Steam Support RAGE!

[jack.mitchell]

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!

 

[jack.mitchell]

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.

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.

Also, signing up with a university account was a pretty dumb thing to do.

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.

 

[jack.mitchell]

You uni account was the most reliable?

You do realise hotmail/gmail have been free to use and sign up instantly like...forever?

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.

 

[jack.mitchell]

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.

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.

 

[jack.mitchell]

This. I'm still amazed how people can get so tin-foil-hat over services like Gmail.

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?

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]

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?

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!