14 DAY TRIAL // The team at Valve in charge of the Steam digital distribution service is announcing that it is introducing a new set of changes to account security and trading to make sure that it's easy to protect the player's data and keep the entire ecosystem as secure as possible.
According to an official announcement, starting on March 9 those who do not yet use the Steam Guard mobile authenticator will see their trade hold duration increased to 15 days, with a reduction to just one for those who have been long friends on the service, and listing on the market will also come with a hold of 15 days before an item can be sold.
At the same time, Steam support will not restore items that left accounts after a successful trade or transaction, a new measure that applies to all accounts regardless of the security that they use.
According to Valve, around 95% of daily trades on Steam now use the increased security, and there was no decrease in overall volume, but the holds are being extended to make sure that accounts are secure when they enter the market.
The company adds, "Our work isn't finished, but we've seen enough progress in account security to finally address an old problem: item duplication. Currently, if an account is compromised and items have been lost through a successful trade or market transaction, we would manually restore the items, creating duplicates of the original items in the process."
Valve will no longer manually restore items, but it will continue to work with gamers who have been affected by issues with trading to make sure that they get the best possible experience possible on Steam.
The company is aiming to balance security with ease of use
Since the trading system was added to Steam, Valve has seen a split in the user base, with some becoming high volume traders while the majority of the community only exchanges cards and other content with friends in limited quantities.
The new changes are designed to introduce a better balance between security of user data and the ease with which an item can be listed and then sold or traded.
Valve is also asking users to post their feedback linked the new changes so that it can improve the experience via future tweaks.
Steam has not been affected by a major security breach, but individual accounts still get compromised from time to time and such an event can have a big negative impact on a player and on his ability to enjoy the video games that he loves.
Steam remains the most important digital distribution service on the PC, but it needs to evolve and improve in order to make sure that it is not threatened by the Windows 10 store, which will benefit from increased integration with the Xbox One, or the new Origin, which is now offering free titles for all its users.
Valve is also working with HTC to launch the new Vive virtual reality system, which is offered as a pre-order at the moment and will cost interested users 799 dollars or Euros and will begin shipping on April 5.