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“Fraud” and “simply” don’t belong in the same sentence. This is coming from someone who’s spent years working with many fraud departments in major companies. Wa
by agentofoblivion 5y ago
“Fraud” and “simply” don’t belong in the same sentence. This is coming from someone who’s spent years working with many fraud departments in major companies. Wack-a-mole doesn’t work, they just scale their account creation.
- gambiting 5y agoWell then please explain what is difficult here. You initiate a purchase with bitcoin, valve instantly grants you access, then few hours later valve checks if the transaction has been confirmed in the blockchain or not. If it hasn't, then the entitlement is removed. What's not simple about it?
- srcreigh 5y agoWhat about people who do this 10x a day to play free games forever?
- ric2b 5y agoForce brand new accounts with no purchase history to wait for the transaction to confirm?
- Siira 5y agoThe UX sucks sufficiently that it shouldn't affect their bottom line.
- naniwaduni 5y agoHow much worse is this than people who do this 0.5x a day with 48-hour returns?
- gambiting 5y agoYou let the user do it twice then ban them from using bitcoin payments?
- SkittyDog 5y agoThey already answered this question in their previous post... The fraudster scales up their account creation. You ban then after 2, they switch to a new account... which you ban after 2, and they switch to another new account, which you ban after 2... and so on, ad infinitum.
- miracle2k 5y agoAccounts here can be blocked after an average of 10 minutes.
- stale2002 5y agoBut then what? Someone downloads and plays a game for an hour, gets banned, then goes through the whole process of having to do all that again? Doesn't seem like a good user experience. All to get a free hour of gameplay? There are easier ways of pirating games. The only possible usecase for this kind of fraud would be if you can buy digital items, transfer and then sell those digital items. But even then, that might be difficult to do all in 10 minutes.
- SkittyDog 5y agoI don't care how well it would work, and I'm not arguing any of your points... I don't even understand why you people like these video games, so I'm the last person who should opine on what constitutes a good UX. My comment was intended to point out that it's parent comment didn't bother to read the grandparent comment, which had clearly answered the question it was asking. But then the parent comment author edited themself, I assume to avoid looking foolish. So I guess it's irrelevant now.
- stale2002 5y ago> I don't care how well it would work Ok, so then I guess it isn't really a problem then. The whole just ban them "ad infinitum", is totally a reasonable solution to all of this.
- rebuilder 5y agoSeems pretty marginal - you’d have to restart, on average, every 10 minutes.
- nurettin 5y agoAre you suggesting that there may be a human being on earth who has the tenacity to enjoy games while creating new accounts, pulling off successful bitcoin heists every 1-2 hours and risking losing their save games? And doing that forever? This website is just surreal.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> Are you suggesting that there may be a human being on earth who has the tenacity to enjoy games while creating new accounts, pulling off successful bitcoin heists every 1-2 hours and risking losing their save games? Most of the “tenacity” parts implied there are automatable, so it's mostly about “can people enjoy the paid-for experience of a game with ephemeral rather than durable accounts”, which, well, really depends on the design of the game.
- nurettin 5y agoYou don't know what implied means.
- kadoban 5y agoWhat whack-a-mole? Just automate it so if it gets double-spent, you revoke the key. If you really feel like it, cancel the account if they keep doing it, but I'm not sure you even need to bother. What have you lost? The bandwidth to download the game?
- rmbyrro 5y agoI think it does, there are levels of fraudulent activity. Calling "simply" doesn't mean to make it benign.