Steam (Valve) and their "F" rating with the BBB

[natto fire]

2 different accounts for a total of 10+ years, over 180 games and have never had problems with any of them, other than that annoying initial start up, wish there was a way to install the games so they are ready to play without going through the first time setup.

Sucks about your situation OP, good luck and I had no idea about their BBB rating, but it will not sway me from spending more money on Steam.

 

[darkewaffle]

I haven't actually had any sort of problems necessitating customer service, but I've definitely had issues with Steam at times. Usually can find a fix simply by searching or just wait for it to sort itself out.

 

[Imp]

I've had Steam since Half-life 2 and never had a problem, which means I've never had to use their customer service.

The only "problem" I've had regularly is their authentication when their servers are down or my internet connection is fuxxored. It's by design, so it's more of a "feature".

 

[DaveSimmons]

I had to email customer service once during a steam sale when I accidentally bought one game in a bundle instead of the bundle itself. (I clicked on details of that one game, then clicked purchase there, d'oh!)

I got a response within one day and they cancelled the purchase.

So based on a sample size of 1, their customer service gets an A from me.

 

[PowerYoga]

Read through a few of the complaints. Most of it is "MY GAME DOESN'T WORK AND I DON'T KNOW WHY"

These are like the 1 star amazon reviews.

"Box dented, 1 star"
"Cut myself opening the package, 1 star"
"It smells funny, 1 star"

 

[blastingcap]

My respect for Valve took a big hit due to Dota 2 and Valve letting bad actors run rampant. I started playing Dota 2 because it's hard to cheat there due to everything being recorded. I eventually quit Dota 2 altogether because Valve doesn't give a damn about its community. Example: The beginning of the end of Dota 2 for me was when I played a game where the other team kept raging at me on comm, saying various unprintable things as they kept dying from my team, me especially since I did most of the killing. I didn't reply at all, which seemed to make them even more upset. The entire other team reported me at the end of the game because they were sore losers (I didn't do any cheese, they just lost because they sucked and their egos couldn't handle it) and even tried to get my own teammates to report me. My teammates asked why. They said "because he's a f__" My teammates were like "you mean because you got beat." The only thing I said the entire game was "gg" and that was AFTER the throne died. I got a 24 hour comm ban out of that thanks to sore losers. WTF.

I had already given up playing Source games based on rampant cheating in DOD Source, TF2, L4D2, etc. that Valve seems to not care about or else not be able to fix. I only use Steam grudgingly now. F U Valve. Fix the cheating and ridiculous reporting system instead of designing more hats. Even if HL3 comes out tomorrow, I'm not buying it until it's like $2.

EA Origin is even worse though, I could not even play DAO without circumventing the broken DRM system because Origin didn't push patches through the way Steam (usually) does.

 

[Oldgamer]

Don't know if it works, but it took me less than 30 seconds to find this on google:

Valve (Steam) Customer Support phone number: Telephone: 425-889-9642

I have tried that number. Goes straight to someones voicemail. No one ever calls back. I had some issues in the past and tried that number, not once did I ever get a call back. I left several messages. Anyway, doesn't matter, I am fixing what I need to do on my end. I just am not purchasing anything anymore from this company.

 

[AznAnarchy99]

hahhahahaaaa.. the BBB is the biggest joke of an organization and let alone a scam organization in the world!! rolf...they will be trembling in their boots when you threaten to go to the BBB...hahahaaaa

BBB is kinda like Yelp before Yelp.

 

[Aikouka]

wish there was a way to install the games so they are ready to play without going through the first time setup.

You should just be able to edit the installscript.vdf before you launch the game. It's really just a text file that points to the different installers. For example, here's an excerpt from Borderlands 2's installscript.vdf

"VCRedist2005"
{
      "process 1"        "%INSTALLDIR%\\Binaries\\Redist\\vcredist_2005_x86.exe"
      "command 1"        "/q:a"
      "Description"    "Microsoft VC 2005 Redist Package"
      "NoCleanUp"        "1"
}

 

[The Boston Dangler]

BBB, XYZ chamber of commerce, Federal Reserve....these are all scams.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

I've been with steam since more or less the start and have nearly 400 games, they're generally very reliable, they can take a while to answer support requests but they've always been helpful to me, I've had games refunded which simply didn't work correctly (despite them having a no refund policy) so they're pretty good in my book.

 

[Pr0d1gy]

10+ years without a single issue.

Same.

 

[TheVrolok]

Another 10 year vet without a single issue. shrug.

 

[xantub]

The 'X years without an issue' posts don't help the OP at all. It's like saying 'smoking increases the risk of cancer' and a bunch of people saying 'I've smoked for 10 years and I don't have cancer'.

My advice to OP: Try 'reload game files' (or whatever the option is named). Also, send an email... what if they respond on 7 days, play other games in the meantime. Better wait than losing your Steam library.

 

[Genx87]

So I have a number of games that I play through my Steam account. I have had some very bad experiences with their customer service over this past year. There is no way to call on a direct line for customer service help. The only way that you can is by using their submit form on their site and they usually take weeks to reply. Most of the time the reply is generic and utterly frustrating when you have issues trying to download a product you purchased. I finally had my last straw yesterday. I purchased a game on sale and the UI is glitched on Steam and I can't download the product at all. I have sent several emails, (this was yesterday morning) and I still haven't heard from anyone. I went on line and discovered they have an "F" rating with the BBB (Better Business Bureau) and have over 1000's of complaints of locking people out of their games and not dealing with major customer service issues. Here is the BBB report if anyone is interested: http://www.bbb.org/western-washingt...ers/valve-corporation-in-bellevue-wa-27030704

There seems to be a phone number in the BBB report, so I will try calling it today. I have quite a few games through Steam but I am considering just uninstalling the damn thing and calling it quits with their service.

Anyone else have issues with steam? I am curious as to how many other people here on ATOT have had hair pulling issues with them.

After I learned the BBB artificially raised ratings when business's paid up. I lost faith in the organization.

 

[nurturedhate]

Only issue I have ever had with steam wasn't exactly a steam issue. I purchased two copies of Dead Island a couple years ago from newegg. Got the games but steam said the keys were already being used. Called the publisher, deep silver i believe, and got no where. Sent an email to steam, got one back the next day asking for a pic of the case and cd key. Sent it to them and received new keys a day later.

 

[postmortemIA]

I got Steam with launch day HL2, so have been with them as long as they have been in business.
The only problem I've has was poor programming on some non-Valve games: like LA Noire crashing in Windows XP on startup, Crysis having DRM that prevents you from using it on other systems.

Sorry for your problems. Nothing is perfect on Windows and you're always on risk that one component or software running with admin privileges messes up rest of the system.

 

[BrightCandle]

The mark of a company is not whether something goes wrong but what they then do about and how quickly they do that. Sometimes you'll buy something from a company, get it out the box and it wont work and you ring them up and they are like "OK we have put another in the post, will be with you before 9am tomorrow, sorry about. In your email is a return code, just ring up DHL with a convenient time to pick it up". Then there are the companies that argue with you about whether its broken, make you send it back yourself at your own cost and then it takes inexplicably weeks before you hear anything until finally then may send you a replacement. Both are legally fine, one is dramatically better than the other. Steam in my experience is the slow unhelpful kind of service, legal in the US (verging on illegal in Europe) but really doing the bare minimum when something goes wrong. You don't hear stories of Valve going out of their way to help people or refund them when they are happy, infact you usually hear they are slow and surly and they don't do refunds.

 

[cbrunny]

No one pays attention to the BBB, its a sham organization. You have to PAY them to get recognized. Its like my paying you to play my game and telling you better give it a good review or else I post bad things about you. But i've never heard of a gamer having problems with Steam.

Notice how it says "THIS BUSINESS IS NOT BBB ACCREDITED", its because the BBB wants you to pay fees to be "part" of it. The bigger the business, the bigger the fees. Its trying to be a Union in a sense. The funny part is they can't even respond to a complain on there without being accredited, so it just keeps going downhill. rofl.

You honestly might get a answer from Gabe directly from Reddit if you post on it.

I use the BBB often, particularly for anyone that will work inside my house - e.g. renovations and such. Even garages. But I'd never look at the BBB for Steam/Valve.

 

[Texashiker]

Anyone else have issues with steam? I am curious as to how many other people here on ATOT have had hair pulling issues with them.

9 and a half years and so far nothing that could not be fixed through the steam forums. Such as Quake II not running on windows 7 64 bit. But then again, running a 15 year old 32 bit game on a 64 bit os will probably cause some issues.

As for the BBB rating I am not surprised. When you deal with teenagers who got banned for hacking, I look for some kind of revenge.

Steam may not be perfect, but it is all we have. No other service out there provides near the games or features like what Steam does.

 

[AdamantC]

Have you tried:
Reinstalling Steam
Running a registry cleaner
Disabling your anti-virus and/or firewall
Trying it on another computer
And last but not least, a fresh OS install

 

[SlitheryDee]

I've never had a problem with steam. Do you happen to be on satellite or other high latency internet? My brother has satellite and has a hard time getting anything download. That wouldn't be steam's problem though.

 

[DefDC]

I'm not defending bad customer service, but it's understandable why they don't have phone support. Just imagine every time someone's parents change the wifi password, or someone's never-rebooted-Windows-Vista computer has a problem, they call and tie up a customer service rep.

I want Steam sales and to keep the games cheap! That'll suck to be on a receiving end when you have a legitimate Steam-related issue, but it's there to keep the games cheap, and weed out the dummies.

 

[z1ggy]

I've been having issues lately with Steam specifically playing Counter Strike GO. Many times when I'd enetr the game it would tell me some files were missing signatures and I would not be able to play in VAC secure servers.

Some googling told me to "verify game cache" which seems to work when this happened (probably 10 times over the course of a few months). Well it has now happened again except the typical fix will not work. I uninstalled the game, cleared my download/temp folder and reinstalled. Tells me CS needs an update.. Okay so I download the update and what do you know..? The DL fails because the "update has a corrupt file". Tried uninstall and repeat this process a few times with no luck. I'm getting really pissed because I am a part of a community with online friends and people I chat with daily, and now we can't play. I know Steam will be useless with tech support...ugh.

 

[M0oG0oGaiPan]

have you tried the following?

1) logging out of steam
2) deleting/renaming ClientRegistry.blob
3) restarting steam

another option is to uinstall the game and delete everything from the global offensive folder. redownload.

sometimes if you scroll way up in the console after you get that message, you'll see the name of the file that's corrupt. you can delete just that file and redownload.

the problem is if you keep getting that error message, you'll get a temp vac ban. something like a week.