Over at HumbleBundle.com, there are a bunch of games for really cheap. You can pay whatever you want. And they issue Steam keys for the games. Before today, you could be an ultra lame cheapskate and buy the bundle for one cent…and get Steam keys.

You probably see where this is going.

Some video gamers decided it would be “fun” to attempt to get tons of Steam coal by abusing this system. Unfortunately for them, Santa keeps a naughty and nice list and they are now squarely on the naughty list. These people set up a script and paid one cent for hundreds and hundreds of Humble Bundles. Then, they generated a bunch of Steam redemption codes and plugged them into new Steam accounts. Suddenly, they have tons of entries into the Steam contest for mere dollars, tons of coal, and tons of prizes (from a limited prize pool).

In addition to getting caught, PayPal transaction fees are 30 cents plus 2.9% of the transaction (usually). And, by buying so many copies at one cent, the average price on HumbleBundle.com has dropped significantly (approximately 25 cents according to one article). So, this little fiasco actually cost HumbleBundle money and will hurt them for a while longer. Fortunately, doing things like this is also against the Steam Subscriber Agreement and will hopefully result in permanent bans from Steam for their regular user accounts too (i.e. total loss of access to their entire digital collection). A suitable punishment for cheating and violating the Steam Terms of Service agreement. So, if you were directly involved in this stunt, here’s a big thumbs down from the gaming community. And a big shame on you too.

I also learned about a new website offering a near-clone of the Humble Bundle: indiegala.com. They only generate Steam keys but they generate one key per game, making the one cent thing even more tempting a target for video gamers without a conscience.

For the record, while I’m definitely a “cheapskate”, I still pay what I consider a reasonable amount for the games I want to own – and I’m patient for good deals. I also try to offset PayPal’s fees accordingly and I don’t cheat online systems. I’m okay with “cheating” in single player games – hey, game developers put in that infinite ammo code in single-player for a reason…. But even I understand and respect that an equal playing field is needed in the online world for everyone to have fun.

Here’s the original announcement for the change: $1 Min. Price For Getting Steam Keys. I originally heard about this via word of mouth.

After having played it through (twice), I can safely say I’m a fan of Recettear. First off, it is an Indie game. Not some AAA hotshot title that everyone talks about incessantly. It is budget-friendly. While not a AAA title, it is still a lot of fun. It doesn’t have a ESRB rating, but if it did, it would probably be E10+ – due to some mild innuendo, cartoon violence, and a few drinking/alcohol references. It has a better Metacritic user rating than Skyrim. There is no cussing or other foul language. There is no gore/blood. The story – it has an actual story – is charming, entertaining, and will touch your heart. It is a different type of RPG: You play from the perspective of an item shop owner in a RPG where you open an item shop to pay off a debt your father left behind (probably deceased). And it offers an actual challenge to players. When was the last time a RPG actually forced you to put on your thinking cap? Plus, Recettear has educational value in critical-thinking skills in regards to finances – but that is secondary to the fun you’ll have learning those lessons.

Now that I’ve got all the Skyrim fanboys riled up, onto today’s Steam deals worth getting:

Recettear (seriously – go get this game right now)
Half-Life Complete (or Orange Box)
LEGO Batman (or just get the WB Complete Pack)
Chantelise (older game by the same authors as Recettear, actual RPG though)
Costume Quest (Wrong holiday…LOL – but it supposedly has magical unicorns with rainbows – nothing can possibly go wrong with that, right?)

To be honest, I’m really tired of most newer M-rated games. WAY too much cussing/foul language exiting the various characters’ mouths. And none of it helps the main story – in fact, such language really detracts from the story in nearly all cases. So you’ll find I’m leaning heavily away from such games this year and favoring those games that go out of their way to have an actual story or just focus on having fun. Without further ado, today’s deals:

Portal 2
Portal
Bunch of Heroes (Gift Pile game)
Orcs Must Die (Gift Pile game)
Just Cause 2

Deals that will be going on the entire time:

Sega Complete Pack (80 games for $100)
Warner Bros. Complete Pack
Various Capcom games
Valve Complete Pack
Various LucasArts games
Dirt 2
GRID
Overlord and Overlord 2
Mirror’s Edge (Maybe other EA games? But they’re really being stupid right now with their Origins service, so don’t give them money. Plenty of other games to be played.)
Magicka Collection
Terraria
From Dust (actually looks interesting – seems Darwinia-ish plus a physics engine)
Introversion games (Darwinia)
THQ Hit Collection (Mostly M-rated games here – okay price)
Square Enix Eidos Complete Pack (okay price – lots of DLC)
Various Atari games
Nail’d
Darkstar One

Looks like there will also be a high-resolution daily wallpaper too.

Cave Story can be picked up over at humblebundle.com for less than on Steam. Plus, you get Jamestown, a bunch of other games, and all the soundtracks for all the games in the process (even if you paid for the Humble Bundle already) and everything is DRM free and comes with free Steam keys (should you want them).

Watch the SOPA discussions live. Or listen if you are at work.

http://keepthewebopen.com/sopa

Currently recessed (no audio during recess).

Despite the seriousness of the bill, there are some entertaining comments that crop up every so often:

“I’m not a nerd, I aspire to be a nerd.” – Zoe Lofgren (Democrat – CA)
“Let’s bring in the nerds!” – Jason Chaffetz (Republican – UT)

http://engineadvocacy.com/voice/

As written, these bills will hurt small businesses and individuals alike – there is no benefit to anyone but lawsuit-happy lawyers and large corporate interests. That is all.

This Bundle has the following games – in order of awesomeness:

Jamestown
Cave Story+
NightSky HD
Shank
Super Meat Boy
Bit.Trip Runner
Gratuitous Space Battles

Disclaimer: Order is of my own personal opinion (aka what I’ll be buying it for).

Steam is still doing their ‘Wishlist Giveaway’ thing. The prices haven’t been spectacular except for VVVVVV – and I seriously can’t recommend that game. It was insanely difficult for no good reason that made any sense. Twitch gaming doesn’t work well on the PC and the default controls were hideous. Methinks that this is just a warmup to some real end-of-year deals to keep people logging into Steam every day.

Enough griping. What is happening right now, though, is definitely worth getting excited about: Every day on Steam, there will be a new Daily Deal (not unusual) AND as long as you visit that deal’s page while logged in, you will be signed up for a drawing to get the top 10 games in your Wishlist for free. You don’t have to buy anything, just visit the deal page while logged in.

Today’s Deal: Terraria – looks/feels like a weird little Minecraft-ey game but in 2D and focused more on fighting enemies than building. Cost: $2.49.

The Steam Daily Deal tends to be Indie games. So, expect budget productions here for the most part. The real excitement is the chance to get your Wishlist items.

BRINK is also Free-To-Play until Sunday. Dunno if you want to buy it – a 70 Metacritic rating with actual gamers thinking it is a lot worse than that. But free-to-play is easy enough to deal with.

November 10th, 2011
Dear Steam Users and Steam Forum Users:

Our Steam forums were defaced on the evening of Sunday, November 6. We began investigating and found that the intrusion goes beyond the Steam forums.

We learned that intruders obtained access to a Steam database in addition to the forums. This database contained information including user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. We do not have evidence that encrypted credit card numbers or personally identifying information were taken by the intruders, or that the protection on credit card numbers or passwords was cracked. We are still investigating.

We don’t have evidence of credit card misuse at this time. Nonetheless you should watch your credit card activity and statements closely.

While we only know of a few forum accounts that have been compromised, all forum users will be required to change their passwords the next time they login. If you have used your Steam forum password on other accounts you should change those passwords as well.

We do not know of any compromised Steam accounts, so we are not planning to force a change of Steam account passwords (which are separate from forum passwords). However, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to change that as well, especially if it is the same as your Steam forum account password.

We will reopen the forums as soon as we can.

I am truly sorry this happened, and I apologize for the inconvenience.

Gabe.

It has been a really rough year for the video game community. Sony, EA (via Bioware), a few others, and now Steam/Valve have been hacked.

I already knew about the forums being hacked and crossed my fingers that the Steam database was on a separate network. Apparently not.

This isn’t the first time Valve, the owners of Steam, have been hacked. A guy named Gembe already holds the championship title.

Even with this fairly sincere letter of apology from Gabe, I’m finding myself wanting WAY more nitty-gritty details and the turnaround time to the actual announcement on Steam was still “Sony slow”. Encrypted data requires a decryption key to use it. That requires a piece of software somewhere with the decryption key stored in plain-text. Most firewall setups are fairly lax – once you are inside the network, it is generally assumed that you are “trusted”. So scanning the network for Steam server nodes and getting into them could become much easier. I don’t know how Valve can detect whether or not card numbers were stolen. I suppose SQL logs could indicate what queries were run, but query logs are unwieldy to work with and a moderately clever individual could extract card numbers slowly over time to hide their tracks. Or perhaps accessing the encrypted data requires a different set of database login credentials? Still, those credentials have to be stored somewhere – again, in plain-text. Defacement of the website could be a “haha, got you” afterthought but the defacement could have also been someone entirely different – two different parties with different objectives exploiting the same or similar weakness.

The information provided does supply me with fairly reasonable confidence in Valve’s digital distribution platform as far as attempting to keep my information secure. They separated and isolated personal information from shared information and then encrypted it – possibly with different credentials required for the encrypted data. One hopes that Valve learned a few lessons from the Gembe HL2 incident and will hopefully learn to not put all user information into what could virtually become a front-facing database.

At this point, if you have a Steam account, you should go and change your password. Just to be on the safe side.

And if you’ve used the same password everywhere, let this be a lesson to use a different but strong password for every place you log into.

Throw children in the mix and you’ve got disaster in the making. That innocuous cat video could land you in prison too. Showing your friends gathered around a display someone else’s video could be construed as constituting a “performance”. EVERYONE is at risk.

The Entertainment Consumers Association has a nice little form letter on their website you can use to send your scathing reply to this abomination of a proposed law to Senator John McCain and Senator Jon Kyl.

S.978 is one of those bills that seems to be quietly passing without much press. Let’s make this into a massive uproar of disapproval. Send a big fat NO to Congress!

Assassin’s Creed Franchise
Just Cause 2
Borderlands GOTY
Battlefield: Bad Company 2

There are a bunch of games on sale too that you may have been waiting for to hopefully get a nice deep discount. Well, if it didn’t happen, then it didn’t happen and you’ll either have to wait for Thanksgiving or buy it today. Look at how many games you bought though and decide if you can play/beat them all by the time Thanksgiving rolls around.

There are no freebie tickets today. Nor any tickets specifically for today at all. Just a nice, big countdown timer. Most people I’ve seen have anywhere from 10 to 20 tickets. So if you don’t care, don’t worry – one extra ticket isn’t going to increase your chances very much. Assume that one million gamers are participating. If you’ve got the average, you’ve got a 1 in a million chance of winning.