Steam has recently undergone a lot of changes; the most recent change being the addition and removal of paid mods from the steam workshop.
Now steam has changed it’s ‘Game Ban’ details, in the past disruptive players and cheaters/hackers were banned by Valve however according to a recent announcement on Steam this is changing. Developers can now select the players they want to ban and Steam will implement the ban.
Valves anti-cheat software has always been good in the past at catching and removing cheaters from online multiplayers games though it was was never able to catch all disruptive players. This change allows developers to help with this problem by letting them ban those players as well.
Game developers inform Valve when a disruptive player has been detected in their game, and Valve applies the game ban to the account. The game developer is solely responsible for the decision to apply a game ban. Valve only enforces the game ban as instructed by the game developer.
Developers now have the power to ban users from online games for whatever reason they wish and there is some concern from the community that this could be abused to remove negative reviews or if a user is having a dispute with the developer. For larger developers this will not be a problem as they will most likely be going by what their game’s community is telling them whereas with smaller developers as problem could arise.
There is no word yet that Valve will need evidence to enforce the game ban meaning that developers may not need to provide any evidence of a player being ‘disruptive’.
The full Game Ban change can be found here
What do you think about this change? Is is a good thing or do we just need to wait and see what happens?