I know Valve wants to remain a small-ish company, but automating in-house support has literally never improved things for the customer. It’s even worse if it’s tied into their anti-cheat - a false positive can lock you and your entire family out of multiplayer, and good luck getting a human to overturn it after the former support staff is moved to other teams.
I’d say it’s weird they didn’t focus on using this to help fix their nearly nonexistent community moderation, but I’ve been told their hands-off approach is deliberate due to a libertarian bent among the higher ups.
One thing Valve is known for is testing things. They typically make sure technology works before rolling it out everywhere.
I’m willing to bet that they have either solved most of the problems a tool like this has by massively limiting its scope, or it never actually gets past a beta test phase.
This. They have explicitly said that they are testing AI applications throughout the company and that it is not a concerted effort. It’s a few devs wanting to try it to see if it actually adds real value or not. That’s it.
It’s the best way, if it’s useful it’ll be used, if not then you’re not wasting time or money. Suits Valve’s methodology.
They improved their support ticket throughput by orders of magnitude by automating a lot of it already. There are lots of versions of automation, too, like collecting information about the user’s problem before you even get to a human.
Right, but there’s a difference between automating a refund if they can detect the purchase happened in the last two weeks and has less than two hours of playtime, versus complex support problems being handled by an LLM that can be mislead or hallucinate.
I suppose it’s fine if it’s limited to giving advice on solving the problem and has to escalate to a human if any server side action is required, but it being tied to anti-cheat has me worried that’s not the case.
This is an incorrect assertion. Making common actions self service without needing a human is almost always a customer win. For example automatic refunds on request if your request meets the correct criteria, instead of needing a human to look at it and make an arbitrary decision. Or having a knowledge base of common issues that can help people fix problems on their own without needing to talk to a person. Both are much faster and more repeatable.
But this is not viable for every use case. If there is a major issue with my Bank account, I want to speak to person, period.
Specific actions have automated workflows is of a course a good thing.
Documentation is also good, but it often doesn’t account for edge cases or your unique situation. Not to mention, the majority of the public is not going have the desire to deal with documentation.
I think it could have been an interesting usecase to chat with a steambot to get game recommendations.
Their current recommendation engine is already a marvel and the only one I’ve ever come across that actually directs me to niche stuff I might be interested in.
12·20 days agoRemoved by mod
Their support staff are always being commended, seems odd to me.
At the same time they allow rusdian war crime simulators.
The non existent community moderation is by design and purpose. Valve wants it that way. They refuse to be any sort of gatekeepers in it.
Which AI fuckhead got into Valve HQ
You know this is totally on brand for Valve if you ever had the displeasure trying to reach out to their support.
Worst features Valve has
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VAC (uses AI to achieve nothing)
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This
thank you for reading
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I hoped for better, but honestly I’m not surprised. Valve’s idea of customer service has always depended on auromated systems because they don’t want to hire people to do customer service.
Gabe’s Prostate Tickler
AI powered anticheat when?
Valve anticheat is ML driven for years
To the people who said Steam won’t ever be enshittified… So it has began.
Can you point to the people who said that?
