Steam NEEDS an anti-idle feature for games.

[katanaofsubterfuge]

Many people will tab out and leave a game open for hours and accumulate many hours 'played' in a game. There needs to be a way to ensure the player is actually interacting with the game in order to properly count play time.

[Nezantra]

Why is this needed though? Who benefits?

[EDƎN]

Originally posted by Nezantra:

Why is this needed though? Who benefits?

so people don't treat their games how they want obviously
OP benefits from being selfish as hell

[tyl0413]

Honestly I don't see why Steam shouldn't add an option to just kill a game if it's been idling for a specified amount of time, I had games not shut down properly and I only noticed the next day it still driving up the playtime.

[ka:i]

ПР

[class101 [OLED deck]]

I don't think valve care on securing achievements or playtime there are site to automate all this already to bring down first such as steamtimeidler, steamachievementmanager

[B l u e b e r r y P o p t a r t]

No, they don't and the simple answer is that game time does not matter.

[Corrosive Studios [Dev]]

need is a strong word.

[Elucidator]

You can also just change 'playtime' to 'time running'.

[Kenny]

As much as I agree with you in terms of ideas and values, I think that first, it's too late for this really. Users have accumulated so much playtime that even if they found a way to sort this out, you'd still have all the old ones already with their bulk. Unless Valve went ahead and changed the numbers themselves, which would obviously piss a lot of people off and it wouldn't even be accurate and measured.

The methods you could use to make this would also probably be circumvented easily. For instance, if Valve set the games to automatically go into idle mode if no input was to be registered within let's say 10 minutes, people would just put weights on their keyboard, or the classic thread on the stick on controllers.

Yes, it will work for all the people who don't actively care about this, meaning that while you are not securing every single user you are definitely security a huge majority anyway. This would probably be the best case scenario and while not perfect, it would still require some effort to circumvent it, effort that would not be found in most acounts.

Just know something, if somebody stacks up thousands of hours by leaving the game open all the time, or use external programs to trigger the unlock of achievements, they are pretty much just kidding themselves.

No one cares about the playtimes and achievements of others, except for yourself. By cheating these stats you are pretty much deluding and disappointing the only person that would realistically care about such things for 96% or more of the times.

[B l u e b e r r y P o p t a r t]

Originally posted by Kenny:

No one cares about the playtimes and achievements of others

Best not to talk for "everyone" because there are plenty of people and groups that do care about both. Anything and everything has some group of people that will care, even if you don't.

[Kenny]

Originally posted by B l u e b e r r y P o p t a r t:

Originally posted by Kenny:

No one cares about the playtimes and achievements of others

Best not to talk for "everyone" because there are plenty of people and groups that do care about both. Anything and everything has some group of people that will care, even if you don't.

You are right, I apologize. Not only there are groups of people that care about it, but I care about it aswell. I shouldn't have used that expression.

Though it emphasizes how the majority really don't care and I bet some would even complain if Valve actually did something about it.

Unfortunately it's very unlikely something will ever be done about this. I think a Valve employee was asked about this before and said that it would be cool if these things weren't played around like that.

I don't remember if he gave any reason as to why nothing could be done but he didn't seem to show any "hope" on the matter.

[mednat]

lets be honest people hours in games have no effect on you

[Edu Furiano (bora coop games)]

And why would you bother if someone leave their games open or not? DOesnt even make sense.

[B l u e b e r r y P o p t a r t]

Originally posted by Edu Furiano (twitch:furiano_tv):

And why would you bother if someone leave their games open or not? DOesnt even make sense.

Because there are those that think that game hours means you are good at it.

I had a game mod comment on my profile saying something about fake hours and how it gives off a different view or something, I can't remember and don't care to go find it, but pretty much he got laughed at because it was stupid to say.

Game hours only = to how long you keep something on and nothing more, if anyone else thinks so they need help.

These types of topics never go in depth about the idea, and they never think that long or hard about what it really means, there are plenty of genres of games that you just leave on like "idlers" and that people get up from their games for whatever reason like bathroom breaks, food, getting the door, etc. (This type of thing more than like never happen anyways.)

[greenraven22]

Originally posted by katanaofsubterfuge:

Many people will tab out and leave a game open for hours and accumulate many hours 'played' in a game. There needs to be a way to ensure the player is actually interacting with the game in order to properly count play time.

Ok so what about study aids with integrated radios? Or esports games with integrated twitch streams? Or social MMOs with in-game movies and concerts?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2300389018

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2799996079

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1763689064

And that doesn't even begin to cover the massive genre that is idle clickers. Who even cares about "play time"?