Well they did try to schedule delivery and apparently UPS wouldn’t let them do that, but yeah certainly not anything to do with Valve.

If this were pre-covid UPS likely wouldn’t have left a note and reattempted delivery the next day. But all of the shippers took the COVID no-contact rules to mean that they could just leave packages at the door, snap a pic, and be done with it. Saves them a huge amount on redelivery attempts, and they get to pass the blame on to their customers for not being there.

UPS asking you to open a case with Valve is normal. You didn’t pay to ship it, Valve did. Even if it is a line item on your invoice it was a contract between Valve and UPS, so you can’t call up UPS demanding investigation/money because it is Valve that gets the money not you (who in turn refunds it to you).

If Valve gives you the money back they are likely taking a loss on it to keep you happy. As far as UPS is concerned they delivered it (presumably with photographic evidence), so why would they pay up on insurance. Unless Valve pays for the higher level of insurance UPS won’t cover for porch pirates.

It is unlikely that Valve paid to have that level of coverage, but that is because they know only a small number of packages will be stolen. It ends up being cheaper to just give a few refunds than it is to pay for the higher level coverage on thousands of packages.

Hopefully that is the case on how Valve handles this and you get a replacement or at least your money back. Good luck!

Deep packet inspection.

They are bypassing firewalls that use DPI to filter which sites you are allowed to access.

Possible, especially because there are many different scores, I.e. I believe a car dealers often use a different score than say mortgage underwiters.

But I haven’t had a installment loan of any kind on my credit report for several years and my “average age of accounts” is still reported as excellent. Some revolving accounts in there, but my understanding was that closed accounts don’t leave your report for several years, and continue to count for your average age metric.

There is usually a small penalty for not having “enough types of credit” (if you are like me and don’t have any installment loans), but the reporting sites seem to say that it doesn’t affect the score much, and it took quite a while before they started reporting that as a problem.

Exactly this.

People think they are getting punished, like the bank doesn’t want you to take out another loan. The reality is that it is just an algorithm that sees major events like that and realizes that sometimes paying off a loan and immediately getting a new loan makes you more of a risk not less of one.

The score is a snapshot on a single day of how the algorithm thinks you could handle more credit than you currently have (it is used to apply for new credit), and if you paid off a loan and proceeded to walk into the bank days later to get right back into debt that is clearly/statistically a red flag.

The problem is people see the score like their current value as a person, but the score was designed for loan applications not for you to monitor month to month.

It’s not the bank trying to punish you it is just an algorithm that frankly has very limited data (no concept of assets, only sees statement balances, usually doesn’t include utilities/rent and many other bills) on your actual capability to pay off a loan.

Enterprise agreements using Copilot have “your data doesn’t leave our cloud, and we won’t train on your data” clauses. Even if you are just a M365 customer using the free tier of copilot you have enterprise data protection.

If you don’t believe them on that clause they were probably already storing that data on one of the cloud providers anyways, so Microsoft would have already had full access to that data right at the database instead of some snippets of prompted context.

Here is a teardown of a similar one. The eyes light up and blink. https://youtube.com/watch?v=eAF4R2n9CJA

Did you check memory usage at the same time? Install would certainly be IO intensive but probably shouldn’t max out a decent nvme drive.

If you ran out of ram due to the games installer and you started swapping that could quickly max out IO and DEs tend to stall quickly when the system is short on ram which also matches your symptoms.