Every so often, it’s normal to get Steam friend requests from people you’ve randomly played a match with.
What I’m wondering is - when should you be suspicious of such people?
I had someone the other day add me after playing Deep Rock Galactic (DRG). What made me somewhat suspicious immediately was on their profile, they describe themselves as a 26 year old woman. Obviously nothing wrong with that, but feels a bit incongruous on Steam, which is kind of an anonymous platform.
Anyway, they have since acted a lot like a real person who just wants people to play with might act, and we’ve played quite a lot together since. They haven’t done anything weird or shady yet - like not asked any overly personal questions or started up with a sob story or made romantic overtures or anything like that. They helped me discover all the other bits of DRG that I’d ignored - the assignments, free cosmetics, and so on - which has reignited an interest in the game.
There was one time when they asked me to join a voice chat in steam chat, and I did but they said they couldn’t hear me very well (which is possible as I’m on Linux and mic issues are not uncommon, esp as I was using a bluetooth headset). I think they were going to suggest I download some other thing, which would be a big red flag of course, but I was just saying that no one uses voice chat for DRG so they didn’t finish what they were saying. Now they’ve said we should play Dead By Daylight, because it’s on a free weekend. I’ve downloaded it and noticed it doesn’t have built-in voice chat. So is this a ruse to get me to install some dodgy software?
So I thought I’d ask here - how do you lemmings deal with these random friend invites? Do you always ignore them maybe, or perhaps it takes time before you consider them genuine? How do you think I should proceed?
Also, what risks are there if any with just adding people on Steam and playing games with them on Steam? I guess I’m thinking about things like the possibility that some multiplayer games might leak the IP addresses of people you’re playing with, things like that.
You must log in or register to comment.
how do you lemmings deal with these random friend invites?
Dude, just talk to the person. You already seem to know every possible red flag there is. If they do something shady, you’ll know, but there’s also the possibility they’re just looking for friends.
I’ve made friendships online that are going for more than a decade at this point. I’m not saying you should trust everyone, but maybe just be less suspicious and let time show you what kind of person you’re taking to, it will reveal if the person is friendly or not.
Yeah I am talking with them, they do seem legit so hopefully I’m just being paranoid/overly cautious.
The reason I thought I’d post here is to make sure I’ve not missed something obvious and to understand what the risks are. I guess “something shady” would be asking me to do something weird like install unknown software, or asking lots of personal questions out of the blue.
Almost everyone uses discord for voip now. You can even use it in a browser.
I’ve got friends I still talk to on a regular from over 20 years ago from an MMO I played. Hell one of them, is a friend myself and another friend who I know offline still game with to this day, we’ve known them for almost 20 years now.
Get a better mic, download or browse to discord and act like a human.
That doesn’t sound random at all and if they were a scammer they’d probably have tried to scam you by now.
There are a lot of bots on Steam. If I get a random friend request from someone I don’t recognize who has only F2P games in their account, or just no playtime in anything that I play, I ignore it.
But if it’s someone you’ve been playing with, that’s a human. A bot would’ve just gone straight to the scam as soon as you accept their friend request.
I’m guessing they’re probably talking about Discord, which is what most people use for voice chat these days (and other social media-y stuff). It’s not a virus or anything, but it is another proprietary corporate-owned social media platform, which I’m sure a lot of us here on Fedi might have opinions about.
They do appear to be an actual human yes, and one who does enjoy playing online games (because we play together and they are getting on with the game just like every other player). I’ve just looked at their account - thanks for the tip - and while they don’t have loads of games, all appear pretty normal paid-for things, and all are kinda similar in appeal - e.g. The Forest, 7 Days to Die. Actually there are a couple of what could have been giveaways/freebies - but all those have zero hours on.
So that does look very normal lol
The only people I’ve friended online that I didn’t know in person were other people who play Skullgirls, because it was the only way to pick their brain on how I can improve, or even just to send a “ggs”. These days, we’re basically all in the same Discord server, so I can usually start typing @ and a few letters of the name they used in quick match and find them pretty easily, so it’s been a while. Still, those people are mostly strangers to me, and sometimes their accounts get hacked. The scam I’ve seen multiple times at this point is that they need people to go to an external site and vote for them to get approved for a Counter-Strike ranked league or something. I don’t know how it works, but I’m not clicking that link. If that’s how that CS ranked league works, find another one with a better method of letting you in.
The most consistent DRG group I play with is women, so not that far fetched IMO. To your concern about leaking your IP, steam uses their own networking solutions to conceal your IP in non peer to peer games based on the settings under “Steam / Settings / In-Game / Steam Networking”. Check that and read up on the options and what they do.
conceal your IP in non peer to peer games based on the settings under “Steam / Settings / In-Game / Steam Networking”
Good tip thanks! Here’s the Steam page about it. The upshot seems to be that Steam itself won’t reveal your IP to others, but games might depending on how multiplayer is implemented.
“Steam doesn’t share your IP address with other players. Whenever peer-to-peer networking is needed, for example in a voice chat, that communication is always relayed. However, we don’t control what games using peer-to-peer connectivity do.”
“If a game uses our newest networking APIs (ISteamNetworkingSockets and ISteamNetworkingMessages), the traffic can be relayed using Steam Datagram Relay (SDR), Valve’s worldwide backbone and network of relays, and you can decide when to allow an app to share your IP address. Under Steam / Settings / In-Game / Steam Networking, there is an option that controls when your IP address is revealed”
and crucially regarding the default setting, “Default. This will not share your IP address, unless it appears necessary to avoid excessive ping times.”
