If you are already familiar or new to this feature, do share this guide to your friends that do TF2, CS:GO trading or basically everyone of your friends here in Steam. Please take note that this guide is somewhat long. If you find any errors or incorrect details found here, please write it in the comments.


Anyway, Christmas is near! Every Steam player expects that annual discount sale Valve gives and traders expect either new stuff, more players since Christmas is normally a time where young people have no school and most importantly more game time. Unfortunately this year, in an attempt to lessen the chances of getting scammed, Valve will implement the Escrow(or trade holds) feature to prevent more and more careless new and old players from getting their items scammed.


While this does look good in terms of security, not everything is always for the good of all and I'll explain how the Escrow feature works based in my own understanding.

Before we tackle with the Steam Escrow feature itself, let us first Google-search what escrow means:

Originally posted by Obvious Google Search:

An escrow is a deposit of funds, a deed or other instrument by one party for the delivery to another party upon completion of a specific condition or event. It is an independent neutral account by which the interests of all parties to the transaction are protected.

Did you understand what it meant? Well, I didn't either because it isn't the same as what the Steam Escrow feature does. In fact, there is no deposit of funds in the Steam Escrow compared to real-life escrowing.

The Steam Escrow is a new security measure on Steam that in order to do regular trades without any delays, both players must have the Steam Mobile Authenticator enabled for 7 days and trade confirmations enabled. This can allow players who have had their accounts compromised to cancel any unauthorized trades done by hackers.

Here is a chart I made that should simplify what the Steam Escrow does. Read the chart starting from bottom to top.
UPDATE: Being friends with a Steam player for at least 1 year reduces the trade hold wait time to 1 day.

• Prevents hacked, phished accounts from having their items immediately traded away to other accounts.
  
• *Requires the code from the Authenticator based on where it was activated.
  
• Lessens chance of easily hacking Steam accounts.
  
• Each device can be used as a recovery or access tool for getting your Steam account back or logging in.
  
• **Having Authenticator enabled for 7 days prevents trade and Market restrictions when logging into a new device.

*This is not to be confused with the player's actual mobile number. Even if the phone containing the mobile number was stolen, burned, disappeared, traveled into another galaxy etc., if the Authenticator is not on that phone, the player can still login and get his Steam account from the device where the Authenticator was activated. If the player has disabled the Authenticator and wishes to reactivate it again using the mobile number that was stolen, burned, disappeared, traveled into another galaxy etc., he must change his old mobile number with a new one.

**You can now safely deauthorize all devices that access your Steam account without suffering any trade and market restrictions as long as your Authenticator has still been enabled for 7 days.

Unlike the Advantages side, I'll actually give side comments on each disadvantage about this as not only because I'm against this feature but it will cause a massive chain of delay on EVERY big trading game from CS:GO to TF2.

• Right to privacy breached
  - I believe this is the most common reason why people do not love this feature. If you don't want personal information displayed on the Internet, simply don't give it away but for a gaming company that now requires it to trade without any time delays is just ridiculous. Personally, I don't often do trades anymore but those who still do either for profit or just for collections feel they're being monitored by a security camera somewhere out there.
  
  
  
• Not everyone owns a smartphone
  - Today is the year 2015 where technology is innovative and not to mention so competitive, older brands of phones become obsolete with new features from other phones that make them unwanted. In this current age of consumerism, we spend tons of our well-earned cash for unnecessary stuff that some people don't want to buy a "super-cool looking" phone and would just own either an old type of cellphone for simple communication or not having one at all. With Steam releasing this Escrow feature, expect lots of riots soon.(or it probably has already started)
  
  
  
• Losing the source of the Authenticator(contains Authenticator itself but not mobile number)
  - The second most dangerous thing is losing the device where you activated your Authenticator. You can't login to your Steam account which is almost the same as getting your account hacked or having its password changed like it poofed away into thin air.
  
  However, you can recover your account by easily going to http://help.steampowered.com and then clicking the "I deleted/lost my Steam Mobile Authenticator" tab. Type in your mobile number linked to your Steam account and get the recovery code sent to your mobile number to remove the Authenticator from your account.
  
  WARNING: This will turn your Steam Guard setting back to 'Email'. Any existing login session of your account will be immediately logged off and deauthorized by Steam. This will also restrict your account from trading or using the Steam Market for 7 days
  
  
  
• Your phone is the Authenticator as well(contains both Authenticator & mobile number)
  [VERY IMPORTANT]
  - This is the most dangerous disadvantage that can happen. The Steam Mobile(your mobile number) is supposed to be a first line of access to your Steam account. The Steam Mobile is meant to add a verification process and at the same time as the ONLY recovery tool for the Steam Mobile Authenticator. When setting your Steam Guard to 'Steam Mobile Authenticator' , your mobile number is step 1 to having the Authenticator activated and the next step to accessing your Steam Account is getting the code from the Authenticator itself.
  
  Now what if that one phone containing both your mobile number and the Authenticator gets stolen, incinerated, drowned in water, pulverized, time-traveled to another dimension etc.? It's simple. You lose both your phone and your Steam Account and you will have 1% access to your Steam Account with the only way to know your account's fate is by accessing your email linked to your Steam Account and then locking it to prevent the hacker from taking full control of your account.
  
  
  
• Accessing an Authenticator-enabled account on another device(For third-world countries mostly playing Dota 2 and CS:GO)
  - For most first-world people, I'm pretty sure it would be unwise and silly why you would access your Steam account in someone else's computer and most of you wouldn't do that for sure. But what about for those other countries that rely on internet cafes to play their Steam games that already have Authenticator enabled on their smartphone? With this Escrow + login security feature from the Authenticator, you now require that device be in your pocket at all times to login, trade or play your games from another device. Isn't that annoying having to bring one device just to access Steam?
  
  
  
• Not all smartphones support the Steam application
  - The Steam Mobile Authenticator can only be accessed via the Steam Mobile Application which can be downloaded on the App Store or Google Play for Apple or Android products respectively. If you don't have that phone that can download the Steam Mobile App, you can't get the Authenticator then you'll have to suffer 3 days for every trade to go through.
  
  
  
• Alternate accounts will suffer from Escrow
  - Do you have two or more accounts on Steam? One for trading and the others for just playing or a future backup account? What if you don't want to use your trading account anymore and move to your playing/backup accounts instead and want to play all two or more of them? If you own only one phone number and wish to trade with your other accounts then you'll have to supply all your other accounts with different phone numbers each in order for them to bypass the escrow feature. You can't use the same mobile number on different Steam accounts.

Thanks for reading this small guide. With the upcoming feature, I myself feel disappointed with it personally since this will affect everybody on Steam. I hope Valve will address future issues about this instead of shoving it in our faces just because many people get hacked or clicking phishing links by their own carelessness.

To top it off, I made a photo just for everyone to think about what Gaben wants us to do.


Once again, thanks.....and a HAPPY BOXGIVINGS DAY TO EVERYONE!