But what if you have moved and forgot to change the address in your steam account?

Also, this can be done by a hijacker as well, they would simply resell the hardware to recoup the costs after successful purchase.


As for IP as a "match":
IPv4 addresses are not unique anymore. As there are more humans (8 billion) than IPv4 addresses (4.2 billion), ISPs have chosen to route users together on an identical IPv4 address. This technique is known as CGNAT.[en.wikipedia.org]

I don't want to sound like an ass.

But, it's probably a hell of a lot easier to just keep your credentials secure in the first place.

Originally posted by shak59:

For auth have an option to add a literal address that can be used to request account recovery where valve sends a literal letter to that address with a recovery code if account security is ever compromised.

The address must have been used to purchase hardware like a steam deck AND the players IP must match the address.

This is good for people who lose access and have no other options left.

IP matching an address isn't what you think it is. IP addresses for people can change constantly and the only way to know an address linked to an IP is to subpoena an ISP company and find out who was assigned that IP at a specific time, and those records are not kept indefinitely.

There are already so many ways to recover your account as is, and Valve hardware sales are so niche compared to their user base this wouldn't benefit many.

Snail mail is a little slow in this situation don't you think. I wouldn't want to wait weeks for a letter to be sent from the other side of the world so i can recover my account.

Why is everyone being nice and pleasant in their replies?

What happened to the usual repliers?!

Originally posted by Thermal Lance:

I don't want to sound like an ass.

But, it's probably a hell of a lot easier to just keep your credentials secure in the first place.

Yeah, I would agree. But people seem to want to do anything but that.

Originally posted by shak59:

This is good for people who lose access and have no other options left.

Well except for the majority of people who've never bought hardware and their IP address is different than at some other point in time. Which is a vast majority of Steam users.

Maybe before trying to solve a problem, you should understand it first....

Originally posted by shak59:

Why is everyone being nice and pleasant in their replies?

What happened to the usual repliers?!

If you want. You can add to the OP that you only want angry people answering.