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.

  • bcovertigo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    17 hours ago

    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.

    • rollin@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      2·
      14 hours ago

      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.”