Mishka and his artist friends are spending the night at an inn not far from Moscow. During dinner, they start talking about how much they hate the regime and how the Soviet system is failing.
Mishka, sensing the opportunity for a good prank, then sneaks off to the kitchen and pays one of the waiters to bring a cup of tea to the table in exactly five minutes. He then gets back to the table and says ”hey guys, lets tone down this discussion, the regime is always listening.”
His friends berate him for being such a coward, whereupon Mishka, to prove his point, leans close to an electrical socket and says ”Comrade Major, could you please bring me a cup of tea.” When the waiter promptly arrives with the tea, everyone laughs at the prank.
Later that night, when they have all gone to bed, the KGB arrives, arresting everyone in the group except for Mishka.
”Why are you letting me go, when you are taking all the others?” Mishka asks an officer, who then replies ”Comrade Major liked your joke.”
Prolly no reference, just thought Mishka in the context sounds odd instead of just Misha, it really could be any name unless we're referencing a real person, but I'm oblivious if that's the case of who it might be.
Ahh, I got you, it's just the "I'm not sure if it's intended" part that was throwing me off, but you meant you're not sure if they intended to make a "fake" name, not that they intended a hidden joke.
Oh yeah easily. Look at the steam deck subreddits and see how many times people have gotten replacements for their steam deck well out of warranty. The one time I had to recover my account (despite actually having the password) took about 5 minutes before I was back in. Their customer service truly feels like they say each time "damn dawg that fucking sucks. But I got you.)
Yeah in 2020 my e-mail got hacked and I got noticed my password got changed. Got to customer service and could prove via a receipt number i found on PayPal from a while back that it was in fact my account. Got it back in less than a day! Luckily I got everything back that was compromised but I still get an email at least once a year from DoorDash with new discounts for someone named Ming. DoorDash isn’t even available in my country.
My index tether cord frayed after about 3 years of use. Replacement was $120 so I emailed them and told them what happened and included a picture. I had a new tether cord at my doorstep in days, for free.
I haven’t used Steam in a few years. Recently, we were playing some of the Tiny Epic games with our son and he told me about the board game emulator on Steam, so I went to log back in. I couldn’t and was prompted to contact Steam and get my account back. Took them just 4.5 hours to get back to me and get me back into my account. I was amazed as I thought it would take days (or weeks) and a lot of hassle. Very impressed with their customer support!
Yeah that's nice. Mine was fucked from the get go, and STILL doesn't dock with any dock more than a few times before stopping. 13 days after order they wouldn't refund me, and just had me doing the same troubleshooting garbage over and over. I essentially have a Steam deck looking paperweight.
Honestly, my son once fell for a scammer and gave his steam pw... I immediately mailed steam support when he told me in shame that he got rekt by a scammer..
It took less than 2 hours for steam to undo the damage, return the account and eliminate the scammer from their system.
This was well over a year ago, but I've always had respect for the steam support, despite them having no direct phone line, they are usually effective and fast.
Steam .07 seconds after i send my login info to "stem suport":
Sir your account has been compromised, pick whichever professional mercenary you prefer from the following list. Your problem will be sorted quickly and efficiently.
In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them....maybe you can hire Steam Support.
I notice a letter has been slid under my front door
“Greetings. Someone was attempting to hack your account so we dropped a JDAM on their house before they got the chance. No need to thank us. -Cheers, Jared :)”
True but I was hacked very recently like not even a month ago. I sent a ticket they never responded 25 hours later exactly I got an email saying I have my account back. Crazy fast
Yea I'm having trouble switching a game on steam over to a new computer, probably got about $400 in that game with dlc's, can't get a hold of anyone from steam and their bot "customer service" just sends me in circles. It's ludicrous
"Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them... Maybe you can hire Steam Customer Care"
Eh, my first steam account got hacked and by the time I got it back it was VAC banned and they wouldn’t do anything about it. I had a few games but it was a lot as a kid with no credit/debit card at the time.
His name is Codpiece) his 100% real canon villian origin story is
"He was told that he wasn't big enough in High School, and though the girl who said it meant his height, he thought she meant his...penis."
I can not emphasize enough that I'm not making this up
The way he was beaten was
"He was eventually stopped when Coagula, who was wearing a frog mask due to not having a costume when she came across his crime spree, got him to lower his guard and used her powers to dissolve his codpiece multi-weapon."
I've seen worse films that are rated R, it sucks because it was a jab about Hollyweird not the porn business. It only had foul language but no nudity at all. Prolly a dildo or four
So Steam protects you from scam games, publishers not honouring refunds, and hackers? And they're pushing for bans on shovelware and games with mandatory ads?
This is the kind of thing that can happen when a company is privately owned, and pretty much can't when it's publically listed. One of the last great holdouts.
Yeah, gaben says that piracy is a service problem.
But somehow people paying less isn't a service problem since gaben doesn't allow even non-steam versions of games that are sold on steam to be sold for less in another stores.
You really can’t see why it would be unfair to leverage Steam’s platform features and demonstrably paying user base for free advertising and then funnel sales away by lowering prices at a different storefront?
Steam is already being generous by letting game keys be sold outside of Steam where Steam gets ZERO revenue and still have them redeemable on Steam. A dev can literally peddle Steam keys on their website and Steam gets nothing.
Steam never tried to force third-party exclusives. All they ask is you play fair by them and not conduct business in bad faith.
Gaben doesn't allow even non-steam versions of games that are sold on steam to be sold for less in another stores.
Pretty sure this just isn't true. The RRP has to be consistent but discounts and sales are totally chill. And ironically "discounted to $30" sells more than "is $30"
That's part of the suit. David Rosen explains in the original blog post that the reason for the suit is that valve is also stifling competition by disallowing lower prices on other stores.
But when I asked Valve about this plan, they replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website without Steam keys and without Steam’s DRM. This would make it impossible for me, or any game developer, to determine whether or not Steam is earning their commission. I believe that other developers who charged lower prices on other stores have been contacted by Valve, telling them that their games will be removed from Steam if they did not raise their prices on competing stores.
You can sue for anything, it only means something if they win
Yeah, you can sue for anything but for it to become class action it has to go through extra scrutiny.
So when is the class action being started against Apple and Google for their 30% cuts for purchasing in their platforms. Or is Valve special because they aren't publicly traded, and suing them won't piss off the normies.
Maybe Steam should just let them sell for lower on other platforms, and then just disable all the Steam features that they don't want to pay for on their game.
I think Valve are greedy pieces of shit like everyone else, but that doesn't mean they should just give their platform and services to anyone that wants to use it for free. They still have costs to pay for.
It's the convenience for me. If you make it easy to pay for a game I will pay for the game. I pirated back in the day for convenience. I could A: trek around the city for hours trying to find a physical copy of a very obscure game that most stores wouldn't waste shelf space on or B: pirate it and have it within whatever the download time is.
I love how you stated can, because we all know the hard truth. The only reason we get a decent product is because the people who run Steam aren’t fuckwits. When you get shit people with zero oversight running things…everyone gets fucked but the very top.
That's it. No doubt private companies can be every bit as villainous as publically owned, but at least they've got the option to not be.
Another dude replied to my comment with some info on the dark side of steam, and now that comment has been deleted for some reason, but I've written a reply to it and may as well post it here because it's relevant:
To deleted comment:
let's not pretend it's all good pro-consumer stuff.
Sure, let's not 👍
[Some interesting information about some mean stuff that valve have done]
That's interesting, and good to know. I didn't know, but if it's all true I'm not especially surprised, either.
Absolutely every industry of any decent size is throughly infested with staff who have gone through their entire careers (and lives) knowing nothing but the golden rule of "fuck as many dollars out of customers as you possibly can, everything else is secondary".
It's the driving force of managers, accountants, PR, you name it, and these people have a collective influence through their every action that is impossible to resist.
This principle has been the guiding ethos of business for so long now that frankly it's astonishing when there's any pushback at all, or any desire to prove something better than you can get away with, even though it's leaving money on the table.
I don't think any medium-sized or larger company can escape it anywhere near entirely, but the only ones who are effectively permitted to say "let's hold off on [specific article of enshittification] because we're in business to provide the [particular goal] and that has to come first" are private companies, because publically owned companies have a duty to shareholders which, in practice, translates to the thing I said before about fucking all the customers over in exchange for all the dollars.
Boards get replaced and shareholders bring lawsuits when there's money at stake, and the whole system is so entrenched in that pattern that no-one ever tried to push back any longer.
It's pretty wretched all round, I'll take any win we can get.
Don't forget facilitating children gambling effectively popularizing the loot box system. Their loot boxes are exponentially worse than almost any other company. I love Valve but they are not perfect saints.
Not really. My account got hijacked, someone bought a 0,04€ item for 60€ ( my full steam wallet) without it even needing to pass 2FA for some reason, and they told me “we can’t do anything”. So they aren’t perfect either.
Just because he's still technically the CEO doesn't mean he's "running" it. He's trained his replacement for when he dies/retires, and that dude is running it, and if anything that actually needs Gabe's input, he will of course give it. Just because you're the head doesn't mean you do anything. Look at Musk, "CEO" of 5 or so companies, yet sits on Twitter posting slop all day.
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u/Skltlez 2d ago