My Great Steam Experiment! (now general Steam discussion)

[faide]

Seems to me a better solution would be to lock down a persons account to prevent them from making future purchases.  For instance in my case, lock out my access to Dragon Age 2, but at least let me access my other games.  There's gotta be a better way than to threaten to lock me down forever...

Of course the best solution would be if I could just actually CALL someone to get resolution.

[Kevin Grey]

So I got this response from steam this afternoon:

"Thank you for contacting Steam Support. The purchase of Dragon Age II has been disputed by Paypal. The Paypal account holder will need to close the dispute and have the funds returned to Steam. If the account holder is unable or unwilling to drop the dispute and let the PayPal know that the purchase is valid, and in turn have the funds returned to Steam, we will not be able to reactivate the account. All games on your account are locked to the account and can not be transferred to a different account. A different payment method can not be used for this game; the money must be returned by the PayPal account that made the original purchase. If the dispute is closed and the funds are released back to Steam, the account will be reactivated. However if PayPal closes the dispute by “Reversing the Payment”, meaning they send the funds for the purchase back to you, the Steam account will remain locked and you will lose access to all of the games on the account. There are no options to resolve a dispute once PayPal has closed the case, so we suggest that you contact them immediately"


So I contacted Paypal immediately.  Paypal told me there is no dispute with the payment and that funds were sent to steam and accepted by them on March 6th when i pre-ordered.  I have the paypal receipt that shows exactly that.  So i've sent that information back to Steam and now have to WAIT again for them to respond.  With Paypal I was able to call someone and talk to a customer service person within 5 minutes.  How come I can't do this with Steam, it is extremely frustrating.

I also have a lot of trouble with the above statement that says if Paypal reverses funds , my account and ALL OF MY GAMES are gone.  That is bullshit.  If I were to say bounce a check at Gamestop, they couldn't demand that I return everygame I ever purchased back to them.  They just won't sell me the one game.  If one game on my steam account is in dispute then by all means pull my access to it, but to permanently take away all other legitimate transactions is completely ridiculous in my opinion.    

Anyway thanks for letting me rant all, hopefully I hear something more positive from steam soon...

Almost the exact same thing happened to me except it was a dispute on a credit card transaction and I hadn't disputed the charge at all.  I detailed it a bit on QT3 when it happened.  I hope it goes better for you- in my case it took a month to resolve, primarily because Valve's support was slow as molasses.  I honestly think someone from Steam saw the QT3 post and escalated it because it got resolved within a couple of days of posting it on that forum.

[faide]

Maybe I should post over on QT3 see if that speeds it up

Thanks for sharing that, glad to hear that at least it got resolved, gives me hope.  Just frustrated because I was really looking forward to a lazy sunday playing Dragon Age 2 

[Boudreaux]

Sounds circumstantial to me. One way to test if your theory is correct is to run the fully working non-Steam games through Steam as well. If Steam is the problem, some of them should start showing the same symptoms. Otherwise the problem lies elsewhere.

Yeah, it may have nothing to do with Steam, I don't know.  I point the finger there because out of all the games on my system, the only ones that crash regularly like this are all tied to Steam.  It's the only common factor.

How do I even launch a non-Steam game through Steam? 

[MonkeyFinger]

Sounds circumstantial to me. One way to test if your theory is correct is to run the fully working non-Steam games through Steam as well. If Steam is the problem, some of them should start showing the same symptoms. Otherwise the problem lies elsewhere.

Yeah, it may have nothing to do with Steam, I don't know.  I point the finger there because out of all the games on my system, the only ones that crash regularly like this are all tied to Steam.  It's the only common factor.

How do I even launch a non-Steam game through Steam? 

You have to add it to your Library: Games / Add a Non-Steam Game to my Library

[Purge]

Imagine a situation where your account is hacked, and they're sending messages to your friends list with evil links to bad net code.

Their only fault in this is having a shitty response time and no escalation procedure. I don't wanna think about how much money I have tied up in Steam - I'm annoyed that they don't have a billing/account dispute number.

[Greggy_D]

Maybe I should post over on QT3 see if that speeds it up

Thanks for sharing that, glad to hear that at least it got resolved, gives me hope.  Just frustrated because I was really looking forward to a lazy sunday playing Dragon Age 2 

Forgive me for asking....but does Valve have a 1-800 number for customer service?  If they do not, it is completely absurd that a company with hundreds of millions in revenue does not have a live support line.  That is completely unacceptable and beyond comprehension.

[faide]

Forgive me for asking....but does Valve have a 1-800 number for customer service?  If they do not, it is completely absurd that a company with hundreds of millions in revenue does not have a live support line.  That is completely unacceptable and beyond comprehension.

Nope, only an email    That has been my single greatest source of rage about all of it. 

[TiLT]

Maybe I should post over on QT3 see if that speeds it up

Thanks for sharing that, glad to hear that at least it got resolved, gives me hope.  Just frustrated because I was really looking forward to a lazy sunday playing Dragon Age 2 

Forgive me for asking....but does Valve have a 1-800 number for customer service?  If they do not, it is completely absurd that a company with hundreds of millions in revenue does not have a live support line.  That is completely unacceptable and beyond comprehension.

I can sort of understand why they don't. Only a portion of their customers are American, and having a customer from, say, Europe calling an American help line is unacceptable. It would be bad enough having a European calling a help line in a different European country. In other words, Valve would have to set up an extensive series of call centers across the world, which would be very expensive for them.

Not that it excuses their lack of phone support at all. This is an expense that customers expect them to take.

[Kevin Grey]

Forgive me for asking....but does Valve have a 1-800 number for customer service?  If they do not, it is completely absurd that a company with hundreds of millions in revenue does not have a live support line.  That is completely unacceptable and beyond comprehension.

Nope, only an email    That has been my single greatest source of rage about all of it. 

Yep, in my case I was sure that the issue could be solved in about 5 minutes by talking to a person on the phone.  But with email I not only had to wade through one or two emails that were practically automated in the sense that they didn't even address my problem but I had to wait a disgusting amount of time between those emails (weeks).  But this was in 2009 so they may be quicker to respond now.

[faide]

Good news.  Steam got back to me and said that the dispute with paypal was indeed solved and that my account has been reactivated.  

The whole experience has left me questioning future purchases through them though.  I've loved digital distrubution of games and have used steam to buy just about all of my PC titles the past few years.  If they can just take away everything I own that easily, then I think I'm going back to box copies of games again.  

We'll see, the first steam sale will probably sucker me in....

Glad to be back, thanks for letting me vent

[Huw the Poo]

Good news.  Steam got back to me and said that the dispute with paypal was indeed solved and that my account has been reactivated.

How magnanimous of them, considering according to Paypal there had never been a dispute in the first place.  In the absence of other evidence, this looks more like Valve fucking something up and playing innocent.

The whole experience has left me questioning future purchases through them though.  I've loved digital distrubution of games and have used steam to buy just about all of my PC titles the past few years.  If they can just take away everything I own that easily, then I think I'm going back to box copies of games again.

Absolutely.  I may have caved and finally installed Steam, but I will never use it for anything other than getting some dirt-cheap games.  Hell, I don't generally buy full-priced games from DD vendors anyway, but if I did it certainly wouldn't be from Steam, it'd be from a service like Impulse who don't hold the key to my fucking gaming cupboard.

[CeeKay]

a sign you have too many games on Steam:  you see a particular title on sale multiple times and think 'damn, I wish I had waited for a sale', only to later on go to install said title and find out that you don't actually own it 

[Caine]

a sign you have too many games on Steam:  you see a particular title on sale multiple times and think 'damn, I wish I had waited for a sale', only to later on go to install said title and find out that you don't actually own it 

the kicker being that you waited to install it after the sale was over. 

[CeeKay]

a sign you have too many games on Steam:  you see a particular title on sale multiple times and think 'damn, I wish I had waited for a sale', only to later on go to install said title and find out that you don't actually own it 

the kicker being that you waited to install it after the sale was over. 

well, the title in question is KotOR, so I've played it a few times already and just assumed I had it in my 'finished' category.  I find it funny that it's been on sale multiple times and I've always called it a 'blah' sale when I could have partaken 

at least I have the CD's around here somewhere.