I had to send them my CC info once, took like 3 hours and my account was back up. Pretty hassle free really, though I agree it should never be required. Still, they want to make sure the account is in the hands of the right person.

Games as a service bro... games as a service. Gabe says its good so it must be!

Yeah but imagine you had to gather every CD key from a retail store connected to your account, write stuff next to all of them, then take pics of all of them and send the pics just to change your email address. :)

And imagine if you had some problem with left4dead

you write down support ticket, problem solved

but then you have another, and another problem. soon youll have your whole game box ruined with marker.

Or maybe they will not give you any support because you didn't write the ticket just above the serial key. lol.

I had some problems before with Origin, and they NEVER required any personal information about my account.

I agree it's annoying. Still a bit better than my old City of Heroes experience. I bought the game but when I tried to use the code (a while later) it said it's already in use. I had to send evidence that I bought it overseas by snail mail in order to get a working code.

They only ask for that if you can't provide a CC or provide a wrong CC, supposedly. Who knows though.

If someone hijacked your steam account he would look up last 4 digits from your CC anyway without a problem.

If such a thing happens, they will definitely find out because I will tell them "Hey, I think someone stole my account". Then they have a good reason to want to see all this proof to find out who really owns the account.. But before they receive strong evidence that something is going on with an account, wanting to see all this proof is simply Valve treating a customer like a criminal for no good reason.

They also count on that after you seeing this message "write down on your box / manual and ruin it with marker and MAYBE we will help you then" you'd think "the hell with this" and stop mailing, and problem is solved for them.

I was thinking that too. A clever way for them to get people to just leave them alone.

You only have to do that when you need to prove ownership. Generally, that will be when you are recovering a lost account/changing an email address without access to the old address and so forth.

Most problems, you will never have to do that.

I also imagine that a piece of paper with the email above the cd-key would suffice just fine. Long as it's a picture of something physical.

And as already mentioned. You don't need to provide proof for every game you have, just one.

Yeah but having to prove myself with physical evidence even with one CD key is unacceptable to me if all I want to do is change the email address when I have access to the previous email address, to the Steam account and there is no strong evidence something is going on with my account. They need to come up with a better way of keeping things secure than just treating customers like criminals for no good reason(if my CC info isn't enough for them).

Steam had a shitstorm of bad rep coming their way after their last server breach. It doesn't suprise me that they ramped their security up tp eleven. Steam is in a lose - lose position. They can either be blamed for bad security or for to bothersome security.

I changed my Steam e-mail a couple of month ago through the client without any problem. That means they either changed their method or your account maybe flagged internally for some reason. Maybe a change of access IP or something like that.

And it's not. I changed my email on the fly for several accounts in the last few months. Not sure what's going on with yours. I'm not saying that the Steam client isn't in some way at fault here but you also can't deny that this is a special case for some reason. Normally there's no need to go through support for this.

And when going through support, I *am* grateful that they tell you to prove who you are, else someone else could just contact them and get my account.

Yeah, maybe they flagged my account for some reason and I don't know it. Then there is a good reason for them to behave the way they did. I didn't think about this before. I just assumed their Steam program wont let me change my email address because it is broken or something like that.