Steam Support RAGE!

jack.mitchell

jack.mitchell

jack.mitchell

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Joined
15 Apr 2008
Posts
1,031
Location
West Didsbury, Manchester
So, my first issue I have had with Steam in two years, and I now understand why so many people regularly rage at Steam. My issue is as follows:

I was at university when I signed up for my steam account using my university email. I have now finished university and they have terminated my university email address and storage. I had forgotten that I had used my university email address for my steam account. When I put a fresh copy of Windows on last week it asked me to confirm who I was via verification email. Now, I cannot access that email account to verify myself so I need to change my email address, however, I cannot change my email address until I have verified my account, see the endless circle here?

So, at first I thought, no issue. Contact Steam Support, so I made a new account, sent them query through the proper channels and I get a nice automated email back thanking me for my question and they will be in touch soon.

This was last Sunday and I have not heard a single peep from them. What are they playing at? A multi-million pound valued online only based company and they cannot manage a simple email verification issue within 5 working days.

Apologies for cluttering the forums with ranting but I was hoping to spend some of my now very limited free time playing online games with my old friends from uni like we used to on bank holidays back at uni! So now I am raging and need to vent.

A note to all, check your current steam email is still valid!
 
Expected this to be a thread about the game RAGE, not a rage at Steam lol

You are just a bank account to them, they will take as long as they want to, to reply lol
 
If you have a retail copy of anything activated on Steam then take a photo of it clearly showing an activation code. It might help speed things along.
 
This should be a good warning to everyone, when using your email address for something important/long lasting, such as an account for a game, or anything like that, make sure you use an email account that you know will be available for MANY years to come, such as a gmail account, or even register your own domain and that way you can just point it to whichever email service you like, even if they stop doing business and you can just point the domain elsewhere.
 
Steam support get thousands of tickets a day, so it's a case of being patient. Although, five days seems a long time. Have you been adding additional responses to your ticket to "encourage" them? Doing that puts you to the back of the queue afaik.

Also, signing up with a university account was a pretty dumb thing to do. :p
 
Dist said:
This should be a good warning to everyone, when using your email address for something important/long lasting, such as an account for a game, or anything like that, make sure you use an email account that you know will be available for MANY years to come, such as a gmail account, or even register your own domain and that way you can just point it to whichever email service you like, even if they stop doing business and you can just point the domain elsewhere.
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I concur, I now have run my own email server for the past year with my own domains and intend to have none of the issues that have plagued me over the past 5 years of providers going down/multiple changes of email addresses.

orderoftheflame said:
Also, signing up with a university account was a pretty dumb thing to do. :p
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It was the most reliable email address I had at the time, it was either that or myrealbox.com which was going down the pan as my main email service provider. I didn't think 2/3 years in the future I may get burned for using a professionally managed service where my emails were stored no less than one mile from my house. On the transfer over as the university told us they were deleting accounts, my steam account never got changed as they never send emails (or I have unsubscribed) and I don't use my email address to log into it so it slipped through the transfer net, so to say.
 
While it's REALLLLLLLLLY annoying and I understand where you are coming from, do as suggested: Send a photo of any retail game on that account. It's probably the only way ahead, unless you have details of your account, and details of the transactions for non-retail games.
 
metbandit1 said:
You uni account was the most reliable?

You do realise hotmail/gmail have been free to use and sign up instantly like...forever?
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I do, but surprisingly I preferred to trust a professional institution where I could speak to the administrator directly over Microsoft or Google, who are well known to be very well regarded companies when dealing with private data...

I have a Hotmail address from 10 years ago, I have a gMail address as Google insist you have one to do anything but I choose not to use them out of privacy concerns and the fact I like to know where my data is. It took me a long time to jump on the Steam bandwagon due to trust issues like this.

However, the issue at hand is not that I chose my university email address, just that I no longer have access to the email account I signed up with and Steam seem to be very very slow at dealing with what I would expect is a very common issue. Even more so considering they are an online based business and should understand that these things happen.
 
Scougar said:
While it's REALLLLLLLLLY annoying and I understand where you are coming from, do as suggested: Send a photo of any retail game on that account. It's probably the only way ahead, unless you have details of your account, and details of the transactions for non-retail games.
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I don't actually own any retail boxed games, I only have maybe 10 games on my steam account, none of which were retail activated.

L4D/Stalker Series/Orange Box/Half Life Episodes/TF... a few more that I can't remember but that pretty much sums it up.
 
metbandit1 said:
You uni account was the most reliable?

You do realise hotmail/gmail have been free to use and sign up instantly like...forever?
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This. I'm still amazed how people can get so tin-foil-hat over services like Gmail. :p

I suspect if you can't link any retail games to your account, or validate the email address, you could be looking at struggling to get it back. I'm guessing if you've not used it for a many years you're unlikely to have any of the billing cards or purchases on statements any more?
 
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I think you may have some issues getting it back without any hard evidence that you ever actually owned the account. Maybe if you have the payment methods and any card numbers that you have used on that account in the past then that may be one rout.
 
orderoftheflame said:
This. I'm still amazed how people can get so tin-foil-hat over services like Gmail. :p

I suspect if you can't link any retail games to your account, or validate the email address, you could be looking at struggling to get it back. I'm guessing if you've not used it for a many years you're unlikely to have any of the billing cards or purchases on statements any more?
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I still have all my old purchase invoices etc as I backed up my whole university email folder structure into my self hosted email server, I've got emails right back to my Welcome to Steam email.

Just as a note, it's not so tin-foil. Have you not noticed how all your ads in your email account are related to your emails? It's not magic, that's purposeful parsing of your emails and targeting adverts towards you.

Also I'm part of a lot of programming mailing lists which means that I can get upwards of 5000 emails a day, which makes it a bit quicker managing and backing up them when they're 2 meters of network cable away.
 
jack.mitchell said:
Just as a note, it's not so tin-foil. Have you not noticed how all your ads in your email account are related to your emails? It's not magic, that's purposeful parsing of your emails and targeting adverts towards you.
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I don't mind a computer parsing my emails looking for keywords when in exchange I get an 8Gb inbox for free, accessible anywhere in the world, a very good anti-spam filter, and almost zero downtime :p

As for steam, I think that its usually a couple of days, though as mentioned above it depends on how many tickets they are getting. What is known is that tickets sit in a queue, new ones go to the back, and if you edit/add anything to your ticket, it pushes it to the back as well, so don't keep replying to it to try and bump it, since that just bumps it to the back.

If you do end up waiting for 10+ days, register on the Steam forums and make a thread saying you've been waiting for 10 days. Valve guys moderate the forum and that could get them to hunt down your ticket
 
Your reasons sound a lot like tin-foil excuses...

You didn't want to sign up a steam account to your hotmail or gmail because of your opinions on their security of data, so instead you signed up for it with an email that has an expiry date? :confused:

But yeah. Someone probably looked at it but didn't take it seriously. So its probably up to what other people suggested and posting on the forum if you don't hear anything.
 
Did you give them information to prove you own the account, i.e Address/DOB/Name/Age/Steam ID/Recent Purchases and any other stuff to help them solve it easier? i had two issues with Steam in 7 or so years of using them and both been sorted fairly quickly.
 
Evilsod said:
Your reasons sound a lot like tin-foil excuses...

You didn't want to sign up a steam account to your hotmail or gmail because of your opinions on their security of data, so instead you signed up for it with an email that has an expiry date? :confused:
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I just full stop don't like using Hotmail or GMail so I used my university account for everything, until about a year ago when I setup my own mail server and transferred everthing over but forgot about my Steam account.

Anyway, all the fuss I kicked up yesterday must have worked as they've asked for proof of purchase which I have in the form of all my backed up emails - so hopefully I'll be playing soon!
 
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