Cell Phone Deficient Discrimination

Steam has adopted a policy as of early December of 2015 that penalizes people not using their authenticator, which ends up cutting out customers that do not have cell phones.  Their argument in this is higher security to protect your account, however they don't seem to be concerned about those that are exempt from using it, do not have the choice of using it (do to lacking hardware) & from what has been stated in the past, it's more of a matter that Steam does not want to deal with stolen inventory items from stolen accounts, believing the authenticator will solve the problem...  The penalty to those that do not wish to use the app (or don't have the option to use it) is targeted at account inventory, where originally a trade/market hold of 3 days would be implied to transfer of items from an account that wasn't using the authenticator, however that hold was later increased to 15 days.  The only plus side to this is that friends of over a year have that hold lowered to 1 day, so it's not as bad if you stay in your circle of friends (that don't really work when trying to purchase/sell over the market, however).

However you can't just add everybody on Steam to your friend list to lower the trade/market-hold duration because there is a friend limit that is tied in with our Steam account rank (which I have unfortunately seen users use as a form of newbie discrimination as well), which is determined mainly by how many badges you get through crafting of card sets through purchased games (there are other ways to raise it, but this is the main way to do it).  Of course to get additional/different cards, you have to purchase them from the market, trade with others or wait for booster packs to drop.  The problem with trade/market holds is that there will be a notice at the top of the screen when a trade hold is going to happen & for those who are using the authenticator, they usually won't trade with those people due to the hold (even those using the authenticator get the hold if the other end of the trade isn't using it), so this is where the discrimination comes in.

The discrimination could have been easily avoided if Steam had allowed authorization codes to be sent over the phone, although with the number of trades that are done per day, it is perhaps understandable why they didn't.  Still, they shouldn't have taken a method that cuts out probably a fifth of their customers due to lacking hardware.  Were automated phone authorizations to be added, there would likely be a delay depending on how many requests were being made at a given time, meaning the phone app would still be the preferable method.

For those who have a cell phone, but not one that could run the app, text authorizations might have been an option, which are already used for account verifications, but Steam so far has decided it's not an acceptable method for trade/market authorizations.  Even this method would be prone to text confirmation codes being delayed, as was proven directly after they put this policy into effect & EVERYBODY was scrambling to get the app added before the Christmas sale started & it's a requirement to get SMS verifications added to your account before you can add the authenticator.

One problem with the authenticator is if you have multiple Steam accounts, seeing as when I had it authorized to multiple accounts (through an android emulator), you could only authorize trades on the primary account.  In the end, I had to disable use of the authenticator on my secondary Steam account because I couldn't get the trades to go through using the authenticator, meaning I was back to having trade holds on that account (luckily trades were only done on that account to my primary account, so it was only for 1 day, seeing as I've had it friended on my primary account for years).

In any case, Steam Guard via email is required now if you want to do trading or use the market, but you're still going to get the trade hold if you're not using the authenticator on an Android/iPhone, so those without the proper hardware to run it are getting the proverbial finger from Steam saying they don't care you are getting a trade hold, because you're choosing not to use the app on a device you do not own & they're not going to make any exceptions.  This kind of attitude as far as I'm concerned is the reason why I expect they're not only losing money on Market transactions, but also customers.  Nearly 8 months later, this trend still continues, which should be enough for people to consider whether they really want to purchase from Steam or not if they do not own a cell phone yet (if anything, that money will be going towards a cell phone & plan rather than to Steam if it's a requirement).