Hi team!
All electronics have failure rates, sometimes as high as 5%. I don’t know what the SteamDeck has in terms of PPM, but I do know that if you contact Steam, they will take care of the defect.
Posting your hardware defects here is not doing anything helpful as only steam can take care of the issue. It also is the squeaky wheel syndrome where people are starting to think that most of the new OLED decks are shipping with defects.
Likewise it just creates noise in the sub as it is flooded with ‘my deck has this issue’ and really we should just hear about it if steam won’t take care of the defect.
I mean asking the community for help is more than appropriate, but if it’s clearly a hardware defect, just let steam know and you’ll have a brand new replacement before to long in most cases.
I love Valve’s Steam Deck Globe Room
P.S. The Deck in the image is inside of a globe with Steam Deck’s all around it that exists at Valve’s office. You can see this in some of their video content they’ve published recently.
I do not see a problem with people posting issues they have with their deck. Yes, they should also contact valve, but informing others of issues, sharing experiences, as well as commiserating with others with similar interests is totally reasonable for reddit or any forum. If you do not like it, just scroll past. There are plenty of posts of all types people don’t like, most just take the 0.05 seconds to scroll past without feeling the need to moderate others. What is wrong with someone sharing their first hand experience? Is this sub supposed to be a shield for Valve or couriers that do not care for the package during transit?
Ya, you do not want things to get blown out of proportion as that may be misleading for those who don’t have the full picture, but if someone is posting their actual experience, then it is legit and doesn’t need to be moderated on behalf of Valve. People shouldn’t just blindly repeat things they’ve read to contribute to hysteria or make an issue bigger than it is, but that shouldn’t be up to mods or anyone else to police posts of people with first hand experience sharing their issue. If Valve doesn’t want fearmongering about defects, then improve QA. If Fedex or whoever doesn’t want fearmongering about shipping incidents, then correct them. Its their problem, not the problem of the excited customer that opens up a busted device or turns on the screen to dead pixels, nor should they be expected to keep their mouth shut to not annoy people who don’t want to move their finger <1mm to scroll past the post.
I find it redundant if other people have shared the same experience already. If you want to amplify that same experience or add something to it, by all means, but I think it would be more appropriate to do by upvoting or commenting on an existing thread, not by creating redundant posts that say the same thing somebody else has already said.
Just my opinion, as somebody who hates noise and redundancy, and who has recently found it hard to find valuable content on this sub.
I get the general feeling of not wanting to see yet another __ post. But I think people posting issues is way more appropriate than the thousandth “what games are you currently playing?” and “look what arrived today” posts, and those posts I think are totally fine and I will participate in those from time to time because it is fun. It is social media, people want to discuss things and share experiences, often it is redundant when looking at it broadly, but is still an individual’s experience/opinion when looking at each particular post (assuming not a troll post). I’m fine posting “congrats” or whatever game I’m playing or just scrolling past.
I’m just not sure what types of posts people expect, most are redundant when looking at the big picture, so I suspect people just get annoyed with certain redundant posts compared to other redundant posts. Not saying you do that, just in general. And I think OP telling people to not share negative experiences is odd when there are just as many, if not more, positive experience posts gushing over their love for the Deck, Valve, Gabe, etc., sometimes to the point it makes me roll my eyes (I would never ask for those posts to be limited). It is just now that the OLED decks are shipping and having some early manufacturing hiccups, we are seeing more negative posts than usual. That’ll taper off if/when Valve gets their act together when it comes to QA.
But this stuff happens on other subs. Like the PS3 sub, people complain about wanting mods to control certain types of posts, even though it is a 17yr old console and doesn’t have a lot of new topics/news to discuss, so there will be a lot of redundancy and even troll posts piling on just to annoy people.
I simply tend to want a high signal-to-noise ratio for communities that I’m in. It’s OK for there to be fewer posts, as long as each post adds something new. I feel the same whether a post is positive or negative - both annoy me if they are repetitive (and both annoy me more if they are wrong or baseless).
Because I dislike noise, I tend to dislike repetitive posts - somebody posting photos of their new Deck is repetitive unless there is genuine creativity or something out of the ordinary to be found there. We’ve seen tons of photos of cats in empty Deck boxes by now - kudos to the first person who did it, but as much as I love cats, those are just annoying noise to me now. Wake me when somebody posts their pet King Cobra coiled up around their Deck with the caption “it’s hers now”.
And while I sympathize with people who have issues and want to vent or get help, having the same issue posted 50 times is just noise to anybody who does not have the issue (or even an OLED Deck, in this case). Yeah we know, the issue exists, there is already a thread (or 49) discussing it. Go read that and comment there. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I think people should at least make a basic effort to use the search function first, and post to whatever threads they found (assuming the existing answers they found there did not resolve their issue).
The “what are you playing” ones are a bit different to me, in so far as what people are playing actually changes over time. Maybe not on a weekly basis for everybody, but chances are that in aggregate you will see changes between weeks. So it makes some sense. However, that being said, while I personally think they are OK as separate threads, I would not object if somebody said they should be made into a mega-thread of sorts.