well ive never changed my name but ive had friends whos changed their names so many times. makes me wonder if they would ever use it or leave it be so other people know who they are
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Also a big win for trade scammers and impersonators...
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oh damn I didnt even think about that since i dont do trading unless with friends. yep bad move now. but i guess before everyone couldve just changed their names alot anyway to get rid of the bad one. but this makes it easier
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I used to do a lot of trading before so many region locks and the first thing I looked at was how many times somebody had changed their name. I know some people do it legitimately but two dozen major name changes was always a good reason to investigate somebody more thoroughly...
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yeah it would. as i mentioned in my top comment i had a friend that pretty much changed it everyday, without the alias if they changed photo too i wouldve had no idea who they were
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Changing your nickname frequently doesn't necessarily equate someone to a scammer. Would you say byteframe is a scammer too? Look up his name change (not all) history here & here's mine (displaying just for maintaining neutrality). I'd recommend to get the 17-digit Steam 64-ID ASAP of any person you suspect is a scammer (for further investigation of them), then no amount of nickname changing & vanity url changing would help them escape.
There are many tools to get the Steam 64 IDs of users, I use "Enhanced Steam" browser extension (where I can see every user's Steam 64 ID on their profile page even if they have their profile under total lockdown), but that extension is going to be discontinued soon as the developer wants to prioritize (not blaming him for it, though) his family life; also check out the websites "SteamRep" "SteamDB" they have features where you can search for other user's info too.
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No one said that everyone who changes their names often is a scammer. It's just a method that many scammers use. Big difference.
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Well it wasn't my intention to equate people changing their nickname with scammers and I don't believe I did so. I'm certainly not accusing anybody in particular of anything. I said it was a potential reason for caution (one of many potential reasons for caution) and I'd stand by that.
I've used SteamRep and other tools for several years but there is a fatal flaw and that is that people have to get scammed before somebody has strikes against them on SteamRep or elsewhere. Quite often a large number of people can get scammed before somebody is flagged as a scammer and then the scammer may simply just move to another account.
I know what a Steam 64 ID is but I'm relying on other users knowing that as well in order to report the right people to SteamRep for SteamRep to be useful. And sadly nickname changes are enough to thoroughly confuse many users if they are even aware they should be reporting people to SteamRep. This is only going to add another level of obfuscation to the existing problems.
If I notice that somebody has changed their name a lot and then I notice that all of their recent names have been those of different high volume high rep traders (or something equally suspicious) then I'm simply not going to trade with them regardless of what any script tells me about them.
Like many changes to Steam this has both clear pros and cons - but above all seems to just not be fully thought through. There are clearly legitimate users who don't want to be embarrassed by all their old names but is there not a better way of dealing with that instead of this?
Why not just have visibility of 'this user has recently played as' instead of the current system? That way nobody would have to regret being 420BLAZEITJUGGALO4LYFE two years ago, but it could save on unintentional confusion when a friend suddenly changes their name and intentional deception as well.
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Agreed. But let's be honest, at this point trading is a thing of the past - Valve has been doing everything in their power to destroy what they created.
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It's definitely not a 'thing of the past', plenty of people still do it, but the issues with gifting through steam now means the selection of games available for trade has dwindled quite a bit.
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A big win for people that don't like scammers trying to steal their Steam accounts. There was a time when your Steam username was your community name as well. They didn't add the ability to have a separate community name from your username until later. One of the things you need to try and steal someone's Steam account is the Steam username, and it was easy find that out by looking at someone's history. If you have an older account, the first name on that history is your Steam username, and even for newer accounts, it could still be the case. I helped my niece create a Steam account ~5 years ago. We used something she couldn't forget (her real name) as the username, and she picked out her profile name. I just looked at her account's history and her username is the first name on the list even though she used a separate community name from the start.
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My account is 10 years old and I've never ever heard of that, nor experienced that, nor have an alt-log, so... no?
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I don't think so. Today, if you get scammed you're very unattentive, there are plenty of sites where you can check if the guy is trustyworthy or not. And if you have doubts, just don't trade... Is not so hard.
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Besides, it's not like name history was exactly keeping scammers at bay.
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100% for sure. Back when i was still using ST, it was one of the first things i was checking to spot scammers.
Sadly i don't think Valve give a single fuck about scammers/impersonators. I mean i've seen some of them getting reported by many people with legit proof and whatnot, all they got was a WEEK ban from market trade. Stolen games steal in their inventory. What about them getting a strike like VAC ban ? .__.
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yeah, tough luck
best advice is dont get scammed now
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Thank freaking goodness .. finally get rid of some of the stupid ones I've used in the past. Thanks for sharing this.
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They should make available this as a bit more "advanced" feature requiring user to have a bit higher level and/or higher trust factor on their steam account. Not everyone should be able to use it right from the start specially considering how many trade scammers and impersonators are out there...
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A feature for level 10+ users, perhaps? There would still be bad eggs that'd make it through, but it'd get rid of quite a few of them. Most people that would care about this sort of thing would be level 10+ anyways
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Okay i like it cause before had some stupid names like emotional dog...... hah and eMpY. im using like from cs 1.6 thats lets say 8 years already ^^
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A wonderful change for everyone, both normal users and despicable scammers alike.
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So now I really will not know who that person who changed their name is. Good thing nicknames exist. Still, good change.
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I would say this probably does more harm than good.
So it's your generic standard Valve change :/
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I have no use for it since I have never changed my Steam name (or plan to), but I can see how some people would enjoy the feature.
I also don't believe it's that big a problem scamming wise, as it's always been easy to double check the URL of who your trading with, to make sure it's the right person.
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Crap. I really enjoyed checking out some of the weird aliases people used on Steam.
One of my favorites was a former SG user who pretended to be a girl for ages. :D
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One of the mods here did it, too.
I really wasn't joking when I said some of the aliases people had amuse me. :3
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Amen sister, take a white dove for your troubles.
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I kind of enjoyed being one of the few people to have just a single alias on Steam, due to never changing it since inception.
Oh well
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You and me both. I came in here wondering, what's an "alias history"?
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Good move. I consider it a privacy concern not being able to delete old nicknames.
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I don't think this really changes much. Steam only saved the last 10 names in the past. I play a lot of counter strike and people often change their names to different things many times while playing. After using a bunch of names, sometimes quite weird names, I would usually just erase them all by changing it 10 times and adding a number at the end so you would see AllTracTurbo1, AllTracTurbo2, AllTracTurbo3...
You can view my aliases now to see what I mean. One of those weird names I used recently was "Gagged for your pleasure". It was a joke because we were messing around and an admin gagged me, which means I can't use the text chat in the game to talk to anyone. Other people that view my Steam account aren't going to know why I used the name and it's kind of weird, so I changed my name a bunch to time to remove it along with whatever other names I used.
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Hey, it's okay if you're into BDSM. I'm not judging you. ;)
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Now they just need to add an option for us to force request some of our friends to change their Steam names.
C'mon, we all have that one friend who still has the humour of a 12-year-old and has it proudly reflected in their Steam name.
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Damn, I wish I had too many old nicknames/aliases to clear out with this new feature. 😐
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Oh, nice I guess. I've only used 2 alias since I joined steam (I changed it at some point so it would match my username here) so it doesn't have much of a use for me but I guess some people are going to be happy... and scammers, those are going to be happy too.
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I'm never happy with my usernames, I always pick something really stupid and then regret it 5 seconds later. I usually just use a bunch of names like "Dude," "Stop" "Looking" "Through" "My" "Last" "Known" "Aliases" if I wanted to get rid of one I really hated on Steam but this way it's a lot more simple.
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Yeah I've seen people that change their alias quite frequently, and I can see how it'd be useful for them. But I can't shake the feeling that this is also like handing scammers a new tool to help their "business".
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It doesn't make much of a change - any scammer worth their salt already wiped their history, and most of the victims don't even know the past aliases option - like I ever used 2 or 3 names (mine +" idling" added to the end) so nobody could copied that ever, to begin with. If they max out the 10 slots to remove their old one, they still would had more aliases on the list than I had :) I
mpersonating is a weak, simple form of scamming that relies on looking similar, not looking the same. Otherwise levels, inventory items, URL, comments on profile would tell the dfference between original and the copycat and it would be way less common.
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I got impersonated once and had to go around explaining the victims that it wasn't me so they would stop accusing me and being hostile for no reason, ever since I had that (kinda baffling and confusing) experience anything that might help scammers makes me worry.
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I can understand how bad that can feel, especially victim or not, they messed it up. It's close to impossible to impersonate someone with matching level, number of badges, games, order of last 4 badges, screenshots, game history... people are just not informed / logical enough to know what to look for :(
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"Private account" solves pretty much all of that. Level not shown, badges not shown, games not shown, badges not show, screenshots not shown, game history not shown.
Back to you.
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Only works if a trader is also having a private account, but at that point the trader is the one who is making impersonating super easy ;)
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If you're not aware there's an imposter how would "Why'd you make your account private - make up some excuse" work. If people are already AWARE it's an imposter private or non-private doesn't really matter as they already find the original account.
If a comparrison can be made the imposting already failed.
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I've used this to remove stupid names I used in the past but I agree I was fine without it. Now scammers can rejoice :(
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Oh nice. Thanks for the tip. Going to use it right away.
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pretty fine with me. you could already change your name 10 times within a couple of minutes, any scammer could have renamed their accounts easily and no one would have been able to see thier former account names then, as the history only showed thier last 10 aliases.
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Just found out they've added the option. Hurray!
As someone who accidentally deleted last letter from his username, saved the changes, and found out only a month later, I'm more than happy I could finally delete it :) It drove me crazy :)
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