Steam, why do you no longer what to take my money?
I went to buy Mass Effect 2 last night. When I went to purchase it, steam came back with “an unknown error has occured, please try again in a few minutes” I tried several times last night and got the same error over and over.
This morning I tried it and steam came back with “your purchase was denied because of insufficient funds in your account.” I jump online to my bank, I still have many 1000s of dollars of credit available and the purchase history looks normal. I called up my bank and they see no attempted charges from Valve since my Bioshock 2 purchase a few days ago.
steam realizes you have more games than time so it wants to help you start finishing some of them first. you reached their purchasing to finishing ceiling. finish some older games to flush the steam cache.
I seem to recall similar things happening every time Steam is overloaded, which is probably the case with ME2’s release. I’d wait a while and then try again.
Happened to me before near the end of the Christmas sale. Turns out my bank put a block on my credit card because they thought it was stolen. I thought it was quite funny when they were explaining it to me.
“Stolen cards are normally used for numerous petty online transactions and thus the activity was flagged and a block was put on until we could contact you, sorry for the inconvience”
It happened to me during the last Steam sale. Let’s just assume this shows how Steam’s servers are overtaxed, and use the experience to gauge the success level of Steam distribution.
Happened here 4 times with my Mastercard using it to buy from GoG and Steam. Always had to call them and “unlock” it. Always they told me that the system will “learn” and not flag transactions like that in the future.
Result: I use my VISA for online purchasing now which was never “flagged” so far. Mastercard is only used for paying IRL in hotels etc.
Mastercard’s loss not mine…
I kept getting flagged by Steam itself. Every christmas deal that I bought, they locked me. So after each purchase, I had to email them and have them unlock my account. They explained that the person who could fix it was out for the holidays. sigh
I use virtual account numbers for all my online purchases, and Steam flagged my account because it saw so many different credit card numbers. I had to contact them to get them to unlock it. It only happened once (so far), but if you use a similar mechanism, maybe that’s it.
You know what’s a good idea when you’re having a problem that everyone knows by now is something that happens occasionally because there are 100 threads about it? Make another thread about it.
I recall either starting one or contributing to an existing steam thread for the same reason: Steam wouldn’t take my credit card when I tried to buy a game on launch day.
I use CC since 2000 on the internet and I never lost money.
Then again I’m not a fucking retard like so many others (judging by the ways banks need to protect the cards these days).