So, my steam account got stolen. Well damn. I submit a ticket to steam support with all of the information required to get my account back. I had always heard their support was a bit slow and figured it might take a few days. That was now 20 days ago. At around the two week mark I figured there has to be a reason and started looking around for some kind of solution. I find /r/steam's weekly community report thread, and was absolutely shocked. Every week the thread is full of people reporting 4 - 8 weeks for a reply. Stories of replies taking 50 days should be strange outliers, instead this has become the norm.

Steam is a service with tens of millions of customers, and is the poster child for digital sales of games. A company with a product that large should not have support that is this abysmal. I know Valve has a very unique working environment, one without a dedicated support team, but I don't understand how they can let it get this bad. Worse, I don't understand why the whole of the games community isn't pushing the issue. When EA launched Origin their subpar support was the topic of rage filled threads for months, but I don't remember their issues being this severe.

For an extreme juxtaposition, lets look at Blizzard support, who have a fairly long standing reputation for being outstanding. I recently had to remove the authenticator from my account because I forgot to transfer it to my new phone before I wiped the old one. My ticket was resolved within 30 seconds after I submitted it. In the time it takes to make a bag of popcorn, I had sent a ticket, had it resolved, and re set up the authenticator on my new phone. Meanwhile I'm considering the possibility of buying games on a new steam account because I don't want to wait another month to play SOMA, or any of the other 100 or so of my games I now am locked out of.

This may have gotten a bit ranty, but really this needs to be talked about. Any other company with as many customers would be getting absolutely destroyed for service even half as bad. Anyway, feel free to share any of your own stories. Or the email of your inside guy at Valve. Tell him there's $20 in it for him if my ticket somehow becomes front of the line.

I'm curious how your Steam account got stolen. Did you get phished, or click on a link someone sent you and end up downloading a virus?

Steam's support is getting better, but it still sucks. I've had tickets get resolved in a day, and others take four months. There is nothing you can do but wait.

Yeah, Steam support is notorious for being or non-existent. I don't know what else to say to help your situation.

I am curious on how your Steam account was stolen. I had to change my password on Steam recently, and to get it changed, I had to enter a code sent to my email address. Is there a way people get around this, or did the person who stole your account also have access to your email address?

Customer support costs money. Gabe need to buy knives for that money. End of story.

Blizzard mainly provides support for their monthly fee game so its in their own interest to keep customers happy.

@rethla: @Mike: Not really sure how it happened, but yea, whoever got it must have had access to my email as well. The password and email associated with the steam account were changed, but there are no confirmation emails in my inbox. Thinking is whoever it is must have deleted them to cover their tracks. I don't click dumb email links or do any of the standard internet mistakes that let this happen, but I must have messed up somewhere. Scan showed nothing and I was due for a reformat and upgrade for windows 10 anyway, so I went ahead nuked the drive. The weird thing is whoever has the acount is logging on and off every couple days, but isn't playing any games, hasn't traded my items, hasn't added or removed any friends, and hasn't even changed the profile name. Weird.

Unfortunately I know all I can really do is wait, it just seems insane that this is the standard experience and people aren't making a stink about it. This seems like it should be a major thing, but maybe cause it's Valve, a company most seem to like, they get away with it?

Well, people are complaining about it. There are a number of threads on Giant Bomb about it, just as there are pretty much on every gaming forum I've ever seen all over the web. You said yourself that the Steam subreddit is full of these complaints. It's just that Valve isn't doing enough about it. They are improving, they just aren't doing nearly enough to address the situation. It's part of the reason I try to buy as many games as possible from GOG these days.

This is what happens when the PC community demanded a STEAM monopoly. Customers get suckered in to buying a ton of cheap games and rejected its competitors and now Valve is under no obligation to make their customer service better.

Blizzard support is a huge juggernaut machine, they are basically their own things in separate countries, Blizzard itself and Blizzard support are kind of 2 different entities. They also had it's own fair share of problems over the years, to say otherwise is just false, they have just been a it for a while now and smoothed things out over time.

And yeah for a company doing as much business as they are Steam really needs to get their shit together in the personal handling department. It wouldn't be amiss to adopt Blizzards approach and just farm that shit out, only needing to oversee it.

On the other hand I have so far used their new refund policy a couple of times and it has been a pain free automatic process. So they are doing some things right.

Why they get away with it? I have no real answer, and I don't think simple fanboy'ism is enough. If I had to take a shot in the dark it could simply be that their customer to problem ratio is just not that bad is all, due to sheer numbers they are dealing with + if those things do get resolved in the end people are just happy they got their shit back and don't raise a stink, instead of the possibility of Valve simply saying: too bad that's your fault nothing we can do.

Tho if I was in your shoes I'd be pissed off like hell for having to wait so long.

This scares me no joke... sounds horrible getting steam jacked and not having access to your games.

Nobody demanded shit. They just offered a better service. As someone who was trying to buy digital from other companies in the period before Steam took off and while it was on the rise, it's competition was far far worse. The big sales we think of now actually came later, much later, they were not the initial push that made it into the biggest retailer.

That's fair. I'm sure there's some kind of confirmation bias for me since I feel wronged and it should be a bigger deal and so on. Hopefully they do get this sorted out for real eventually.

@i_stay_puft: Just make sure you set up two-step verification for everything possible.

I've never had a problem with Steam support. My issues always get resolved within an hour- sometimes a day.

But anyway. You could always get SOMA on GOG. Just saying. You don't have to wait.

I'm sure that was for simple stuff though, right? I've never heard of a compromised account being resolved in hours or days, it's always weeks, or sometimes even months. Usually with no response while the person waits it out.

Considering that even Uplay customer support got back to me within 24 hours the one time I actually needed them, you'd imagine Valve would be at least equally capable. Being capable and being willing are two different things though.

I hope you get your stuff sorted out.

This is a good reason to have a proper retail key or something associated with the account. I have the old half-life 2 game of the year box with the code still waiting just in case i have to dispute ownership.

The thing I like about the myth of steam customer support is how many people say they've seen or heard from them. I mean you all sound crazy like those folks who been abducted by aliens or say they've seen bigfoot. We all know steam has no support... Very much like the tooth fairy and Persona 5 in 2015 they're just myths by folks with crazy imaginations!

IIRC they've put out statements before saying that they agree that their support is lacking and in need of overhaul but that it'll take some time for them to plug the bigger holes. So they're working on it, basically.

Thank you for motivating me to update my steam password

Can't they be sued for stuff like this? EULA's don't mean much in court and you paid for a bunch of stuff that you can't access due to reasons beyond your control, seems wrong.

Sued for what tho?

If you lost your keys and someone came in and robbed your flat would you immediately sue the landlord? If OP can show Valve that it's his account I'm sure they won't have an issue restoring it, but even that is essentially in good faith from them technically. When someone gets your CC info and drains or partially spends money from your bank account, sometimes the bank can reverse that, sometimes they can't. But ultimately you aren't suing the bank generally, because they aren't at fault, you are, as someone responsible for security of his own shit (if it goes missing because of you and not the bank obv.) and the thief for taking it. If someone got access to your gmail account, you aren't going to sue Google, assuming it's not they who got hacked or leaked the info. Etc. You get the idea.

I'm not writing this to absolve Valve or anything, I agree with the OP the customer support wait time for serious issues is shit and a major problem they should fix. The above is just the basic logic of the situation as I see it.

If the security failed on their end and you can prove that somehow, sue away.

But generally stuff like simple passwords are reused by users themselves, find it from some weak service or just datamine it; then get access to email or try with other services you know that person used, etc. I've been on the receiving end of this when my old WoW account got "hacked", and I had to supply physical proof of ID documents.

Finally. If you can prove to a court that it was indeed you who owns that account and made those purchases you sure as shit can prove it to Valve themselves much easier, now if they refuse to restore said account after provided proof then indeed there might be a basis to sue them.

I guess one can also sue them for poor customer support maybe, not sure how that would hold up.

At least that's how I see the situation, just reasoning it out, I'm not myself a lawyer by any means.

I always get level 0 people adding me as a friend then messaging me with "WTF?!" followed by a url they want me to click on.

I've never had to contact steam support though I have refunded a couple of games and those worked almost instantly.

I have a friend on steam who apparently got his account hacked: http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198003378041

If you go to page 9 of the comments on his profile, you'll see that he also says that the hackers got 50 euros from his paypal. The hackers were also unlocking achievements on his profile, he unlocked every achievement for like 100 games (not exaggerating) in the same minute at one point, and they literally unlocked THOUSANDS of achievements within however long they had his account. I think what was happening was that the hackers were justifying their stealing from his paypal by unlocking achievements on his profile, to mock him.

This is why he is also banned on Astats: http://astats.astats.nl/astats/User_Info.php?SteamID64=76561198003378041

I don't know maybe you would like to contact him for advice or for emotional support? He is French but he knows English. I think I met him through Tomb Raider multiplayer.

Anyway man, God Speed! Like others have said you can buy SOMA from GOG. Maybe the guys at valve are currently going balls to the wall with their controller, steam machine, steam link etc so they have limited resources for other things.

I was gonna say this exact same thing. Yeah it can be annoying to deal with but having your email compromised is the worst possible thing that can happen. If you make it incredibly difficult to get into your email by requiring someone to have an alternate set of random passwords then your safety goes up significantly.

I'd recommend everyone get the mobile app for 2-factor verification. Works well, very little setup, and makes it if not impossible then at least very, very hard for anyone to get access to your account.