Valve has added a few safeguards to stop builders from creating faux in-game objects to rip-off merchants.
When the case of Abstractism – the sport whose builders created fake TF2 items to scam traders – grew to become public, Valve eliminated it and its developer from Steam.
This is when it grew to become clear that mentioned builders had been capable of efficiently idiot merchandise merchants by creating these faux objects. The concept that any recreation might do that in any respect was staggering, as a result of it meant that it will be a simple approach to rip-off unsuspecting Steam customers.
In order to deal with this difficulty, Valve made two large adjustments to Steam. The first is an easy warning that alerts gamers making a commerce that the merchandise they’re about to purchase is from a recreation they’ve by no means performed earlier than, or a recreation that’s new to Steam.
This ought to stop instances the place merchants would learn the title of the merchandise, however not what recreation it’s for, earlier than accepting the commerce. This is strictly what the TF2 dealer from this week’s story did earlier than realising what had occurred.
In their case, the merchandise proven had the title of a well-liked TF2 rocket launcher, however look intently and also you’ll realise that it wasn’t for Valve’s hero shooter in any respect.
But that’s not all, Valve now additionally requires approval for app title adjustments to in-game objects, which ought to care for instances the place a developer tries to rename the merchandise to rip-off totally different teams of gamers (or troll), which is one other factor the builders of Abstractism had carried out.
Valve developer Tony Paloma defined that extra work is being carried out on this space, although he hopes the present options are sufficient.
“We are hopeful that having to dismiss two warning dialogs will be sufficient to make people think twice about trades containing forged items, but this is not the end of our response, and we’ll continue to monitor, of course,” they mentioned, posting underneath username Drunken_F00l on Reddit.
“We also started requiring approval for app name changes, and have more planned to address this sort of problem that we couldn’t get done in one day.”
The excellent news is that anybody that bought scammed could have their objects restored, in accordance with Paloma.
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