the reason i made that reply was that switching to gog over steam doesnt make much sense, what does gog provide that is comparable to the market. I never praised valve for this decision so dont put words into my mouth. Infact i personally find it irritating to be forced to confirm every sale on my phone but that doesnt mean i cant understand why they might have made the change and while i disagree with it maybe there are some improvements that could be made to improve the current system whilst not harming security of accounts instead of straight up bashing and nonsense arguments of switching to other services that dont even have the perks (in any form) that the old service you just left did.
The fact that these issues strike people trading the cards makes it even worse as those are what most customers are going to use the system for. As you said, sell your cards and you can buy a game after a while. Except that was almost always bullshit. Depending on the cards you were selling, you would exhaust your 200 sell orders well before you saw enough to buy anything but a rinky dink indie game at 50% off. Steam added a system that gave its customers nothing but more ways to spend their money on Valve. Because all those transactions gave Valve a piece of the cut. And all the money, in the end, is already Valve's.
how does it matter that a cut of the money goes to valve ? at the end of the day the customer is profiting for free. And please you dont need 200 cards to buy a game, sell 20 cards and you can get a half decent game on winter/summer sale.
And people have not suddenly started to abuse the system. There have been abusers since the start of the SCM. Particularly bots that would insta-buy anything below the median market price for flipping. Valve's just being forced to do something about it because of international regulation. They're no longer being allowed to be lazy assholes sitting by while their customers are taken advantage of.
after the introduction of csgo and its inventory system the scamming has risen exponentially and thats why valve is forced to make changes and increase restrictions. They themselves have stated that over 77k hijacked accounts just because of csgo items. The numbers were nowhere close to this in the past and thats why the market was a lot less restrictive.
The most hilarious part about this is your post is almost entirely in the past tense, because you know how morally bankrupt this is getting. "Steam trading HAD benefits for customers"
Yes i used past tense because i understand that for people without steam app trading and market has becomse more or less obsolete and the system is no more a benefit for users.
However i do not believe that its "morally bankrupt" what valve is doing, yes they can and need to improve the current system to somehow accommodate people with windows phone and even the ones without phones in a better manner for example they could make sales of items < $5 be accepted without delay like it was previously, maybe add an exception to certain products like csgo knives so that scammers cant sell them for $4 or something like that.
I know that the restrictions suck, however i also understand why they have been put. Now valve just needs to figure out that the current restrictions are maybe too heavy and need some more thought put into them.