The move is intended to prevent malware installed on users' computers from affecting trades. Humans all the way, baby.

Jan 11, 2015 13:44 GMT  ·  By

Valve has decided to add CAPTCHA as a part of the confirmation process for trading items on Steam.

The company’s decision stems from its hope to cull automated trading processes made by malware installed on users’ machines.

CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, which is pretty self-explanatory.

The company has further revealed that a couple of the already existing third-party trading services are exempt from the check, in order for them to be able to continue activity.

“We’re updating trading to include a CAPTCHA as part of confirmation process. We know it’s a bit of a hassle, and we don’t like making trading harder for users, but we do expect it to significantly help customers who are tricked into downloading and running malware from losing their items,” the official announcement reads.

However well-intentioned Valve might have been, it appears that the change is already introducing another wave of unwanted problems for users of the worldwide digital distribution service.

Some community members are reporting encountering issues that prevent them from initiating trade altogether, while others have pointed out that their existing trade offers have been reset.

A select few also report that the newly added CAPTCHA test is crashing their Steam client.

In any case, the majority of users are most likely not encountering any issues at all. Go Team Human!