Poll if ZKL starts only with steamaccount

One option is to use steam accounts and steam battle/lobby services instead of current infrastructure. In that case official stuff would only run through steam but of course anyone could still host zk games on old lobbies.

Only benefit I see are less smurfs. But as an FLOSS advocate I'm not particularly in favor of this idea.

Needs more details, poll is unclear.

Does that mean...
a) zero-k lobby client (as in zero-k.exe) only starts with steam account? In this case I would not care and use different lobby.
b) "steam accounts and steam battle/lobby services instead of current infrastructure" - if that means new lobby server parallel to current one, then I would not play there.

I don't see what the fuss is about. Steam accounts are free, and if all goes well most of the people who start playing ZK in the future will already have one.

I agree with luckywaldo7 on giving the maintenance burden to somebody else. Out of curiousity, how much of the data would Steam actually handle? Is there a way to associate things like punishments, commanders, elo, etc. with Steam accounts in a secure manner?

Finally, what about the website? Does Steam have an SSO API that will be used in place of our current ZK accounts?

It's true though. I rarely have steam running, and going through that mess of starting it before I can do the "watch game" or "play mission" thing would actually make me play even less.

It would force everybody to use zklobby to play zk instead of use whatever-you-like. It is possible to keep spring infrastructure and just add steam in it accounts?

like most ToS:
https://tosdr.org/#steam

however, the client software is UNACCEPTABLE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Anti-Cheat

"In February 2014, rumors spread that the system was monitoring websites users had visited by accessing their DNS cache. Gabe Newell responded via Reddit, clarifying that the purpose of the check was to act as a secondary counter-measure to detect kernel level cheats, and that it affected one tenth of one percent of clients checked which resulted in 570 bans."

If you find a way to use steam infra without forcing players to install spyware, why not... but I'll not install such a thing, except to study it.

No kaen I can not. I just got curious after reading your comment.

I'd use Steam if there was no software and community already present.. but yeah.
If you'd opt for Steam-only you'd lose the benefit of an existing community when it gets released, which is imo pretty important for people to get started playing.