[To the Mods] [100MILL+ BANANA & BOTNET] Banana scandal reminds Valve that bots own the Steam platform and Steam Market. TF2 is just an appetizer.

[Wimpzilla aka gRAVE]

Mods, please, send this messengers pigeon to Valve upper management:




In the last 10 years, i slowly started to lose more and more trust in Valve and its services.

In this modern age of Valve, the TF2 bot drama and the bot Banana speculation scam are here to remind us that Valve doesn't own anymore its own platform.


I have now a complete distrust in Valve, more than ever after the Microsoft leaked documents showing interest in acquiring Valve, in addition to hiring senior board directors from Microsoft five years ago and EA two years ago, that now sit at the Valve upper management team.

The unregulated, uncontrolled misusage of new account creation and the bots has been slowly but steadily eroding, ruining the two key pillars of the Steam Community, which are the Steam Discussions and the Steam Games, for years now!

Steam has become an empire that is too large to be decently regulated, which allows rampant abuses on the platform, that are well hidden from the normal user public.

I contacted the Steam Support to inquire about account deletion if Valve would be acquired, i don't care if i lose money, but i don't want my data to be sold and misused for the sake of profits. My personal data and games data are worth more than the games present on this old Steam account.


Valve has lost what once was its main selling argument, keeping us quiet about the obvious monopoly that Valve is engaged into.
And for a long time, i personally always dismissed the fact that Valve was slowly going down and that it was still fine, even if there were no concrete signs showing Valve steering the ship in the right direction.

I guess this time is now revolved, the mistrust toward Valve has grown now larger than the love for the platform, and as painful as it is, reconciliating with the reality is often hard and takes time, especially for the things human beings are attached to.

I have now a complete distrust in Valve, and i will not keep pushing under the rug all the hidden misusage of the platform that has been perpetrated and grown over the last ten years.

I will not tolerate anymore scamming, money laundering, predatory games easily pushed on the platform, the usage of an external launcher for Steam games, poor policies that allow big publishers to rule over Valve, or the Steam Discussion being influenced by bots and inappropriate spammers.

Valve is in a horrible critical shape, this is primarily a platform for kids and young people, this kind of behaviors will not be tolerated anymore for the sake of revenue and lack of management.

If Valve ended up on a leaked document showing it can be bought, it means it can actually be bought, showing the true weakness of the platform.
I don't know if this pressure has been put on Valve on purpose to slowly and steadily lower the quality of the platform, or on purpose to generate an always-increasing growth in revenue, and i don't care tbh.
Because if it were the case, Valve would have the duty to share this kind of issues with its customers and start to take sharp actions in good faith openly.

That said, the Banana money laundering scheme is just an example of what has been hidden on Steam for many years, showing that Valve is not willing or incapable of taking measures to protect its platform.
Who is currently in control of the Steam Market is showing Valve it should keep quiet, otherwise, things could slide toward a bad outcome very quickly!
This is completely unacceptable coming from a company like Valve!

I have now a complete mistrust in Valve, and will readily prompt my account deletion if it goes further down to line with an acquisition, including all the legal work needed to ensure that Valve deletes my data faithfully, instead of just sending a mere email stating that my data has been deleted!





Don't bother answering this tread, i will not spend time here battling with bots and spammers.
This thread is directed toward the Valve management and upper management, it is not directed to Steam users!

Nevertheless, you can share the thread and the feeling that this thread carries with your friends and entourage, inside and outside Steam.
And maybe start thinking more critically about Valve, the empire of Steam, and if you should still trust Valve with years of your personal data and life!

As said once by a Valve developer, "we own a lot of data, but we lack the human resources to faithfully put this data toward a good use."

Banana scandal reminds Valve that bots own the Steam platform and Steam Market. TF2 is just an appetizer.

Originally posted by Wimpzilla aka Grave:

*** EDIT I ***

[UP]

I'm literally speechless and in total disbelief after spending a couple of days reading what the Steam Discussions offers to its users, checking out the shady programs that Steam offers, and spending time skimming through the Steam Games reviews pages!

I'm out of there; as a user, i don't share the lack of respect toward others and the predatory messages that Valve and Steam convey to its users.
Leaving me with a sour taste in mouth, a complete total distrust in Valve Company, and a total disbelief of how we came to this point!


To anyone at Valve who reads the complaint posts :

Originally posted by SWEIII:

You were the chosen one! It was said that you would destroy the Sith, not join them!
Bring balance to the Force, not leave it in darkness!

************************************************************************

*** EDIT II ***

[UPDATING THE MAIN POST]

Updating my main post with both of my above replies.
I'm not even sure that my main post analysis is the right one, hence updating the main post for clarity.
From the outside, the Steam platform nowadays really feels like a casino, made for users who are addicted to gambling, where gambling has now become the main source of income for human users exploiting the platform.

But i'm now a bit puzzled.

The other explanation would be that, in reality, Valve itself has evolved into a giant botnet, deceiving its own customers by controlling a huge botnet network.
OR
As stated in my previous main post, someone outside Valve is now rivaling with the Valve own botnet sheer power, taking over Valve own Steam Market platform botnet.

In any case, human users have been warned not to trust Valve and the Steam Platform anymore.
Do not post and share sensitive, personal information into the Steam Platform chats or whatever is connected to the Steam Platform services, if you don't want it to be known.

As a long-time customer of the platform, i did my part, sharing my worries and profound dislike for what Steam and Valve have become, and notifying Valve about my concerns.

Because, as a user and customer, the Steam Platform matters to me, at least not anymore now, due to what it has become!

*************************************************************************

*** EDIT III ***

[CREDITS]

For obvious security reasons and to avoid Valve Neural Networks systems flagging this credit post links, i have redacted the materials available corroborating the main post.
Valve employees can freely check the bellow articles and videos by simply searching the internet for the materials.
Also updating the main post with the credits.


-Banana and the Crypto, NFT world.
*Cryptorank.io article about the NFT and Crypto on Steam titled "Steam’s Clicker Game Sensation Opens Debate About NFTs And Crypto Gaming" published 29/6/2024.*
*Toronto Star newspaper article about the "Crypto King" scam titled "How ‘Crypto King’ Aiden Pleterski faked an extravagant life using Scene points and virtual goods " published 30/5/2024.*
*Binance Square post about the "Crypto King" scam titled "The court ordered Steam to freeze $280,000 of the “crypto king” in the game Counter-Strike" published 8/6/2024.*


-Court leaked documents showing Phil Spencer discussion about Microsoft aggressive or passive long run tactics for the future take-downs acquisitions as Nintendo and Valve.
*Kotaku article titled "Microsoft Casually Discussed Buying Nintendo Or Valve In Leaked Email", published the 19/9/2023*


-Valve lawsuits ongoing in UK about the Valve monopoly over the PC games market.
*Kotaku article titled "Valve Is Being Sued For $838 Million Over Alleged Pricing Restrictions", published the 13/6/2024*


-Valve corporation management roles showing Valve hiring management profiles from EA, Microsoft, Amazon in the last 10 years available on the RockedReach site, corroborated by a LinkedIn search.
*Rocketreach and LinkedIn websites*


-TF2 botnet issue impacting Valve TF2 servers, triggering the second wave of FixTF2, after the previous SaveTF2 campaign, asking Valve to take actions about in game cheater and idlers bots.
*Fixtf2 site where the user petition is available for sign up, published the 3/6/2024.*
*YouTube video titled "TF2: Nobody's Home" racking 750K views, published the 30/4/2024*
*YouTube video titled "TF2: I Found 60,000 Bots" racking 380K views, published the 1/6/2024*
*YouTube video titled "Valve Refuses To Fix Team Fortress 2..." racking 440K views, published the 5/6/2024*
*YouTube video titled "Valve Should Be Embarrassed FixTF2" racking 1.6M views, published the 10/6/2024*
*YouTube video titled "#saveTF2 & why the Bot Problem isn't simple" racking 790K views, published the 9/7/2022*
*YouTube video titled "Team Fortress 2 Has Been Taken Over By Bots..." racking 490K views, published the 21/5/2022*
*YouTube video titled " TF2: Post #fixTF2 Whiplash " racking 160K views, published the 3/7/2024*



-CS2 cheaters issues.
*Blix article titled "CS2 Cheating Problem: An In-Depth Look", published the 11/5/2024*
*IGN article titled "Valve Warns Counter-Strike 2 Cheaters It Will Punish ‘All Their Associates’, Too", published the 28/9/2023*
*Tradeit article titled "CS2 Cheating Problem – What’s The Solution?", published the 1/6/2024*


-Banana NFT like market manipulation scam, possibly allowing large automated money laundry schemes on Valve platform outside Valve owned games.
*Coinspeaker article titled"Legal Infinite Money Glitch’ of Popular Game Banana on Steam", published the 17/6/2024*
*Gamesmarkt article titled "Hundreds of Thousands of People or Bots Speculate on Banana Images on Steam", published the 17/6/2024*
*Polygon article titled "Why clicker game Banana — the ‘legal infinite money glitch’ — is going viral on Steam", updated on 21/6/2024*
*Forbes article titled "What Is ‘Banana,’ The Game Where You Click A Banana, With 136,000 Players On Steam?", published the 7/6/2024*
*YouTube video titled "Huge Steam Scam" racking 2.1M views, published the 16/6/2024*
*YouTube video titled "Why Is A Free BANANA Breaking The Steam Market? - STEAM IS PERFECTLY BALANCED WITH NO EXPLOITS!" racking 1.7M views, published the 12/6/2024*
*YouTube video titled "Banana - The 4th Most Popular Game on Steam (please don't play this)" racking 1M views, published the 13/6/2024*
*YouTube video titled "How A Free BANANA Broke The Steam Market" racking 711K views, published the 14/6/2024*
*YouTube video titled "Banana Game Dev Admits Bots Are A Problem" racking 236K views, published the 16/6/2024*
*YouTube video titled "The Biggest Scam On Steam Right Now..." racking 295K views, published the 17/6/2024*

************************************************************************

*** EDIT IV ***

Adding the following section to the Credit post:

-Banana and the Crypto, NFT world.
*Cryptorank.io article about the NFT and Crypto on Steam titled "Steam’s Clicker Game Sensation Opens Debate About NFTs And Crypto Gaming" published 29/6/2024.*


The article quote the banana developer about Crypto/NFT users habits and them being degens:

Originally posted by banana developer:

Some users believe that Banana and similar games could help with web3 gaming. The meme quality of the game was pointed out as a potential catalyst for broader adoption.

Similarly, this week, Avalanche Gaming discussed Banana’s implications on its Gamified Show. According to Paul Bettner, game developer and co-founder of Playful Studios, Banana could be a getaway to the larger world of crypto gaming.

To Bettner, “the behavior that we all love and participate in web3 as degens and web3 and crypto native users is, in fact, universal.” While watching the phenomenon of Steam’s clicker sensation evolve, the game developer noticed that users were “a bunch of degens that don’t know they’re degens yet.”

Ultimately, he considers that “people are learning how to degen.” If most of these users knew “what a wallet or a blockchain was, they would realize they could do that at 1000x the scale on a blockchain.”

Valve is literally allowing kids to be instructed to crypto, nft and all kind of predatory practices related to the field, would like to remind everyone the latest scam by Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX sentenced to 25 years in prison!


I would like to remind Valve employees that the Valve TOS allow kids of age 13 to register on the Valve platform.

Originally posted by Valve TOS page:

7. Children
The minimum age to create a Steam User Account is 13. Valve will not knowingly collect Personal Data from children under this age. Where certain countries apply a higher age of consent for the collection of Personal Data, Valve requires parental consent before a Steam User Account can be created and Personal Data associated with it collected. Valve encourages parents to instruct their children to never give out personal information when online.

Valve is already responsible of instigating gambling addiction to minors with its own games like CS, TF2 and the Valve Steam market.
Now Valve is also instigating minors to NFT, Crypto scams without having the proper disclaimer warning about the dangers of such gambling and crypto scams.

This is going against faithful corporate values of preserving children from all sort of digital abuses like gambling, crypto, NFT that our current digital era is going through!

************************************************************************

*** EDIT V ***

Little update about the magic world of predatory programs/software that Valve is allowing on its platform.
Over all the cats finding games, described by the tags "100 cats" or "hidden cats", only one developer/publisher is providing in-app purchases.

Here is below the list of the developers publishers i cheeked:

- Guiidea => NO in-app purchases.
- FM Simple Games Studio => NO in-app purchases.
- 100_Cozy_Games => YES in-app purchases.
- Catnip studio => NO in-app purchases.
- Cats Corp. => NO in-app purchases.
- Indie Games by Anatoliy Loginovskikh => NO in-app purchases.
- Faithy Games => NO in-app purchases.
- Harbin Happy Fish Technology Co., Ltd => NO in-app purchases.
- Animalle Studio => NO in-app purchases.
- Brandon Bradshaw => NO in-app purchases.
- 100 Cats => NO in-app purchases.
- ms => NO in-app purchases.
- Devcats => NO in-app purchases.
- Nukearts => NO in-app purchases.



Guess which developer is also behind the cats clicker game, similar to banana, egs, NFT clickers games?

You guess it, 100_Cozy_Games is the developer/publisher that allow in-app purchases:

=> For the cats finding games, it's usually a cat picture stamp worth 10e, named "donation x".
=> For the cats clicker game, it is a suggestive currency cat picture stamp, worth between 0.25e and 9e.

The very suggestive currency cat picture stamp are named the following:
-MONEY CASH
-MONEY CARD
-SILVER COIN
-MONEY COIN
-MONEY DRAGON
-MONEY UEE


Not a lot of young peps, nor even the old one, myself included, can afford a 1500e foiled trading card sold on the Valve Market.
But a lot of young peps will surely like the cat finding games, until they find the cat clicker game, and be instructed to play NFT and crypto like games.

Get the NFT games out of the 100 top played games, approve policies and TOS regulating NFT, crypto games on the Steam Valve Platform!!!!!!

Rigorously PERMA BAN the false Steam accounts botnet farms, allowing games to be pushed on top of the charts for revenue purposes!

************************************************************************

*** EDIT VI ***

First point:
I checked the Steam discussion Online Conduct, Rules and Guidelines For Steam pages, and none of these specify that Valve has no knowledge of what happens on its own forum.
The only sentence mentioning the Steam support is where the guidelines state that for moderation appeals, one shall contact Steam Support.

I'm not in charge of how the Valve Corporation sets up its internal corporate structure, and it is not specified which services belonging to the Valve Corporation are subcontracted, nor does it state anywhere that the Steam forums are not under the Valve Corporation's supervision.

I shall not bother to know how Valve decided to subcontract some or all of its services, separating them from the decision-making management branch.
Furthermore, i'm on the Steam forums, and inside the Steam software owned by Valve, Valve should be aware of anything happening inside its company.
Corporations should have information channels that route to decision-making positions and relay the message if deemed necessary!

Valve is responsible for everything that happens on its platform, no matter if and what services are being subcontracted!!!!

Second point:
Valve sits on a humongous pile of user telemetry data, publisher telemetry data, games telemetry data, which includes, saved games, games statistics, market statistics, all kind of telemetry related to steam usage, users chats logs, etc.
It is corroborated by the Valve developer itself, which also states that Valve has decent computing power at disposition.
Hence, Valve is able to train neural networks, and it does, to be able to manage all kinds of tasks, ranging from pattern detection, to LLM chatbots.
The amount of product managed by Valve does not matter!
Valve is in charge of scaling its computing and human resources accordingly, to be able to run the business in the best condition possible, respecting its own TOS.
If Valve is not scaling its hardware, software, and human resources accordingly, it can be viewed as a negligence act.
Negligence can be done on purpose or by error, still a negligence act it IS!

Once again, it is not my job to moderate the content on the platform.
The users and customers of the Steam platform range from kids to almost-dead human beings.
Not everyone received the same education, which means that the most disfavored, young, and old users, may not be able to recognize predatory schemes designed especially to trick a human being.
Hence, the self-report of content is not a tool that should be at the center of Valve services moderation!!!
Platform content reporting is an additional tool that works alongside the main Valve tool set, destined and designed to maintain the platform afloat, by respecting the Valve TOS.

Third:
I have spent a bit of time skimping through the 1500 most played games using Steamcharts site, and i could easily find the new NFT software trend, among the 1500 top Steam played games.

Fourth:
Then i switched to the Steam market webpages to find both the most expensive and most abundant items on the Steam market.
Here once again, i could easily spot the new NFT program trend without any issues or difficulty!
Moreover, the Steam market API requests are extremely limited.
I'm getting the following error message after maybe less than 15/20 API requests:
"Sorry! An error was encountered while processing your request: You've made too many requests recently. Please wait and try your request again later."

From a technical computing resources management point of view, this shows that the Steam market server is overwhelmed by requests and suffering!
There is no other explanation for imposing such strict API request filtering, especially on a web page that is meant to be browsed rapidly and frenetically.
This behavior is not present when browsing the forum or the games store web pages, and i don't know if this is a recent change.
When i was trading in the past, i could skimp through the Steam market indefinitely without being filtered or locked just by throwing less than 20 API requests in a row to the server.


Fifth:
Here is a list of a panel of newly created NFT software, made just to instigate a NFT like behaviors in the user when using the program.
Feel free to report them yourself, if you care, and if Valve employees and subcontractors still show some kind of decency when doing their job.

- banana
- egg
- egg Surprise
- egg RTX
- cats
- cucumber
- hamster
- clickout
- asteroids ++
- the Colorful Creature
- idle Fishing (AI MT game)
- bananametr
- banana Shooter
- banana 2: fruits
- pizza hero
- heart clicker
- shrimp.io
- shrimp
- tapple
- melon
- meh
- burger
- punch!
- mug
- poop
- POOP
- bananamana
- vhs
- fruits
- hamster combat
- broccoli
- leaf clicker: grow your green thumb!
- clothing
- lemon
- box clicker
- dollar
- crazy corn
- avocado
- pizzeria
- monsters
- car clicker
- monsters
- banana cat
- banana extreme
- banana monkeys
- croissant
- pizza clicker
- that guy
- emoji clicker collector
- ducks
- raspberry
- DUCKS
- giraffe
- domenation (incorporates blockchain technology, enabling players to earn, NFT )
- apple clicker
- c0ck
- nearly friendly tribes (incorporates blockchain technology, enabling players to earn, NFT )
- demigod nft gallery (support for NFT purchases)
- nft museum (support for NFT purchases)


There are some other programs that are dormant and ready to be pushed onto the platform, but i did my job, i could show that one can easily find these kinds of programs, implicating and corroborating Valve negligence regarding the NFT programs alike matter.
It is Valve responsibly to take care of these issues, and here we are, a NFT program pushed to the Steam top charts by botnet farms account, racking more than 800k concurrent players and pushing more than 14M of a single kind of NFT items on the Steam store.

This is unacceptable for a company like Valve, have some corporate decency.
This is why i completely distrust Valve going forth, i cannot find anything excusing this kind of behavior.

Sixth:
One doesn't know where the fund fueling all these NTF transactions on the Steam market comes from.
Most of these accounts belong to botnets, that could be reattached to blockchains, crypto wallets or crypto funds.
This kind of behavior is dangerous and can fuel any kind of bad malpractices, including money laundering!
This kind of behavior is absolutely unacceptable in any shapes or forms, especially on a platform that where users are either very young or very old!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

As a knowledgeable tech dude, i did my part to show my discontent and complete distrust toward Valve, which is pilling up bad decision-making, growing bad company reputation, and being too much into the focus of media, for my taste.
Don't say that there was anybody to warn users and customers about!!!!!!!

************************************************************************

*** EDIT VII ***

All the Valve items have a uniqueness quality, which is given by the association of multiple fields when querying the database, to define its uniqueness.

All Valve items are tied to the Valve back-end database system, the database query retrieves multiple item attributes as AppID, contextID and assetID and so on, which altogether will provide true uniqueness to the item.

These database fields are updated when the item lives its life on the platform, when traded, modified, and so on.
It doesn't matter if some items share the same ID for some field, the
multi-field query that retrieve data for the item from the database will be truly unique.

This is why it is possible to follow the item ownership through time on the Steam platform.
If there were no item uniqueness, it would not be possible to follow the item ownership, and Valve would not be able to distinguish item dupes.
Valve is able to assert the item history through the platform, which is a proof of item uniqueness, otherwise, the platform would be invaded by dupes, created for money generation purposes, which is not the case.


This system, as any other database model driven, is design to have a mean to assign true uniqueness to a particular row element of the database.
Which mean that Valve itemization literally predates the NFT idea, which is something that is well known.

Each Valve item uniqueness is defined by the association of multiple databases fields.
A NFT is unique because it bears a unique identifier.

Valve back-end database system is what store the item uniqueness.
The blockchain is what stores the NFT unique identifier.

Credits:
-Querying Valve database for item uniqueness
*McKay Development forum post titled "Identifying Steam Items", published the 20/5/2016*
-NFT, Non-fungible token
*Wikipedia article about Non-fungible tokens*

Originally posted by Dr. McKay:

Those are the two different types of "containers" in the Steam economy. Apps own contexts, and contexts own assets. Every asset on Steam has, in addition to its AppID and context ID, an asset ID which is guaranteed to be unique inside of a given AppID+ContextID combination. Notice that this means that asset IDs are not unique across all of Steam. They aren't even unique across a particular app. They are only unique inside of a given context. For example, there could be two items with asset ID 1 in the same game, as long as they have different context IDs. An item's asset ID may be referred to as "assetid" or just plain "id".

************************************************************************

*** EDIT VIII ***

The following post has been removed by the moderation because tagged as spam.

Adding links to credit section:
*Toronto Star newspaper article about the "Crypto King" scam titled "How ‘Crypto King’ Aiden Pleterski faked an extravagant life using Scene points and virtual goods " published 30/5/2024.*
*Binance Square post about the "Crypto King" scam titled "The court ordered Steam to freeze $280,000 of the “crypto king” in the game Counter-Strike" published 8/6/2024.*

Originally posted by Rorhiam from Binace Square:

The court ordered the owners of the Steam platform to freeze the account of the self-proclaimed “king of cryptocurrencies” from the Canadian city of Ontario.
This man was declared bankrupt and, despite this, transferred assets worth more than 500,000 Canadian dollars ($430,000) to gaming platforms.
On Thursday, an Ontario Superior Court judge ordered the seizure of the accounts of one
Aiden Pleterski, who two weeks ago was caught trading and selling items in the game
Counter-Strike, in particular, expensive virtual knives.
He spent C$382,000 ($280,000) on a third-party skin trading site and C$207,000 ($151,000) on a number of other platforms.
The court order obliges Valve Corporation to provide login information for the Crypto King
user account on Steam to bankruptcy specialists from Grant Thornton.
Over the course of about a year, both Valve and Pleterski repeatedly rejected the requests.

************************************************************************

*** EDIT IX ***

Since i did some work, at least it would be useful to share it, as my last update to this thread. There is nothing more to research, since i gave an overall spin on the steam platform, getting a good sense of what Valve is nowadays.


Here is in the previous above post, the updated list of the current and upcoming NFT likes games, found on steamdb, there are quite a few, if you ask me.


Next, here is below a look at the % of in-game players shown by steamdb, vs the % of games played during the EU night of the 06/07/24.

Steam %players vs %games [i.imgur.com]

Total games with at least 1 player reported in-game as shown on steamdb = 5164
Total players across 5164 games with at least 1 reported player = 7,164,281

Almost 50% of the total in-game players are within the TOP50 games, that are listed on steam stats page.
Almost 80% of the total in-game players are within the TOP100 games listed on steam stat page.

Less than 6% of the in-game players, are responsible for playing almost 83% of the 5164 steam games, with at least 1 player reported!
Almost 80% of the in-game players are responsible for playing less than 5% of the 5164 steam games with at least 1 player reported.


Ladies and Gentlemen, this is what a dying platform at its peak looks like.
And i'm glad that the TF2 and NFT drama brought me back to checking the platform overall health, as doing in the past when having more disposable time to burn.

Valve you bet you lost a customer, and now i completely understand why Valve got in the microsoft acquisition memos.
Who is/was in charge at Valve, completely burned the ground for indie and small developers studios.
Greatly favoring bigger studios, while accepting any software that can barely called a game, to boaster its own platform stats.
Valve did really nothing to boost small indie games and small developers teams that deserve some spotlight, these are just a mere asset that can be botted through, for sheer platform numbers!

Valve has become a giant predatory botnet, that isn't doing any good to the gaming industry, sharing the same corporate agenda adopted by the other majors publishers!

I'm done with this crap!

************************************************************************

*** EDIT X ***

Can't be more explicit than that, Valve negligence at its finest:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3070500/Coin/


Here is a fairly updated guide list of NFT clicker games coming from the banana sub-forum:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3290759601


************************************************************************

*** EDIT XI ***

On a side note, as of today 4/8/24, 6 months into the 2024 wave of NFT/Token drop clicker programs, MORE THAN 80 MILLIONS of NFT/Tokens have been pushed by these new drop clicker programs and are currently available on the Steam Market.

I have never seen a such thing in my 16 years using the Valve Steam platform, we are leveraging an unprecedented botnet feat!

The month of June 2024 alone has seen a trade volume for banana program token surpassing 25 MILLIONS of trades, peaking at 2.7 MILLIONS of trades the 22/6/24.

This is simply mind-blowing, we reached levels of crypto coins exchanges, and we are leveraging this feat on the Valve Steam market.
The month of June has seen 1 MILLION in revenue alone [pick the currency] from the simple 0.03$ banana NFT/Token Steam Market trades, shared between Valve, the Developers and the botnet users.
And it seems these items are constantly bought and resold, since the amount of listed market items keeps growing each day!
This is, once again, an unprecedented feat on the Valve Steam Platform.

The basic 0.03$ banana NFT/Token will, within a few days, break the 30 MILLIONS bar of items listed on the Valve Steam market.
To give a sense of scale, the first item on the Valve Steam Market, that isn't coming from the NFT/Token clicker programs is the following CS sticker, Counter-Strike 2 > Sticker | BLAST.tv | Paris 2023, with 1.8 MILLIONS of items listed on the Valve Steam Market.
There are 15 TIMES more basic 0.03$ banana NFT/Token on the market, than most listed 2023 CS item, coming from a Valve owned game!!!

Moreover, each account can only carry 3K items in the inventory, which means that one would need more than 25 MILLIONS of accounts to hold all these NFT/Tokens in Valve Steam accounts inventories.
And since these NFT/Token drop clickers can be run headless in command mode, without the graphical interface, it means that most of these accounts are related to the botnets farming these NFT/Tokens.
I guess Valve resorted to start stacking these items into the Steam Inventory, to avoid breaking the Inventory system.
Now, these NFT/Token items can be stacked using a single Inventory slot, something i have never seen done before, as the limit was set to 3K Inventory items per account.


There are simply no words to put what is happening on Steam into perspective!
We had a lot of things going on in the past, but nothing is comparing to what we are leveraging now.
I thought the sexually oriented games, the abusive DLC/Microtransactions/Gambling games and the flooding of poorly developed games/programs were the best Valve can do to make revenue, destroying the platform.
I would have never though Valve come this far, never!

Lastly, some kind words for our IT, Infra, Tech dudes working at Valve and its contractors.
I hope this kind of assault on the infrastructure was planned, because if it was not, i sincerely feels you here.
I guess that the db dudes have been found in their cubicles bashing their head against the desk!

[Ben Lubar]

Valve doesn't have upper management. There isn't a Valve board of directors.

I'm assuming your quote is a misquote of John McDonald's 2018 GDC talk about how he basically successfully stopped all cheating in CS:GO from 2016 on:

So if you're not really familiar with deep learning at all or you're just familiar with the buzzwords, then I'm gonna give you the 40,000 foot view. And the basic concept behind deep learning is that deep learning can help you basically just automatically build a function that maps inputs to outputs. If you're familiar with algebra notation you're probably familiar with y=f(x) and we're just saying Y is the result of applying some F to some input. And the cool thing about deep learning is deep learning says if I have enough X and I have enough Y I can solve for F. And that's pretty powerful it turns out that then you can take that F that you have just built and you can apply it to sort of never-before-seen X values and get actually pretty sensible Y's. And if you don't use deep learning, then engineers are writing your f values. That's that treadmill of work that we were talking about. And that lets you make this trade that at Valve we're really excited about. That lets us basically trade data and compute for engineering time because at Valve we are always always short on engineers but we have a lot of data and we have a lot of compute power.

https://youtu.be/kTiP0zKF9bc?t=1082

The people idling for drops are not robots. They're just speculating on the value of a virtual item. Just like what happened in Team Fortress 2 a decade ago.

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

Valve was aware of Banana before it was first talked about across YT and news sites.

[Ben Lubar]

The problem with Banana is that even though people are upset by it, it hasn't broken a single rule. Maybe there will be some revelation that the developers are doing something shady like lying about drop rates or creating rare items manually, but right now it's just preying on fear of missing out on pictures of bananas.

There's a ton of other free to play games on Steam that do pretty much the same thing. The main difference here is they skipped all the steps that usually obfuscate the random drop fear of missing out money making loop. Banana is just the harmful parts of a free to play game, but again, it hasn't done anything that breaks any rules. Other free to play games have those harmful things too, they just have stuff surrounding it so it's harder to see.

[BJWyler]

Originally posted by Ben Lubar:

The problem with Banana is that even though people are upset by it, it hasn't broken a single rule. Maybe there will be some revelation that the developers are doing something shady like lying about drop rates or creating rare items manually, but right now it's just preying on fear of missing out on pictures of bananas.

There's a ton of other free to play games on Steam that do pretty much the same thing. The main difference here is they skipped all the steps that usually obfuscate the random drop fear of missing out money making loop. Banana is just the harmful parts of a free to play game, but again, it hasn't done anything that breaks any rules. Other free to play games have those harmful things too, they just have stuff surrounding it so it's harder to see.

It's basically mimicking NFTs.

[Ben Lubar]

Originally posted by BJWyler:

Originally posted by Ben Lubar:

The problem with Banana is that even though people are upset by it, it hasn't broken a single rule. Maybe there will be some revelation that the developers are doing something shady like lying about drop rates or creating rare items manually, but right now it's just preying on fear of missing out on pictures of bananas.

There's a ton of other free to play games on Steam that do pretty much the same thing. The main difference here is they skipped all the steps that usually obfuscate the random drop fear of missing out money making loop. Banana is just the harmful parts of a free to play game, but again, it hasn't done anything that breaks any rules. Other free to play games have those harmful things too, they just have stuff surrounding it so it's harder to see.

It's basically mimicking NFTs.

It's not, because the bananas are explicitly not unique. A better comparison would be Beanie Babies.

[shu]

Don't mess with the Steam Epic Store and their "Absolutely NOT NFTs". Oh, I mean, lootboxes for gambling children. Damn, I mean.. the Market Place.

[76561199648916059]

Steam market should be shut down, it's laundered money for years across international borders

[Start_Running]

Originally posted by BJWyler:

Originally posted by Ben Lubar:

The problem with Banana is that even though people are upset by it, it hasn't broken a single rule. Maybe there will be some revelation that the developers are doing something shady like lying about drop rates or creating rare items manually, but right now it's just preying on fear of missing out on pictures of bananas.

There's a ton of other free to play games on Steam that do pretty much the same thing. The main difference here is they skipped all the steps that usually obfuscate the random drop fear of missing out money making loop. Banana is just the harmful parts of a free to play game, but again, it hasn't done anything that breaks any rules. Other free to play games have those harmful things too, they just have stuff surrounding it so it's harder to see.

It's basically mimicking NFTs.

Annd a milk snke mimics a coral snake.

[Zefar]

Originally posted by Wimpzilla aka gRAVE:

In the last 10 years, i slowly started to lose more and more trust in Valve and its services.

In this modern age of Valve, the TF2 bot drama and the bot Banana speculation scam are here to remind us that Valve doesn't own anymore its own platform.

The banana hasn't caused any real problems. It's just items on the market.

The TF2 bot drama is more about Valve gotten tired of working on TF2. Also it being free makes it hard to counter the bots because they can make new accounts. If you put any payment block before that you don't have a free game anymore.

Originally posted by Wimpzilla aka gRAVE:

I have now a complete distrust in Valve, more than ever after the Microsoft leaked documents showing interest in acquiring Valve, in addition to hiring senior board directors from Microsoft five years ago and EA two years ago, that now sit at the Valve upper management team.

Microsoft wouldn't be able to buy Steam because FTC would step in because Microsoft would actually have a monopoly. When they bought Blizzard and Activision the FTC stepped in to investigate if this was too much for them to own.

Originally posted by Wimpzilla aka gRAVE:

The unregulated, uncontrolled misusage of new account creation and the bots has been slowly but steadily eroding, ruining the two key pillars of the Steam Community, which are the Steam Discussions and the Steam Games, for years now!

No one is botting on the Steam discussion board unless it's spam bots.

Originally posted by Wimpzilla aka gRAVE:

Steam has become an empire that is too large to be decently regulated, which allows rampant abuses on the platform, that are well hidden from the normal user public.

What abuse?

Originally posted by Wimpzilla aka gRAVE:

Valve has lost what once was its main selling argument, keeping us quiet about the obvious monopoly that Valve is engaged into.
And for a long time, i personally always dismissed the fact that Valve was slowly going down and that it was still fine, even if there were no concrete signs showing Valve steering the ship in the right direction.

The main selling point was that it was keeping quiet about being a monopoly? What?
That literally makes no sense.

Originally posted by Wimpzilla aka gRAVE:

I guess this time is now revolved, the mistrust toward Valve has grown now larger than the love for the platform, and as painful as it is, reconciliating with the reality is often hard and takes time, especially for the things human beings are attached to.

Steam is larger than it has ever been. It keeps growing. This mistrust you claim there is are from an extreme minority.

Originally posted by Wimpzilla aka gRAVE:

I have now a complete distrust in Valve, and i will not keep pushing under the rug all the hidden misusage of the platform that has been perpetrated and grown over the last ten years.

I will not tolerate anymore scamming, money laundering, predatory games easily pushed on the platform, the usage of an external launcher for Steam games, poor policies that allow big publishers to rule over Valve, or the Steam Discussion being influenced by bots and inappropriate spammers.

Scam? Do tell
Money laundering? Not possible because once you put money onto Steam you can't get it back unless you get a refund. But money laundering involves millions of dollars and there is no way to spend that much on Steam.

Again with the bots on Steam discussion. There are no such things.

Originally posted by Wimpzilla aka gRAVE:

That said, the Banana money laundering scheme is just an example of what has been hidden on Steam for many years, showing that Valve is not willing or incapable of taking measures to protect its platform.
Who is currently in control of the Steam Market is showing Valve it should keep quiet, otherwise, things could slide toward a bad outcome very quickly!
This is completely unacceptable coming from a company like Valve!

You don't know what money laundering is. Free items that just generate profits is not money laundering.

No one is in control of the Steam Market.

Originally posted by Majestically Awkward:

Steam market should be shut down, it's laundered money for years across international borders

You too don't know what money laundering is. The Steam market is not doing any of that.

[Tito Shivan]

I still have to be shown how the banana players are bots and not just regular accounts idling the game.

Originally posted by Ben Lubar:

Originally posted by BJWyler:

It's basically mimicking NFTs.

It's not, because the bananas are explicitly not unique. A better comparison would be Beanie Babies.

Digital Funkos.

[Doctor Zalgo]

Originally posted by BJWyler:

Originally posted by Ben Lubar:

The problem with Banana is that even though people are upset by it, it hasn't broken a single rule. Maybe there will be some revelation that the developers are doing something shady like lying about drop rates or creating rare items manually, but right now it's just preying on fear of missing out on pictures of bananas.

There's a ton of other free to play games on Steam that do pretty much the same thing. The main difference here is they skipped all the steps that usually obfuscate the random drop fear of missing out money making loop. Banana is just the harmful parts of a free to play game, but again, it hasn't done anything that breaks any rules. Other free to play games have those harmful things too, they just have stuff surrounding it so it's harder to see.

It's basically mimicking NFTs.

And NFTs are just digital tulips.

[CANCELCULTURE]

Well Valve. If you have one game geared at solely skimming funds out of market economy by generating items that just drop for doing nothing in game, you might as well have 100,000 more smurfs just like it. Please give them ALL their own TAG and Steam store category, thanks.

[CANCELCULTURE]

Originally posted by Tito Shivan:

I still have to be shown how the banana players are bots and not just regular accounts idling the game.

As if the games own developer speaking about the bot accounts openly in Discord wouldn't know what he's talking about? https://youtu.be/6UFMu81jAPM?t=68 shown at 1:08

Tito Shivan how is this any different from the past when people BOTTED Steam Summer games with alts? Saliens and Monsters? Or did no one prove to you that they were not all just regular accounts idling?

https://steamcommunity.com/minigame
https://steamcommunity.com/saliengame/play xpaws AND others browsers scripts idled on millions of Steam accounts like a bot net. Sure was FUN wasn't it?

I mean what we had was Valve encouraging use of alts and bot idling, scripts, they did nothing to keep the games fair. And they profited from dropped trading cards sold in the market.

It wouldn't matter if we could show each other all the alts, BOT Steam accounts we find for Banana, like we most certainly can TF2, DOTA2 and CS2, as someone would just report us and have us banned for harassment and name and shame because Valve's not going to do anything about the bot accounts for any game, anyway.

OP's post is spot on, Valve is complicit and negligent in a lot of things. There are literal genital pics spammed in Counter Strike Global Offensive official hub chat room, and solicitation for *C*ontrol *P*oints like wtf Valve?

[Start_Running]

Originally posted by CANCELCULTURE:

Well Valve. If you have one game geared at solely skimming funds out of market economy by generating items that just drop for doing nothing in game, you might as well have 100,000 more smurfs just like it. Please give them ALL their own TAG and Steam store category, thanks.

O mean if people are generating items so easily then how pray tell do these Items have any value?

[Tito Shivan]

Originally posted by cSg|mc-Hotsauce:

Valve was aware of Banana before it was first talked about across YT and news sites.

:winterbunny2023:

Are we seriously running out of things to be angry at? Because I've been having that feeling lately.

This 'scandal' smells to me like version 2.0 of when Jim Sterling & Co. started making content about the 'worst games on Steam'

Ultimately the only thing these content creators are doing by comenting about these kind of games is to give them publicity and visibility. Just like Jim ultimately realised people were making terrible games on purpose just to try get reviewed by him and get a boost in sales.

We had one 'Banana' game... Youtubers started featuring them on their 'minute of hate' tirades... And now there's a bunch of them around.

Originally posted by CANCELCULTURE:

As if the games own developer speaking about the bot accounts openly in Discord wouldn't know what he's talking about? https://youtu.be/6UFMu81jAPM?t=68 shown at 1:08

Tito Shivan how is this any different from the past when people BOTTED Steam Summer games with alts? Saliens and Monsters? Or did no one prove to you that they were not all just regular accounts idling?

"We're burrently facing some problems about botting"

"Some problems"... I'll tell you how I know this isn't a widespread problem in the game. In order to profit from the game drops, bot accounts need to be unlimited. That means $5 for account. $5.000 for 1.000 accounts.
Looking at the data, most trading volume happens amongst the lower end of the item spectrum (the items worth pennies) and while there's some high priced items there their trade volume is really low and severly under the starting price (Although Crypticana is listed as starting al €1.6K 99% of buy orders are below €156)

In short. There's no scam, no widespread botting in the game. Just lots of people idling a low resources game trying to make some dollars out of a fad game. It's a matter of time the regular downard spiral of selling kicks in (Specially as some competition gets in) and this game to become part of gaming fads.