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Family Sharing enables you to play games from other family members' libraries, even if they are online playing another game.
This is huge! Previously it was annoying to share games become if someone was playing my game and I opened something up they would be kicked out.
If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you will also be banned in that game.
This sucks.
It does but it also makes sense. This way people can’t have “family” member alt accounts for cheating with the primary as a parachute.
But… I’d like to see something like “if a family member gets banned then their access to sharing is blocked and you will get a temp ban”
This way I can rain down hell on whoever screwed up and the penalty for trusting them isn’t permanent
I'm pretty sure this was already the case in some games before, depending on the netcode of the game.
The old FAQ said:
What if a borrower is caught cheating or committing fraud while playing my shared games? Your Family Sharing privileges may be revoked and your account may also be VAC banned if a borrower cheats or commits fraud. In addition, not all VAC protected games are shareable. We recommend you only authorize familiar Steam Accounts and familiar computers you know to be secure. And as always, never give your password to anyone.
If it's a game with VAC it probably always worked as described above, but for example: People in Fall Guys did use this trick to avoid getting banned for cheating until they turned off Family Share for Fall Guys shortly after release.
If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you will also be banned in that game.
This sucks.
Yeah, but I an see why as it would be easy to abuse. Only need one copy of the game and you could cycle accounts that never owned the game out of the family sharing when they get banned.
Might be other ways to limit that, but would also likely need more restrictions on the feature that might be more annoying.
Maybe they could allow me to set a game as not shareable.
Family view does this.
Oh cool I guess they thought of everything then
Do bans typically only affect the multiplayer portion of a game? I could see my nephew fucking around and finding out with one of my games. I never play competitive multiplayer, but if I got locked out of the game completely, I'd be pretty cross with him.
Even worse, a VAC ban in your game will probably transfer to your account in general. You won't only be affected in that game, but in any games that check your VAC status.
I guess don't share it with them, or have a conversation about the consequences of their actions if they happen to cheat if you can trust them. Allowing for the loophole is worse than it possibly hurting a few people though. Cheaters ruin games for everyone else, and they don't have any control over it at all.
I think it's fair. You should know if your family cheats if you share your games with them
Nah its impossible to always know if they will cheat. It could be their first time.
If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you will also be banned in that game.
This sucks.
On the other hand, Rust had a cheater issue at some point because they only checked the account ID when banning in EAC. Cheaters leveraged this by purchasing the game in a master account, and using secondary accounts tied with Steam Family Sharing to play.
Secondary account banned? No problem. Log out, share with another account, rinse and repeat. From what I can see they disabled Family sharing altogether.
I don't think it's horrible. First, it prevents abuse, and second it adds extra social pressure to not cheat if you're using this since you know if you get caught all your family comes with you. Sure, maybe some parent sharing with a stupid child it sucks, but I use this with my brother and we're both adults and know it isn't an issue for either of us. I don't really care if this prevents more cheaters from existing. The harm will be very minimal, with pretty good upsides for the vast majority of people.
It's stuff like this that makes me not even think about pirating games. Imagine a company that literally just improves features and makes it easier for me and my family to enjoy the media they sell. Why the fuck wouldn't I buy from their store?
Why streaming services don't understand this, I'll never know. Seems like the games industry is riding purely on Steam's usability while the film/TV industry is speedrunning enshittification.
Every company os speedrunning enshittification except steam. Like. Look at the other game launchers. They are all shit.
Epic didn't need any catching up tho 😎
Its better than Ubisoft connect or EA Launcher. But it sucks nontheless.
Or maybe we expect too much because of steam
Well, every one of these is a different pile of crap, but a pile of crap nonetheless.
It was supposed to be a Steam competitor, and they openly said it, but the only competition it won is the dumbest fucking ideas brought to PC gaming - and that being exclusivity. But after a few released games, I've realized it was a good thing! I could try the game for free, and wait a year when the game has those nice QoL features. For BL3, I started when the game already had tons of extra content.
The only games I've ever pirated are Sims 4 (I ain't paying 1000 bucks worth of dlc) and Starfield (I still feel robbed) because Steam just makes buying games at reasonable prices so easy.
The other day I bought RDR2, player it for an hour, didn't enjoy it and returned it no questions asked
The only thing stopping me playing that game through again is the first part of it being unskippable.
Fuck that prologue.
I never got through the prologue either... but I'm a completionist, and each mission was giving me extra parameters that made things so much harder than just 'beating' the mission.
So the main takeaway is that you no longer need to be offline if 2 family members want to play at the same time as long as they’re playing different games.
That’s fair and it should alleviate a bunch of headaches.
Absolutely amazing! I'm so glad they're finally doing this. The restriction was such a pain.
Awesome! That would mean that family sharing finally works like I thought it would work. No more tears because I started a game while the kid was playing another one.
What happens if my brother gets banned for cheating while playing my game?
If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you (the game owner) will also be banned in that game. Other family members are not impacted.
That kinda sucks.
That's necessary, "it was my brother who cheated" is the oldest lie.
It would be great to blanket disallow games that you can get banned in. Especially VAC bans.
Or alternatively send the rest of the family detailed explanations of how the idiot in question cheated and what they did. 😈
A thousand times this. I'd even be for a button to add whitelist for games they wanna play. I am super sensitive about Mr acc, and the last thing is having a ban on record. Especially when I had to spend 10 years with a trade probation because my dumb ass duped some items on TF2.
Is it though? If they are not banning the whole family, what prevents me from adding a new little brother?
The price tag of the game generally
Except that lie is often used when sharing an account.
Under this system, there is no ambiguity in terms of if it was you or your brother.
Yes there is. You can just make another account for yourself and add it to the family, then use it to cheat. That's the reason why they have to ban both.
Aaah, didn't think about that. Darn! Can't have nice things.
Yeah it's unfortunate that a few bad Apples have to ruin it for everyone 😅.
I kinda hope they grant the ability to block some games from being shared. I trust my kids not to use cheats, but I can understand being a bit paranoid from being banned from a game you really enjoy and not wanting to take a chance.
Yes, especially if you can be banned for your little brother borrowing your game and swearing.
Well, it never changed for years
So this is great except for the cheating thing. Why am I being punished as the games owner because someone else in my family was banned for cheating? Ban the cheater not the owner.
So people don’t have 5 accounts they can cheat under for a single game purchase.
Do it on a 3 strikes basis. They don't ban an account in a single offense. And therefore shouldn't do that to account groups either. It's not perfect. But it's much more forgiving and fair.
you're not getting banned from steam, you're generally getting banned from participating in anti cheat secured lobbies of a single game or a group of games.
single player experience is generally not affected.
having a 3 strike system before getting banned from multiplayer just means it's 66% cheaper for a cheater to get a new copy of the game.
this is also not new and has been the case for the current family sharing system as well.
That's how most bans already work, so what's the problem? You got to be quite egregious for Steam to ban you outright.
Honestly I think it's a good thing. It strongly decentivizes cheating by there being a possibility of real-world consequences for cheating.
Don't harbor cheaters 4head