Frequently Asked Questions

MikeBlaszczak · 01-09-2011, 04:51 PM

Steam Community
Q: How do I report a problem with Steam Community?
A:We'd be happy to have a look at your issue, but it's important to make sure we know all the information about your problem. We don't know what account you're using unless you tell us; and you should try to be as clear as possible when reporting a bug. You might think it's obvious that you're adding a friend, for example, but there are more than three different ways to add friends in the Steam client or on the Steam Community web site. Which one were you using? Make sure you give us the exact error messages you see, let us know which browser you're using on which version of which OS, and so on.

A list of good things to mention in your question can be found in this sticky.

Q: Why isn't my city listed in the location settings in my profile? Why isn't my country listed? Why are old countries listed?
A:While it would seem like getting a list of places in the world together would be easy, it surprisingly isn't.

We released Steam Community with a list which we were happy with, but that list is no longer updated by the provider we used. After some searching, we've found another data set that we can use, but we haven't converted to that data set yet. We need to do a few things to convert to the new list. First, we need to filter it a bit. Since it contains a list of every location everywhere in the world, using it without filtering would make the lists shown in Community very long and unusable. Once the list is pruned, we need a way to convert existing users to use entries from the existing list. If a user has selected a location that is no longer in the list, for example, we need to make sure their profile is still sensible after the location is removed. Once this mechanism is in place, it will be easy to update the list at any time going forward so we can always keep it current.

Q: How can I control privacy in the Steam Community?
A:Go to the "Settings" tab of the "Edit my SteamID" page. You will see 3 options:

Private - Only you can view your SteamID page

Friends Only - Only viewable by your friends

Public - Viewable by anyone on the World-Wide Web

Q: Can an owner/officer kick a member from their group?
A: Yes. If you're using a private group, you can remove the user from the group. If you're running a public group, you can ban the user from participating in all group features by using the "ban from chat" feature on the group. We'd like to have a better interface around this feature, but for now it works to serve this purpose.

Q: Can I delete a group?
A:To avoid problems with accidental deletion, groups can not be deleted by users.

Q: Can Steam Billing & Support delete a group?
A: Groups are removed after a period of inactivity after all users leave. Groups are not deleted upon request. Steam Support may delete a group if it contains objectionable material.

Q: Can I change my group from Private to Public or Public to Private?
A: Yes, look for "Group Status" in the Settings of your group admin page.

Q: Can I change the name of my group?
A:No. All groups are known to their members by their name, so changing the name would be confusing to members -- they would have joined one group and suddenly find themselves in another.

Q: I signed up for the community. Can I undo this?
A: No. You can not remove yourself from Community.

Q: I reported what I believe is an inappropriate community page. How come it is still there?
A: Thanks for submitting the report! However, what is inappropriate to one person may not be inappropriate to another. It might take additional reports before action is taken against the community page in question.

General
Q: Valve seems slow to implement features or fix bugs. Why is that?
A: Writing software and fixing bugs takes time. The Steam team tries to spend time adding features and fixing bugs, but the team also spends time working with partners to publish games. Most importantly, we spend time working on the servers to make sure they're stable and functional, and performing well. After all, we'd rather keep Steam up with the existing features than let it go down because we were busy writing software for new features.

If you think you can help us, please review the job postings and send along your resume.

Q: How many Steam users are there?
A:It depends on what you call a "user". For the public, we define it as someone who owns at least one game and has logged in within the last month. There are 35 million active users, if we use those criteria. The number of actual accounts is much higher, and the number of users online concurrently is a different number.

Q: What is the largest number of users on Steam at any one time?
A:The Peak in concurrent Steam users? thread has current information about recent users peaks. It also includes a post that explains how we measure concurrent user counts. You can find a graph of users over the last two days on the stats page.

Q: How are SteamIDs formatted and what do they mean?
A:A couple of the different ways to format a SteamID are discussed in this post.

Steam Client
Q: Which programs are known to interfere with Steam?
A:The support site has a list of Programs Which Interfere with Steam.

Q:What is the "Steam Vista Service"?
A:The short answer is that the service will help certain games and programs interact with Vista's security model so that the games work properly under Steam. For more details, you can read this post contains information about the service that is installed with Steam under Vista.

Q: Is the service installed only on Vista?
A:The Steam Service installs on Vista and Windows 7.

Q: Is the overlay compatible with certain DX versions?
A: It works with DX7 through DX10; the overlay also works with OpenGL. You can check the In-Game Overlay Application Incompatibility List to see if your favorite game is listed.

Q: Does the Steam Community overlay render inside of third-party games that I add to Steam (i.e. Warcraft3 or Quake3)? Or does the overlay only work if I buy the games from Steam?
A: It will work with third-party games which you add. For instance Warcraft 3 and Quake 3 are both known to work.

The basic requirement is that the game uses D3D7, D3D8, D3D9, D3D10, or OpenGL to do its rendering. D3D11 will likely be supported in the future but is not today. Some older 2d games which use DDraw or software based rendering methods will also not work (for example Diablo).

Friends
Q: Where did the "Friends" button in-game go to?
A:Friends in-game support is now provided by the overlay exclusively.

Q: Can I make my friends list private?
A:If your profile is set "private", then your friends list is not visible to others. If your profile is set "friends only", then your friends list is only available to your friends.

Q: What is the friends list size limit? Why isn't it larger?
A:You can only have 250 friends on your list. This number includes active and blocked friends as well as invites. You'll get a bonus of 50 more friends (for a total of 300) if you've activated Facebook integration with your profile. It does not include blocked users who are not friends. The size of the friends list is rather arbitrary, but we keep a limit on it for now to help mitigate spam just a little.

The storage for all the friendship information in Community takes about six gigabytes. This number obviously grows as we add features and more users arrive at the site. Increasing the number of friends each users allows increases system load in a couple of different ways. One is that status updates get sent to more users; each time you change from being "online" to "in game" to "busy" and back, Steam must send out a notification of the change of state to all your friends so they can see your status. The more friends you have, the more processing and network bandwidth this requires.

With some recent upgrades, I think we have plenty of power and storage available for maintaining the list, and network bandwidth isn't a problem. A remaining concern is making the friends list more manageable. Searching through 100 or 150 users on your list right now isn't too pleasant, so I'd like to make enhancements to the UI before increasing the list size. Right now (January, 2011) there are less than 3% of users who are over 200 users on their friends list. While we understand the limit can be inconvenient, we're working on adding features to make the problem better as soon as we can.

MikeBlaszczak · 01-09-2011, 04:52 PM

Version 1.0, 9 January, 2011

First version.

MikeBlaszczak · 01-09-2011, 04:52 PM

Reserved post.

MikeBlaszczak · 09-29-2011, 07:20 AM

Added links to some useful threads and posts about SteamIDs, user counts, and so on.

01-09-2011, 04:51 PM	#1
MikeBlaszczak Valve Join Date: Feb 2007 Reputation: 4590 Posts: 5,067	Frequently Asked Questions Steam Community Q: How do I report a problem with Steam Community? A:We'd be happy to have a look at your issue, but it's important to make sure we know all the information about your problem. We don't know what account you're using unless you tell us; and you should try to be as clear as possible when reporting a bug. You might think it's obvious that you're adding a friend, for example, but there are more than three different ways to add friends in the Steam client or on the Steam Community web site. Which one were you using? Make sure you give us the exact error messages you see, let us know which browser you're using on which version of which OS, and so on. A list of good things to mention in your question can be found in this sticky. Q: Why isn't my city listed in the location settings in my profile? Why isn't my country listed? Why are old countries listed? A:While it would seem like getting a list of places in the world together would be easy, it surprisingly isn't. We released Steam Community with a list which we were happy with, but that list is no longer updated by the provider we used. After some searching, we've found another data set that we can use, but we haven't converted to that data set yet. We need to do a few things to convert to the new list. First, we need to filter it a bit. Since it contains a list of every location everywhere in the world, using it without filtering would make the lists shown in Community very long and unusable. Once the list is pruned, we need a way to convert existing users to use entries from the existing list. If a user has selected a location that is no longer in the list, for example, we need to make sure their profile is still sensible after the location is removed. Once this mechanism is in place, it will be easy to update the list at any time going forward so we can always keep it current. Q: How can I control privacy in the Steam Community? A:Go to the "Settings" tab of the "Edit my SteamID" page. You will see 3 options: Private - Only you can view your SteamID page Friends Only - Only viewable by your friends Public - Viewable by anyone on the World-Wide Web Q: Can an owner/officer kick a member from their group? A: Yes. If you're using a private group, you can remove the user from the group. If you're running a public group, you can ban the user from participating in all group features by using the "ban from chat" feature on the group. We'd like to have a better interface around this feature, but for now it works to serve this purpose. Q: Can I delete a group? A:To avoid problems with accidental deletion, groups can not be deleted by users. Q: Can Steam Billing & Support delete a group? A: Groups are removed after a period of inactivity after all users leave. Groups are not deleted upon request. Steam Support may delete a group if it contains objectionable material. Q: Can I change my group from Private to Public or Public to Private? A: Yes, look for "Group Status" in the Settings of your group admin page. Q: Can I change the name of my group? A:No. All groups are known to their members by their name, so changing the name would be confusing to members -- they would have joined one group and suddenly find themselves in another. Q: I signed up for the community. Can I undo this? A: No. You can not remove yourself from Community. Q: I reported what I believe is an inappropriate community page. How come it is still there? A: Thanks for submitting the report! However, what is inappropriate to one person may not be inappropriate to another. It might take additional reports before action is taken against the community page in question. General Q: Valve seems slow to implement features or fix bugs. Why is that? A: Writing software and fixing bugs takes time. The Steam team tries to spend time adding features and fixing bugs, but the team also spends time working with partners to publish games. Most importantly, we spend time working on the servers to make sure they're stable and functional, and performing well. After all, we'd rather keep Steam up with the existing features than let it go down because we were busy writing software for new features. If you think you can help us, please review the job postings and send along your resume. Q: How many Steam users are there? A:It depends on what you call a "user". For the public, we define it as someone who owns at least one game and has logged in within the last month. There are 35 million active users, if we use those criteria. The number of actual accounts is much higher, and the number of users online concurrently is a different number. Q: What is the largest number of users on Steam at any one time? A:The Peak in concurrent Steam users? thread has current information about recent users peaks. It also includes a post that explains how we measure concurrent user counts. You can find a graph of users over the last two days on the stats page. Q: How are SteamIDs formatted and what do they mean? A:A couple of the different ways to format a SteamID are discussed in this post. Steam Client Q: Which programs are known to interfere with Steam? A:The support site has a list of Programs Which Interfere with Steam. Q:What is the "Steam Vista Service"? A:The short answer is that the service will help certain games and programs interact with Vista's security model so that the games work properly under Steam. For more details, you can read this post contains information about the service that is installed with Steam under Vista. Q: Is the service installed only on Vista? A:The Steam Service installs on Vista and Windows 7. Q: Is the overlay compatible with certain DX versions? A: It works with DX7 through DX10; the overlay also works with OpenGL. You can check the In-Game Overlay Application Incompatibility List to see if your favorite game is listed. Q: Does the Steam Community overlay render inside of third-party games that I add to Steam (i.e. Warcraft3 or Quake3)? Or does the overlay only work if I buy the games from Steam? A: It will work with third-party games which you add. For instance Warcraft 3 and Quake 3 are both known to work. The basic requirement is that the game uses D3D7, D3D8, D3D9, D3D10, or OpenGL to do its rendering. D3D11 will likely be supported in the future but is not today. Some older 2d games which use DDraw or software based rendering methods will also not work (for example Diablo). Friends Q: Where did the "Friends" button in-game go to? A:Friends in-game support is now provided by the overlay exclusively. Q: Can I make my friends list private? A:If your profile is set "private", then your friends list is not visible to others. If your profile is set "friends only", then your friends list is only available to your friends. Q: What is the friends list size limit? Why isn't it larger? A:You can only have 250 friends on your list. This number includes active and blocked friends as well as invites. You'll get a bonus of 50 more friends (for a total of 300) if you've activated Facebook integration with your profile. It does not include blocked users who are not friends. The size of the friends list is rather arbitrary, but we keep a limit on it for now to help mitigate spam just a little. The storage for all the friendship information in Community takes about six gigabytes. This number obviously grows as we add features and more users arrive at the site. Increasing the number of friends each users allows increases system load in a couple of different ways. One is that status updates get sent to more users; each time you change from being "online" to "in game" to "busy" and back, Steam must send out a notification of the change of state to all your friends so they can see your status. The more friends you have, the more processing and network bandwidth this requires. With some recent upgrades, I think we have plenty of power and storage available for maintaining the list, and network bandwidth isn't a problem. A remaining concern is making the friends list more manageable. Searching through 100 or 150 users on your list right now isn't too pleasant, so I'd like to make enhancements to the UI before increasing the list size. Right now (January, 2011) there are less than 3% of users who are over 200 users on their friends list. While we understand the limit can be inconvenient, we're working on adding features to make the problem better as soon as we can.

01-09-2011, 04:52 PM	#2
MikeBlaszczak Valve Join Date: Feb 2007 Reputation: 4590 Posts: 5,067	edit history Version 1.0, 9 January, 2011 First version.

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09-29-2011, 07:20 AM	#4
MikeBlaszczak Valve Join Date: Feb 2007 Reputation: 4590 Posts: 5,067	Added links to some useful threads and posts about SteamIDs, user counts, and so on.