BoNfiRe wrote:
Probbably because of the scale involved in doing this. How many ppl have steam accounts hmm too many.
Nah..... You're only talking about 2.5 million records really. (2.3 million unique users per month http://www.steampowered.com/status/status.html)
Even a desktop database like Microsoft Access is capable (all be it at its utter and total limit) of handling that number of rows in a table.
As Whisper has already said its not that hard an application to build.
With the details that you enter into your Steam registeration, you've got at least 3 ways of confirming that a user is a legitimate and at two different points of connection. You can check the users details on start up of the client (its possible to intercept this and make the steam client believe that its completed a valid login [maybe this is how nosteam works?]) and the second connection point is when a user joins a server. The server sends the user details to a valve authentication server. This second connection would be much harder to intercept other than by installing something on the server itself to prevent it talking to the authentication server.
I'm not sure what the authentication servers are doing, but really they should be confirming, userid, steam id and possibly checking cd keys of users connecting to a server. I know that a userid/cd key match is not mandatory, because you can log in on any machine where steam/halflife is installed, but I'll bet 9/10 legitimate users will have matching a userid/steamid/cdkey. Ok - so a lot of people would be less than comfortable with their login details floating around in the open, but there is no reason why some kind of one way encrypted hash of their details couldn't be passed instead. The encrypted hash would be useless unless matched up with information in the Valve database. A nice little cluster of MS SQL or Oracle or even mySQL servers with some kind of webservice on the front could probably manage this nicely.
Sorry... I hate speculating or suggesting solutions when its not my place, but the problem of ensuring valid logins to servers is a nice little problem that appeals to me.
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