Steam games forum down amid hack fears Computer games outfit Valve has suspended its Steam user forums following unconfirmed reports of a security breach. Eurogamer claims that the official message board for Valve's Steam online games platform, Steampowered, was "defaced" on Monday night shortly before the site was suspended. It is believed the defacement involved …
Chose to move my Steam directory to another drive (to free up some space) but wasn't able to re-install steam once the move was complete.
Every-time i tried to update I was told not available/come back later/general error.
Linked? Possibly.
Now if I had stolen all my games this wouldn't be an issue
Are we approaching the point yet where some kind of "wouldn't have happened if I had pirated it" becomes a meme? "It was dark, I was eaten by a Grue! Pirates don't have these problems!"
Using steam errors to justify piracy? I really hope you are being sarcastic.
All I see from the post is a legitimate games purchaser/owner venting a little bit of stress about the inconvenience and irony of anti piracy measures that impact legitimate customers more than pirates. Similar to remarking that people who buy pirate DVDs don't have to sit through three minutes of copyright warning, unlike paying customers.
I tend to doubt that for the simple fact that I only allow myself to be tied to Steam because I CHOOSE to be. My reasons are simple:
1) No disc to lose/scratch/have in the drive to play a game.
2) No serial numbers to do the same with.
3) All my games are in one place...well those I buy on Steam anyway
4) Deals...quite honestly Steam tends to have some pretty outrageous deals when it comes to games. Check it out. I doubt youll find a better deal elsewhere besides maybe Impulse.
5) A rather decent community for friends to play together.
So no I dont think the majority are tied down. What I do believe though is that Gabe needs to admit they wanted to kill L4D1 and just get on with it.
"The mortgage market would never have collapsed if everyone had just stolen houses by squatting in them. We should all steal houses!"
Now, it's not *quite* the same but it would make you sound just the same kind of pillock as you already do when you're talking about "stealing" your games instead of buying them.
Steam's "come back later" is more a function of how many users are *playing* or *downloading* games than anything else. That's why, when you go back later, it works. That message has been displayed since the first days of Steam and is unlikely to have anything to do with the story at hand. The stats pages show you how many people are currently running Steam successfully in real time:
http://store.steampowered.com/stats/
Nary a blip since the forums went down. That said, they really need to put out some kind of message because 4 days isn't exactly a "temporary" outage at all and they need to tell people what's happened (even if it's just "we don't know, we're looking into it").
P.S. Moving your Steam directory is a way to cause yourself lots of lost time and hassle. You should've just made an NTFS junction point pointing to a new copy of it on your other drive. Quicker, easier, simpler, invisible to Steam, no reinstalls, and you can revert it in seconds if it doesn't work.
Of course if you squat in a house, the legitimate owner can't use it which doesn't happen in software piracy. More importantly, if the company that sold you your house goes broke, you don't suddenly lose access to your house. Similarly, you don't need to check in with said company every time you want to enter your house.
Rental is a bit closer, in that when the company renting you your house goes broke, you might be thrown out. Even then it won't happen suddenly and you don't have to ask said company for permission to use your house every time you want to go in.
As for stealing games. I find myself pirating games when I'm uncertain of a game's quality and there is no (reasonable) demo to try it with. Then yes, I will pirate the game to test it.
All I said was I was having trouble with Steam this week.
When I said I was having trouble with Steam that somehow suggests I buy games and not steal them.
But I am well aware that (and everyone here is as well) getting a pirate game to run is much easier than a DRM laced DVD or Steam for that matter.
You should be careful how you talk your customers because I choose to buy games even though I don't have to. I could steal them, easily but I choose to go out of my way to pay money and put up with DRM to keep little trolls like you in work.
I had to downvote here and I have never given a reason or even mentioned that I have. In this case I will make an exception and give a reason for it.
I mean no disrespect in that your opinions are your own but unfortunately ElRegs comment boards dont allow a nice way of replying to others whohave replied to someone else. As for why I downvoted this the problem I have is that what I said wasnt meant to knock you but to support....somewhat. Being called a troll isnt the best way to make friends. Sorry bro.
As for this comment chances are it will be red-flagged and removed by the mods but meh. It needed to be said.
This post has been deleted by its author
If early reports of the incident (bay12 forums) are to be believed, it was less of a high level attack, more like one of the admins/mods had their account password guessed/brute-forced. Other things may have come to light since last night, but as far as I understood it came down to an admin account being used to post adverts to a cheat/hack site.
It is a little more than just an admin account hacked, we ran a UBB with over 2000 active users , steams UBB is a custom jobbie with a huge user DB and Forums DB beelzebub himself would get brown trousers at maintaning.
It does not take 3 days of down time to sort out a busted admin account, even a full restore to before the time of the hack does not take 3 days of downtime granted the Steam Users forums are a humongous tolkienesque purgatorial shit pit of the hammer Legion v Trolls but the Dark Lord Himself Newel will be cracking the whip at his minions for more than just pizza and doughnuts.
The black gate is closed for now and just goes to show you what one little hobbit can do.
Er... actually:
"Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.7"
And that's pretty universal for a lot of large sites (despite it's inherent insecurity). That's also several versions out of date, so it's hardly surprising if their forum software has been compromised.
I imagine they run the forums on completely separate machines and have decided to image, analyse and re-image the forums servers just to be on the safe side because they do have millions of forum users.
Still, they could at least make an announcement of some kind.
so it is Vb, still much the same as UBB( it dont take 3 days to fix) and i told you it was more than just the forums.
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=611
mm odd how they say "intruders" plural, and odd how this is not all over the news A DB with over 30 million users and the CC infromation, passwords etc stolen.
Most likely the DB has got good encryption and will take a while to break..but i see trouble ahead.
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