Epic Games marking people buying too fast as fraudulent users

[Thaldor]

Sources: Kotaku , GameRevolution ,  Jim Sterling

 

Now that we have the first grand sale in the Epic Games Store it has been brought to the surface that if you buy many games too fast, you get marked as fraudalent user. I haven't heard anywhere where the line is, but apparently buying 5 games got Twitter user @AngriestPat blocked from doing anymore business with Epic Games Store because apparently buying 5 games from a store without shopping cart during sales means you must be hoarding games to do harm.

 

Epic Games has commented the situation to GameRevolution:

Quote

Nick Chester, senior PR for Epic, told us that it was part of the store’s attempts to stop fraud.

“This was a result of our aggressive fraud rules,” he said. “If players run into this issue, they should contact player support so we can investigate.”

 

And the story doesn't end here. Shopping cart, that thing you put your things before heading for the cashier to give money to take the things you put into the thing to your home, this very useful basket with wheels that holds things, is coming to Epic Games Store [pause here for a long time] not in 6 months but somewhere later. Confirmed from Epic Game Store (yes, I misspelled that for a reason) very useful and nice Trello roadmap adding more "very useful" payment methods and even redesigning the store page are more important tasks than adding shopping carts to your store where people can carry things.

 

Personally I'm very baffled how much more you can have money to build a store than Epic Games has but still manage to do so bad job that it's amazing your shop can be even called a shop and it haven't burned down yet.

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

nvidia: i'm the most hated company in the tech industry

 

epic games: hold my rgb

[HarryNyquist]

Epic: We will offer money to devs to put your game exclusively on the store for <time>!
 

Also Epic: What the actual hell are you doing you fucking scammer, buying 5 games. Who even buys more than a single game. Get the fuck off our platform.

 

Also Epic: Account security? Two-factor authentication? What's that?

[Eastman51]

*Despicable Me meme*

>has sale
>blocks people for buying lots of games

>doesn't have shopping cart so users can buy lots of games at once
>doesn't have shopping cart so users can buy lots of games at once

 

In all seriousness tho, I've been wondering why teh fuc the Epic Game Store never had a shopping cart. And this just makes the Epic Game Store so much more of a meme. Instances like this are why Steam still looks like a more refined platform.

[Bouzoo]

For serious, is there a single thing they did right with EGS? 

[Thaldor]

2 minutes ago, Bouzoo said:

For serious, is there a single thing they did right with EGS? 

They paid the game publishers and developers beforehand so they can finnish their games without monetary problems? [/s]

[Humbug]

Shopping cart would really help. It will cut down the amount of financial transactions. Easier for everyone...

[Radium_Angel]

16 minutes ago, Eastman51 said:

Epic Game Store never had a shopping cart

Rush to market.

 

[Thaldor]

4 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

Rush to market.

 

I find your use of the word "rush" very offensive against things that rush. EGS was more like somewhere around "taking too much laxative" and "drinking the extra strong morning coffee while suffering from salmonella" to the market.

[Radium_Angel]

Just now, Thaldor said:

offensive

That's me, in a nutshell!

In their quest to compete with Steam, they figured features would be added later, market penetration and exposure were more important.

[Unixsystem]

How is it even possible for them to be this incompetent. I've shopped on extremely niche hobby websites that had totally functional shopping carts with coupon codes and shipping calculators and the whole shebang.

 

Anyone with coding experience: realistically how long would it take a competent programmer to implement a very basic but functional shopping cart into an piece of software? Surely it couldn't be more than a few days to get working and then maybe a week or two to test and double check everything, right? 

 

Even if they give zero shuts about their PR or the user experience, why would they not just throw one or two software devs at it and get it over with? They are throwing around millions of dollars like it's pocket change, how have they not just contracted out to a small team to make their store functional on a basic level? 

[Humbug]

49 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

That's me, in a nutshell!

In their quest to compete with Steam, they figured features would be added later, market penetration and exposure were more important.

Yep Epic store is not exactly new. Just that it's not technically ready to be a general purpose launcher for other dev's games. If it was just for epic's games it wouldn't be a big deal.

 

What I mean is Steam also took time to improve in the early days. But it was just the launcher for Valve's games so if it sucked it was Valve's own customers who had to suffer.

 

Selling 3rd party games on steam happened gradually and even then there was no exclusivity contracts forcing games away from other retail channels, so they were able to have their early growth period of improvement more organically. Although still those of us playing Valve games did complain about steam.

 

Epic's strategy is quite different. It is to get very big very fast. Get too big to fail.

 

Whereas Valve never really planned or expected to be a leader in digital distribution. They wanted a way to directly sell and update their own games without a publisher. Then they realised wow this is working really well we can pitch it to other devs and make a lucrative business.

[imreloadin]

Is anyone here really surprised they're messing this up somehow? Wasn't this supposed to "rival" the steam summer sale? Kinda hard for that to be the case when you're ACTIVELY not letting people buy your products...also, could all of this had been mitigated by simply adding a fucking shopping cart to their "store"???

[Radium_Angel]

58 minutes ago, imreloadin said:

Is anyone here really surprised

I am! Stunned. No, really. Stop laughing.

/h /s just in case it's not obvious

[ravenshrike]

1 hour ago, Humbug said:

What I mean is Steam also took time to improve in the early days.

The difference is nobody knew what the fuck they were doing regarding online store/game launcher creation. It was very much trial and error in 2004/5. Nowadays the absolute basics for such a marketplace, like a goddamn digital shopping cart and filters for your games list, are widely known.

[Guest]

Gotta buy them up before they increase the price the next hour.

[Stefan Payne]

The insane thing is that EA and also Ubi did a passable Job with their first try.

Yes, there are still some things lacking but it wasn't as bad as EGS was...

[Arika]

Epic doesn't understand how stores work... Or people... 

[Stefan Payne]

1 hour ago, imreloadin said:

Is anyone here really surprised they're messing this up somehow?

Not really...

Epic seems like the worst of the worst.

Sadly that often gives them success as people don't care about that. We have precedent for that.

 

1 hour ago, imreloadin said:

Wasn't this supposed to "rival" the steam summer sale? Kinda hard for that to be the case when you're ACTIVELY not letting people buy your products...also, could all of this had been mitigated by simply adding a fucking shopping cart to their "store"???

Yes, it is. And its achieved by throwing money at the Publishers with an (in Europe) illegal business model...

Because its required by law here to make money on a product. 

 

You can't sell a product or a service under cost.

 

And that's what EGS seems to do...
Their business model is unsustainable and financed with other means. There is a reason why others demand more - for example eating the cost of some more expensive payment methods...

[WereCat]

EPIC:

Buys games to have exclusives so that you have to go to their store

 

Also EPIC:

Bans you when you try to buy all the exclusives

[xAcid9]

Poor thing can't afford to provide shopping cart to their user because they only took 12% cut. 

 

in be4
STeaM Also DoNt HavE CaRT WheN TheY STiLl nEW. 

[Theminecraftaddict555]

9 hours ago, Thaldor said:

And the story doesn't end here. Shopping cart, that thing you put your things before heading for the cashier to give money to take the things you put into the thing to your home, this very useful basket with wheels that holds things, is coming to Epic Games Store [pause here for a long time] not in 6 months but somewhere later. Confirmed from Epic Game Store (yes, I misspelled that for a reason) very useful and nice Trello roadmap adding more "very useful" payment methods and even redesigning the store page are more important tasks than adding shopping carts to your store where people can carry things.

 

[Thaldor]

8 hours ago, Stefan Payne said:

The insane thing is that EA and also Ubi did a passable Job with their first try.

Yes, there are still some things lacking but it wasn't as bad as EGS was...

The bad thing is that EGS is also quite probably becoming even worse. Steam and GOG Galaxy at least achieve game playing time data from their overlay, this is good way to do it because no other data is dangered in the process. EGS has Player Play Time Trackig in their near term development list while Epic Games Overlay is in the mid term list meaning they probably need to use a different method to keep tracking if the pplayer is playing the game. Comparing that as simple thing as shopping cart is impossible job for their interns in toilets to get done, I would guess they are going to track players playtime with process tracking, it's ok way to do it and trainers have use it for a long time to latch to the games, but it's extremely dirty and may be even a can of worms.

 

And it's not even that. 4-6 months to add Brazilian and Australian dollars as currencies to the store, like what? Even the completely free Wordpress addon eshops have support for every single currency there is and it's nothing more than taking the approximated conversion rate from somewhere time to time and multiplying the store price with it to show the user the price in whatever currency they fancy. "Search by Genre and Tag" 1-3 months, are they actually making even completely their own search engine that is apparently even more in it's infancy than the store core. "Library improvements" - " Add sorting, filtering and different views to the library. Add support for moving installs and rediscovering existing installs." Excuse me for my French, what the fuck?!? Did Epic even develope EGS before releasing it?

That's not a trainwreck. That is a trainwreck that happened in the train factory while trains were only in making.

[williamcll]

At least Steam checks if a user is actually a bot before issuing trade bans.

[Jito463]

17 hours ago, Thaldor said:

Steam and GOG Galaxy at least achieve game playing time data from their overlay

Can't speak for GoG, but I have the overlay disabled in Steam and it still tracks my game time.