I get random friend requests from accounts in discord servers that I haven't even viewed, let alone interacted in, for years - most have some sort of "live/laugh/love" bio blurb. Maybe I'm just an antisocial hermit at this point, but I ignore every single one.

In comparison, Steam seems a lot more genuine. You can always try suggesting discord for voice chat if you're leery of installing an unknown program just for talking to that user.

I have blocked 357 accounts that sent a random friend invite, where 302 of it were automated. I do have some stuff on my Team Fortress 2/CS2 inventory which attracts all sorts of scammers and bots, even though I've stopped playing both games for quite some time.

With that said, I'm cool with random invites from real people. There are lots of games where you can use more people to play with, regardless of how close you are.

As someone who has been on the Internet for a long time, I have never once thought adding someone on a game platform/social as something risky. If they turn out to be bad, you just block them, no? I don't understand why something like this needs to blow up in your face. I should say that I am someone who randomly sends invites to players I have played with online, who are strangers, but whom I enjoyed playing with for XYZ reason. I never thought I was committing some kind of crime by doing that but maybe that's just me. I don't mind getting random friends requests from people I've played yes and yes I have no friends. Go figure.

how do you lemmings deal with these random friend invites?

Dude, just talk to the person. You already seem to know every possible red flag there is. If they do something shady, you'll know, but there's also the possibility they're just looking for friends.

I've made friendships online that are going for more than a decade at this point. I'm not saying you should trust everyone, but maybe just be less suspicious and let time show you what kind of person you're taking to, it will reveal if the person is friendly or not.

Aren't those attempts to jack your steam account? I remember hearing something a few years back about people being able to "recover" an account by having a certain number of friends put in a ticket saying it was stolen.

Or maybe that was discord. Either way, as a result I don't add randos.

That doesn't sound random at all and if they were a scammer they'd probably have tried to scam you by now.

There are a lot of bots on Steam. If I get a random friend request from someone I don't recognize who has only F2P games in their account, or just no playtime in anything that I play, I ignore it.

But if it's someone you've been playing with, that's a human. A bot would've just gone straight to the scam as soon as you accept their friend request.

I'm guessing they're probably talking about Discord, which is what most people use for voice chat these days (and other social media-y stuff). It's not a virus or anything, but it is another proprietary corporate-owned social media platform, which I'm sure a lot of us here on Fedi might have opinions about.

The only people I've friended online that I didn't know in person were other people who play Skullgirls, because it was the only way to pick their brain on how I can improve, or even just to send a "ggs". These days, we're basically all in the same Discord server, so I can usually start typing @ and a few letters of the name they used in quick match and find them pretty easily, so it's been a while. Still, those people are mostly strangers to me, and sometimes their accounts get hacked. The scam I've seen multiple times at this point is that they need people to go to an external site and vote for them to get approved for a Counter-Strike ranked league or something. I don't know how it works, but I'm not clicking that link. If that's how that CS ranked league works, find another one with a better method of letting you in.

The most consistent DRG group I play with is women, so not that far fetched IMO. To your concern about leaking your IP, steam uses their own networking solutions to conceal your IP in non peer to peer games based on the settings under "Steam / Settings / In-Game / Steam Networking". Check that and read up on the options and what they do.