Why do you require an attached phone number?

[Mechanos]

Believe it or not, some people do not have working smartphones. And out of the people that do, some of them (the smart ones) choose to not jump onto the data collection bandwagon by having apps attached to everything. Yet you have it as a requirement to join in competitive. Is this really necessary? I assume this is some way of attempting to keep people from making alternative accounts, as they would need to buy a new phone number for every account... but this would only slow down poor people lol. Is there any alternative means of entering competitive without having to have a mobile phone number?

[Mechanos]

The phone number is required. I have steam authenticator enabled through a tablet and email, but without a phone number attached to it (presumably the same number as a smartphone loading the steam app), you still can't join TF2 Competitive unfortunately.

[HungryBanker]

Can you acquire a free phone number? There are many services.

[Elias011203]

Yeah.I think its uneccesary....Escerow and the new Update are like a slap in the face!Why not make it email confirmation?Srsly,Volvo thinks we are dumb,atleast thats what it seems like :(

[Memes and Dreams!~]

I like how I constantly see these posts... Welcome to 2016 where every thing is getting the mobile treatment... It's not a new fad it's just becoming much more visible in the lime light... It was gonna happen one way or the other

[Silver]

Steam just wants your phone number so they can send you nudes

[Mechanos]

Originally posted by Silver:

Steam just wants your phone number so they can send your information to the NSA

Fixed that for you.

[HungryBanker]

Originally posted by Elias011203:

Yeah.I think its uneccesary....Escerow and the new Update are like a slap in the face!Why not make it email confirmation?Srsly,Volvo thinks we are dumb,atleast thats what it seems like :(

They must still be having issues with scammers. Only reason they would keep restricting items is to save money/hours supporting recovery of stolen accounts, or, if it helps make money.. for example, if the market or trading takes too long, more players might buy straight out of the TF2 Shop, from Valve!

[Sham!]

Originally posted by HungryBanker #TFComp:

Originally posted by Elias011203:

Yeah.I think its uneccesary....Escerow and the new Update are like a slap in the face!Why not make it email confirmation?Srsly,Volvo thinks we are dumb,atleast thats what it seems like :(

They must still be having issues with scammers. Only reason they would keep restricting items is to save money/hours supporting recovery of stolen accounts, or, if it helps make money.. for example, if the market or trading takes too long, more players might buy straight out of the TF2 Shop, from Valve!

The mobile aut doesn't stop scammers, it can help only in case of account hijacking, the only way to not get scammed is growing a brain.
Also Valve doesn't recover lost items anymore so they don't even waste time anymore for that.

[the man]

It's required because it's the most effective way of keeping cheaters and smurfs out. Timewalls can be bypassed by idling and paywalls just don't work (look at CS:GO). But if every time a hacker gets banned he'd have to buy a new phone, the amount of hackers will probably go down drastically. Same with smurfs. Valve is probably able to live with cutting a (very small) percentage of the community out if that means delivering a cheater/smurf-free experience, and honesly, can you blame them?

[Sham!]

Originally posted by bsep:

It's required because it's the most effective way of keeping cheaters and smurfs out. Timewalls can be bypassed by idling and paywalls just don't work (look at CS:GO). But if every time a hacker gets banned he'd have to buy a new phone, the amount of hackers will probably go down drastically. Same with smurfs. Valve is probably able to live with cutting a (very small) percentage of the community out if that means delivering a cheater/smurf-free experience, and honesly, can you blame them?

VAC fails to detect the mojority of the premium cheat program, how can the mobile aut keep hackers out the game if they aren't detected in the first place.
Also where I live you can get a new phone number for around 5-10 euros and that's probably the same in the other EU countries, so it pretty much fails at stopping smurfs as well.

[the man]

Originally posted by Sham!:

Originally posted by bsep:

It's required because it's the most effective way of keeping cheaters and smurfs out. Timewalls can be bypassed by idling and paywalls just don't work (look at CS:GO). But if every time a hacker gets banned he'd have to buy a new phone, the amount of hackers will probably go down drastically. Same with smurfs. Valve is probably able to live with cutting a (very small) percentage of the community out if that means delivering a cheater/smurf-free experience, and honesly, can you blame them?

VAC fails to detect the mojority of the premium cheat program, how can the mobile aut keep hackers out the game if they aren't detected in the first place.
Also where I live you can get a new phone number for around 5-10 euros and that's probably the same in the other EU countries, so it pretty much fails at stopping smurfs as well.

People that use premium cheat programs make up for a very small percentage of the cheaters in TF2, most cheaters are just 12 y/o kids that think it's funny to spinhack and those'll be kept out of MM by requiring Mobile Authenticator. That, accompanied with some Overwatch-like system, and hackers won't be that big of a problem anymore.
For smurfs, they'll have to go out of their way to get a new phone, and judging by the amount of people crying over not having a phone number I think it's save to say that that's too much of an effort for the average TF2 player. And sure, it might not keep every smurf out, but defenitly more than all of the other systems.

[Sham!]

Originally posted by bsep:

Originally posted by Sham!:

VAC fails to detect the mojority of the premium cheat program, how can the mobile aut keep hackers out the game if they aren't detected in the first place.
Also where I live you can get a new phone number for around 5-10 euros and that's probably the same in the other EU countries, so it pretty much fails at stopping smurfs as well.

People that use premium cheat programs make up for a very small percentage of the cheaters in TF2, most cheaters are just 12 y/o kids that think it's funny to spinhack and those'll be kept out of MM by requiring Mobile Authenticator. That, accompanied with some Overwatch-like system, and hackers won't be that big of a problem anymore.
For smurfs, they'll have to go out of their way to get a new phone, and judging by the amount of people crying over not having a phone number I think it's save to say that that's too much of an effort for the average TF2 player. And sure, it might not keep every smurf out, but defenitly more than all of the other systems.

MM will probably have a paywall so it's unlikely that cheaters are going to use free software.
Also you don't need a new phone device, just a new phone number which literally takes minutes and few bucks to get one.
If Valve wanted to keep out smurfs and cheaters they should enforce VAC and be more effective at tracking alt accounts, intoducing the mobile aut is the sloppiest and less effective way to get -poor- results. Even if they tie VAC bans to phone numbers it's going to be almost useless.
Right now they are pretty much using the comp beta as a bait to make people want to bind their phone number to steam.

[the man]

Originally posted by Sham!:

Originally posted by bsep:

People that use premium cheat programs make up for a very small percentage of the cheaters in TF2, most cheaters are just 12 y/o kids that think it's funny to spinhack and those'll be kept out of MM by requiring Mobile Authenticator. That, accompanied with some Overwatch-like system, and hackers won't be that big of a problem anymore.
For smurfs, they'll have to go out of their way to get a new phone, and judging by the amount of people crying over not having a phone number I think it's save to say that that's too much of an effort for the average TF2 player. And sure, it might not keep every smurf out, but defenitly more than all of the other systems.

MM will probably have a paywall so it's unlikely that cheaters are going to use free software.
Also you don't need a new phone device, just a new phone number which literally takes minutes and few bucks to get one.
If Valve wanted to keep out smurfs and cheaters they should enforce VAC and be more effective at tracking alt accounts, intoducing the mobile aut is the sloppiest and less effective way to get -poor- results. Even if they tie VAC bans to phone numbers it's going to be almost useless.
Right now they are pretty much using the comp beta as a bait to make people want to bind their phone number to steam.

"I payed 4 dollars for MM so I also pay 20 dollars for LMAOBOX premium"??? Once again, getting a new phone number might just take a few minutes, but judging by the amount of people crying on this Steam Group, it's too hard for most TF2 players.

[miji]

Originally posted by Mechanos -CD-:

Believe it or not, some people do not have working smartphones. And out of the people that do, some of them (the smart ones) choose to not jump onto the data collection bandwagon by having apps attached to everything. Yet you have it as a requirement to join in competitive. Is this really necessary? I assume this is some way of attempting to keep people from making alternative accounts, as they would need to buy a new phone number for every account... but this would only slow down poor people lol. Is there any alternative means of entering competitive without having to have a mobile phone number?

Get clever about it.
I have a friend who knows a friend who knows a friend that just used a no-contract plan for a month and used that number for a bunch of things before it expired.
Also not having a smartphone in this day and age is pretty much only excused by lack of finances. Even if it's not activated with a phone plan, it's just an extremely useful thing to have.

Alternatively: Be patient. It's just for the beta.

[Mechanos]

Originally posted by bsep:

Originally posted by Sham!:

VAC fails to detect the mojority of the premium cheat program, how can the mobile aut keep hackers out the game if they aren't detected in the first place.
Also where I live you can get a new phone number for around 5-10 euros and that's probably the same in the other EU countries, so it pretty much fails at stopping smurfs as well.

People that use premium cheat programs make up for a very small percentage of the cheaters in TF2, most cheaters are just 12 y/o kids that think it's funny to spinhack and those'll be kept out of MM by requiring Mobile Authenticator. That, accompanied with some Overwatch-like system, and hackers won't be that big of a problem anymore.
For smurfs, they'll have to go out of their way to get a new phone, and judging by the amount of people crying over not having a phone number I think it's save to say that that's too much of an effort for the average TF2 player. And sure, it might not keep every smurf out, but defenitly more than all of the other systems.

LOL I'd like to see some proof of this, as contrary to what you're saying, most circumstantial evidence points in the other direction. That there are tons of hackers playing undetected. Let me just put this into perspective for you with some comparisons.

First off, you can get an undetected cheat program for TF2 for only $20. How many serious TF2 players have already spent $20 on crates/hats alone? $20 is nothing to someone that spends money on gaming already. I can't link you what program I'm specifically talking about obviously, but I'm sure most of you know which one I'm talking about already.

Secondly, I'm going to reference the happenings in another game recently. World of Warships. Up until a month ago, they allowed extensive modding in their game. To the point, mods could pull some of the game data. People figured out how to use this data for use towards aim assists and damage logging/profiling. Wargaming released a patch to put a stop to it by only allowing skins and such. All other mods require being whitelisted now to access gamecode. Now, you're probably thinking.. good for them, right? Wrong. With-in a week, at least 3 different developers of cheats had both functionalities re-added to the game through actual cheat programs instead of mods, undetected, for a price. One of said cheat companies ended up with a PR problem because they got SO many subscribers that their login servers for their cheat program couldn't keep up. Estimated 11,000 subscribers. That is a HUGE number.. with numbers like that, you can only assume there's at least 1 or 2 people every game using aim assist that non payers no longer have access to. If a game like that, that doesn't even rely on that much twitch skill, can get this many paying cheaters.. (and those cheats btw cost more like $30 a month rather than $20 only once..) what makes you think TF2 barely has any cheaters? This isn't a new thing, it's just how online games work nowadays because visually you can't detect cheats anymore. They emulate human aim, and there is profit to be had by programmers selling these cheats.

Third, I want to mention a community made anti-cheat that came out a few years back that's now broken. It was designed for competitive servers and worked via being able to screenshot someone's TF2 externally. This meant.. you could request a screenshot from a suspected cheater, and you would be able to see the overlays from their cheat program. When it went live on some servers, it ended up catching a whole bunch of people that were high ranking competitive players (in those communities at least) that wouldn't have gotten caught if it wasn't for this screenshotting. This used Valve's code to work. But then, to the best of my knowledge, Valve caught on and feared that this functionality could be used maliciously to spy on someone's desktop or something, so they patched it out. This meant the anti-cheat could no longer work without sending server's an extra exe or dll to work, which killed the project. But it's still a fact that in it's short lifespan it caught people.

Lastly.. this doesn't even touch the unknowns. That is, people that have made their own cheat programs. In theory, anyone with low level computer knowledge and/or is good with assembly, that also knows a decent programming language, can make cheat programs. Basically anyone that's ever gotten a computer science degree, or took the time to self teach themselves.

Sorry for the huge post, but trying to make it look like cheaters are the minority is pretty misinformed.