People invest a significant amount of money into their steam accounts(by purchasing skins and games) and targetting folks with some serious bans would help curb this behaviour. For example, a four month ban on the first offence, a year on the second, and lifetime on the third seems pretty reasonable and would surely have a significant impact.
Perhaps you could be lenient and if you’re only worried about prevention and not deterrence you could restrict the ban to online games and forums.
Maybe you'd not be banned from the storefront, but all Valve's game as well as the steam marketplace for those games. Perhaps Valve could create a system that lets other publishers opt in to receiving a notice when a player receives a ban like this so that they can mirror it. Locking the player out of all online games as a consequence of their actions seems fine.
The details don't need to be hashed out here but my overall point is that Valve has powerful levers at their disposal to tackle these problems and they aren't doing enough.
...No? This is a terrible idea on all levels. I never understood this "say bad word" -> "completely banished" pipeline either. To me this just sounds like a power trip from people who want to enforce their ideals on the rest of us.
Disable chat/voip for some time (as CSGO already does if you don't opt out) if someone gets reported too much.
I wouldn't (and won't) drop full price on a modern multiplayer knowing some trigger happy biorobot could ban me for a word or two with no recourse or refund. And I very rarely get worked up about a game enough to swear.
A: We aren't talking about a bad word or two here. You'd not receive an action like this for saying "gg ez noobs" or w/e. We are talking about racist, sexist, violent harassment here.
B: It's not "completely banished", that's why I would suggest exponentially ban durations, hopefully people get the memo on the first offence.
FWIW you can already be banned like this for cheating via VAC. Sexist/racist harassment is just as toxic as cheating to the game. It means big chunks of the population don't feel comfortable participating in the game fully(ask any female friends if they use voice chat in pubs).
https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/647C-5CC1-7EA9-3C...