I'm certainly glad they changed it, I am somewhat skeptical about who we have to thank for said change, though. I'm not sure whether we should thank EA/Origin or some government office with a lot of lawyers looking for someone to flay alive. As you say, 8 and a half years doesn't make it seem like it's a change they were willing to make and it's not like the leadership over there has had any shake ups. They do seem to be in PR mode lately and I tend to wonder why...

Wow - Valve are finally done with illegal business practices? (well, it's very illegal here and irrespective of legality I'm very surprised they they kept it up so long in somewhere as litigatious as the US). Maybe Mastercard and Visa gave them an ultimatum - those merchant agreements are there for a reason.

Anyway, this is excellent news. I'm very glad that they are addressing the problems with their service, and this is the best place to start. I hope they decide to work on a functional update system next.

Well accounts can be linked to forum accounts now, so they *could* theoretically decide to punish forums users via taking action on their Steam accounts.

Now, I've never seen Valve do that yet, however a few years ago they did used to disable accounts if you pissed off support. I remember at least one forum thread on that subject. The OP of that thread was acting like ha had no idea why his account was disabled, that is, until a Valve employee posted in the thread explaining that he had to apologize to the Steam support staff member he verbally abused before he'd get access back.

I also find it hard to believe that Valve have stopped outright disabling accounts, especially as within the last month or so, I saw someone posting a response from Steam support stating their account had been disabled and would not be reactivated.

I wish I could find that thread again, but it was moved to "Help and Tips" - the cess pit where topics are moved to never be found again.

A friend of mine got his account dissabled like that. At first they banned him with some paypal/cc issues over Christmas sale. After 2 weeks of almost no response from them. He made the things too public and the response was:
"Per the Steam Subscriber Agreement, we have disabled the account and any games contained in it. The account will not be reactivated. "

And that was account with 3000+ $ worth in games.
So what you payed 3000$ to their asses... and in one moment... they can take what you paid for . Doesn't seem very normal.

Source please?

I do remember some issue with VAC around 1 and a half year ago. Mainly for TF2...

Not quite, there are still the Anti-Trust Laws (Barrier to Entry and Third Line Forcing) as well as the First Sale Doctrine. But this is at least one law they are done flouting. I too am surprised that there has been no law suits yet, though I know of very few people who would hire lawyers and go through that whole process for a $50 game.

For a 50$ game no... but let us say a account with 300 games?

I was banned from Steam trading for 2 weeks because a guy traded a fraudulently purchased game to me. Steam removed the game from my account and blamed me for having the game in my account. The other guy got my game for free. I was the victim and Steam punished me. I'm still on probation for something that was beyond my control. I now have a second account that i keep traded games in for 60 days to make sure that they are good before i transfer them into my main account. After that incident, i completely lost faith in Steam and have not purchased another game from their store. Now some games require Steamworks so i have no choice but i will not give Steam another dollar. I was the victim and they treated me like a criminal and wouldn't even listen to my pleas for justice.

Googled it for the past 15 minutes, but it seems that the people were unbanned?

I take it that Google doesn't work in the UK. The Kotaku article covering that is literally the first one n the list. I'd provide you a link, but I can't even click the link.

EDIT: Here you go http://kotaku.com/5597038/valve-bans-modern-warfare-players-by-mistake-apologizes-with-free-left-4-dead-2

The whole affair is both common knowledge and admitted to by Valve, they ended up having to give away a ton of free games to compensate all the users. I shudder to think what would happen if it's an isolated case.
Yes, they were, but only because it affected thousands of accounts and they were looking at a class action suit by the rest of the people who their VAC tagged as cheaters.

I remember when I made my account the official line was that VAC was infallible and that Valve would not be removing any of the VAC sanctions really ever.

Ok, so I finally found this link:
http://kotaku.com/5597038/valve-bans-modern-warfare-players-by-mistake-apologizes-with-free-left-4-dead-2
Valve banned a bunch of people by mistake. It then reversed the ban and gave everyone affected a free copy of L4D2, as well as a free copy to give to a friend.

Those vile scum, how dare they!

Do you have any support for this statement:
"Yes, they were, but only because it affected thousands of accounts and they were looking at a class action suit by the rest of the people who their VAC tagged as cheaters."?

Or is it just you spewing bile?

Do you have any evidence to support the belief that it doesn't happen?

Because, I find it incredibly hard to believe that Valve is perfect and never, ever makes a mistake with their software. The quote itself indicates that Valve knows there's a problem with their software, if they're having to undo that many mistaken VAC autobans, what makes you think that they don't miss a few of them?

But, I'm sure it's easier to go with OMG teh horr0r sumbody h8 steem, than it is to admit that people do lose access to the only servers due to Valve's software not working correctly and unless Valve admits that there's a mistake, which they may well not do, you're in a situation where the account is not in good standing with little recourse.

Such a surprise to see this thread take this turn.

Isn't that a silly thing to say? Really? Prove that they aren't banning people for no reason? How the fuck am I supposed to know? I've been a part of Steam since 2003 (when CS 1.6 was released) and I know lots of people who were banned. It then turned out that they were banned for cheating. There's only so much information that you can get from forum posts, and they are always simply one side of the story.

And no, I do not think that Valve are perfect. Far from it really. I find their 'customer support' abysmal. I hate their regional pricing. I hate their almost-always-online DRM. I hate their neglect for older games (i.e. CS 1.6) and I hate them for the useless VAC.

But this doesn't stop me from being rational. If you've got a quarrel about Valve, try to make it more rational than "Tell that to the many thousands of people that were banned by VAC due to a bug." Is that really representative of the situation? You come off no better as the generic moronic Steam hater.