if they told people who have suggestions for games to post in the games discussion areas instead of posting here.

[Brian9824]

Messaggio originale di Viper:

Messaggio originale di brian9824:

This is for suggestions to the steam CLIENT. This is not the place for legal debates for them to change their SSA that effects all games and their entire service because a group of people think they are going to get DDOS'd everytime they play PvP in a game.

Your not required to buy the game on steam, if you chose to then you must abide by Steam's rules or suffer the consequences. If your not happy with those rules you can play Destiny 2 on PC without going thru Steam.

I didn't buy the game on Steam. Bungie is migrating from the Bungie.net launcher to the Steam launcher on October 1.

As an aside, I'll wait for a forum moderator though to decide if your interpretation of the purpose of this forum is correct since a Steam Support person is the one that linked me to this forum and suggested I post here :-)

It's not my interpretation. It's from a steam moderator and stickied at the top of this forum - https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/10/135507548120407092/

[Fox]

I think a suggestion regarding Steam's ToS has his place here (as well as anything directly Steam-related, really) : maybe I should clarify this bit in the pinned thread, since it was written first and foremost to exclude game-specific suggestions from the mix.

With that said, if this concerns a game only, it may be best left up to the game developers : Valve only bans VPNs when either the store or the server's security, for example, circumventing regional pricing, or launching an attack. If the game explicitely (as in, in their ToS, not in the opinion of players) allows VPNs, you shouldn't have an issue, especially if you don't hide your country of origin.

Otherwise, I wouldn't risk it. It's up to the developers to offer a safe online experience for e-sports, so it may be worth asking the devs for extra security/DDoS mitigation instead.

[VViperRR]

Messaggio originale di Fox:

I think a suggestion regarding Steam's ToS has his place here (as well as anything directly Steam-related, really) : maybe I should clarify this bit in the pinned thread, since it was written first and foremost to exclude game-specific suggestions from the mix.

Thank you for clarifying. Really appreciate the reply!

Messaggio originale di Fox:

Valve only bans VPNs when either the store or the server's security, for example, circumventing regional pricing, or launching an attack. If the game explicitely (as in, in their ToS, not in the opinion of players) allows VPNs, you shouldn't have an issue, especially if you don't hide your country of origin.

Could this be considered an official response?

[Fox]

Messaggio originale di Viper:

Could this be considered an official response?

I'm afraid not. The only official answer would come from Valve, and they hardly interact there.

As I said, suggesting a ToS change here is valid, but for the immediate situation, either use a VPN at your own risk (with the personal, absolutely-non-official opinion that it may not be as much of an issue unless Destiny's dev also do explicitely ban VPNs), or ask the developers in their own hub to strengthen their online play so DDoS are less likely to happen.

[VViperRR]

Messaggio originale di Fox:

I'm afraid not. The only official answer would come from Valve, and they hardly interact there.

As I said, suggesting a ToS change here is valid, but for the immediate situation, either use a VPN at your own risk (with the personal, absolutely-non-official opinion that it may not be as much of an issue unless Destiny's dev also do explicitely ban VPNs), or ask the developers in their own hub to strengthen their online play so DDoS are less likely to happen.

Sounds good. Thank you! I hope that maybe the ToS change will be considered to be more clear on the issue :-)

[AmsterdamHeavy]

Look, the SSA is as written, it really isnt debatable.

the reality is that plenty of us have used VPNs, even if inadvertently - no one has been banned or anything of the sort. Ive gone months with a VPN on, even going through another country. Buying and playing games, no issues. But Im also using the US store with a US bank, so Im obviously not trying to game the store.

The VPN clause is in there to give Valve a reason to act if you are trying to defraud them by faking your region to get lower prices, or to access content that is banned in your country.

Im even willing to bet that they wouldnt care about the latter, either.

What they really dont want is for anyone to get tricky with VPNs and the store, thus costing them money.

[aiusepsi]

Messaggio originale di brian9824:

because a group of people think they are going to get DDOS'd everytime they play PvP in a game.

People using DDoSes against other people or dedicated servers in multiplayer games is absolutely a thing. It was one of the key motivations for Valve building a relay network to proxy traffic for Dota 2 and CS:GO, which is also available for other devs to use.

Hopefully that will be the long-term solution for Destiny 2; if they're migrating exclusively to Steam, they can adopt Steam features like the use of Steam's relay network so that when you're playing peer-to-peer IP addresses aren't exposed.

[Crashed]

If denial of service attacks are threatened or carried out I would suggest reporting it to law enforcement as it is a serious crime.

[76561198001062896]

as long as the VPN isnt used to bypass regional restrictions, you should be fine

[Crashed]

Messaggio originale di Zetikla:

as long as the VPN isnt used to bypass regional restrictions, you should be fine

Is there any official statement on that?

[76561198001062896]

Messaggio originale di Crashed:

Messaggio originale di Zetikla:

as long as the VPN isnt used to bypass regional restrictions, you should be fine

Is there any official statement on that?

there isnt but the wording of the statement definitely makes it clear that they only have a problem with VPN-s whenever foresaid VPN is used to bypass their restrictions.

A VPN in itself doesnt automatically makes purchases for you in regions different of yours or automatically activates keys that normally you wouldnt be able due to region lock, now does it?

[Gwarsbane]

Messaggio originale di Crashed:

Messaggio originale di Zetikla:

as long as the VPN isnt used to bypass regional restrictions, you should be fine

Is there any official statement on that?

Nope and I doubt there ever will be.