Steams Kinda Sucks Sometimes

I've been using the Steam services to play video games for a few years now. I've never had any complaints until last night. You see I've been changing my passwords a lot lately with all the data breaches (I'm looking at you Playstation Network & Gawker). Last night it all caught up with me when I tried to log into my Steam account but I couldn't remember my password. I'm pretty sure I was close but with so many spaces and special characters I just couldn't figure out what I changed it to. So I started down the automated password recovery road.

First you enter in your username and they send you an email. In this email is a verification code and a secret question. Once you get this email you enter in your verification code and the answer to your secret question and you SHOULD be able to change you password.

Here is where the trouble began. The secret question I received was "What did customer support last reset your passphrase to?" Now keep in mind every time you fail to get the secret answer correct you have to go through the whole process of waiting for another email.

Having no idea what they are talking about I tried a few things that could be a passphrase but they all failed. Step two was to go through all my old emails to find the passphrase. I went through about 200 Steam emails and tried about 10 different codes and nothing worked. It wasn't until after I had submitted a customer service ticket that it finally dawned on me. What they were looking for with the secret question was my old password. I'm not a tech ludite but it would have saved a ton of time if the secret question was "What was your old password?" instead of "What did customer support last reset your passphrase to?"

A quick search online found tons of people running into the same problem. Hopefully this post will help someone someday. I was just happy I was able to get my Portal 2 on last night.

"Space!"