Great EA & valve hook up.

[retardedchicken]

There are far more disadvantages to the consumer when using Steam than advantages. Some may be more tolerant to these disadvantages, some may be less tolerant. However the point is that, as you even pointed out, Steam benefits Valve far more than the consumer. Now, we were talking about companies that care about their community, not companies that care about themselves. Every week there are tons of request on the Steam website to release a retail CD Steam-free version of HL2. Tons and tons. The community wants it, and a large percentage of the community wants to dump Steam. In fact, the only people I have seen really trumpeting Steam lately are those that are fans of Valve. Between the clunkiness, required updates for single player, long install times, "can't connect to steam" errors to play even a single player game offline, disappearing games, etc, Steam is an unnecessary pain in the butt. Doom3, FarCry, Painkiller, every other FPS released recently had a retail CD version available with nothing as intrusive as Steam. Steam is layered on top of HL2 and it would be cake for Valve to release a Steam-free HL2. But as I pointed out above, Valve cares about themselves and making a profit more than their community. Just like EA!



I would prefer to see actual real progress more than news updates. CryTek brought HDR and SM3.0 to FarCry much faster than Valve is bringing it to HL2. People Can Fly brought SM3.0 and the Battle Out of Hell expansion to Painkiller much faster than Valve is bringing it to HL2. id Software brought the expansion to Doom3 much faster than Valve is bringing their HL2 expansion. And most importantly, neither FarCry, Painkiller, Doom3 has the glut of technical bugs that plague the Source engine, most noticably being the horrendous combo of "stutter" and "memory cannot be read crash" bugs. Valve seems to have given up on fixing these bugs which have persisted since the game came out, over 6 months ago. FarCry, Painkiller, and Doom3 also don't have anything intrusive like Steam, you just play the game like any other game no internet connection required for single player.
.

SM3.0 is making a very minute difference for Far Cry, and HDR is littered with problems that make it almost cumbersome to play with turned on.

Ok, my steam program is currently taking 18 megs of my RAM, out of the 1gig you SHOULD have to run HL2 smoothly, that is NOTHING. Required updates? Don't you WANT updates? Long install times? I'm sure Valve is sorry for not giving you all of their bandwidth just so you can download a 2MB update for CS:S. Currently my entire Valve folder is 5.5GB, IIRC it took almost 3 hours to download that, if my math is correct it downloaded at about 500kb/sec, which is pretty damn good. The stutter bug is gone for me, the only slight stuttering I get is when I switch resolutions.

What's the big deal about playing with Steam on offline mode? Haven't you looked at the minimum requirements? AN INTERNET CONNECTION.

 

[tranCendenZ]

Auto updates are a good thing for a few reasons. For one, you don't have to wait in line to download. Now I realize some people try to be "hardcore" and pretend they'd rather wait in line to download or download at a slower rate, but in reality this is beneficial to everyone.

I get my patches from www.filefront.com... I've never had to wait more than 30 seconds in line for a download, its free, and its faster than steam.

Secondly, having everything auto update ensures that people who are still confused by Windows Update (there's tons of them) get to play online, otherwise most would probably never figure it out. Seriously, it's not a big deal; you have to connect to the Internet each and every time you want to flame Valve.

Right, but if the internet is down or hardforum is down and I can't flame Valve, I can play Doom3 single player. If the internet is down or Steam is down, I can't play HL2, not even single player offline.

What are these disadvantages, and please spare me the pathetic "what if Valve goes bankrupt?" argument. Also, what are your perceived advantages? The number of people who really want a Steam-free version of CS:S are minimal. Very few people are still playing HL2 who actually care about Steam. How is Steam clunky? It doesn't use that much memory and it's about as minimalist as it gets. Required updates for single player... so bad... I have to wait a whole 4 minutes to play a game as it's updated every 2 weeks or so... oh no! Long install times - sorry, don't blame your shitty hardware on Steam, I can install just fine in very little time. Also, requiring an internet connection is a big deal. It's 2005, where broadband is available nearly everywhere, not 1995. Get with the times grandpa. How is Steam intrusive? Is it really that hard to click TWICE to close it? And what's wrong with a company making money? I'm sorry to inform you but every company is going to look out for profits first.

STEAM ADVANTAGES
1) On-demand game downloads let you get the game more conveniently than buying it from a store
2) Auto-update
3) Ability to download game from anywhere with no CD required
4) CD not required in drive to play

STEAM DISADVANTAGES
1) Requires internet connection.
2) Takes an hour+ to install and update even on a fast broadband connection installing off the retail CD/DVD. Even longer for the download.
3) Needs to login and verify your account every time you play even single player
4) After verfication, you can trick the program into working offline for single player through an annoying process, but after you go back online to play multiplayer the program tries to reset itself back to online mode, defeating the purpose of said settings.
5) When the Steam servers are down, you cannot play any of your Steam games at all, period - even if you have the retail CD/DVD in your drive ready to play offline with the CDKEY. There have been several occasions where they have been down for a few minutes, and there was one occasion they were down the whole weekend, locking out users. In fact, there was a thread on Hardforum regarding this very downtime. Even with today's cable modems and DSL, the internet does go down on occasion, and the Steam servers also go down on occasion. Generally when you can't use the net but want to play games, you would probably play an offline single player game - but you can't do this with HL2 because of Steam.
6) Steam gives you no physical media for authentication. It's much easier to steal an online Steam account and the 6 games you bought for it than to steal the physical CD media out of your house/apartment.
7) Sometimes due to glitches in the system, the games you bought will disappear off your Steam list, often requiring you to contact Valve to fix the problem if a reinstall doesn't work, leaving you gameless until they respond.
8) Steam gives Valve too much control - if Valve thinks you are doing something they don't agree with, they have the right to terminate your account and all games on it. This gives Valve the power to disable your games from being played at all, even single player offline. Correcting an error like this if one is made generally takes 4-7 days according to the Steam forums.
9) Steam is clunky. There is no well programmed offline mode or levels of intrusion and it does not remove itself from memory after you have played a game. The interface is also poor - compared to other protected content delivery systems like XBOX Live the interface leaves much to be desired. Steam also makes starting and quitting the game take longer even when there are no updates.
10) Steam takes up resources while you are playing your games.
11) Required auto-updates when playing single player/offline is nonsensical. If you want to install HL2 off a retail CD onto a secondary laptop that has dialup, for instance, you will probably have to connect to the net over the phone line downloading updates all day long. That is unacceptable when you simply want to play the single player game offline and updates are not necessary.
12) Use foresight. There is no unified standard for content delivery on PC (unlike XBOX Live for XBOX). Fine, Steam is no problem now for you now. Let's say it catches on. Then you will have both developers and publishers pushing these content delivery systems onto your systems - I could easily see EA, for instance, pushing one of these for their games. Then you will not only have Steam, but a host of other intrusive programs that all do the same thing from different companies. Do you think EA's content delivery/verification system would work as good as Steam based on their other software work? How about Blizzard based on their WOW server performance? Do you really want to be at the mercy of the publisher/developer when simply wanting to play the game you bought offline and single player?

And that's all CryTek was working on. id did not make RoE. Yes, they brought an expansion to Painkiller faster... not hard when that's all you're working on. See get with the times in above section about internet access. Of course you could argue that what happens when internet access goes out... but that would just make you seem like a drama queen grasping at straws as we all know internet access is reliable today.

Every developer releases flawed products, period. BTW, Valve doesn't have to release ANY content at all. I don't see Dice working on new maps and game modes for BF2... oh wait they are, for a price. The people who have the most problems with Steam are drama queens and the computer illiterate, of which you fall into the first group and you know it.

If you want to smile and wave as you gleefully let a Trojan Horse sail through your gates, that is fine. I'll put up more of a fight, thanks.

 

[Badger_sly]

Poor EA. Gabe is just gold digging for the next rich publisher he can sue. Hopefully EA's lawyers will make that an extremely tight contract.

 

[133]

I get my patches from www.filefront.com... I've never had to wait more than 30 seconds in line for a download, its free, and its faster than steam.



Right, but if the internet is down or hardforum is down and I can't flame Valve, I can play Doom3 single player. If the internet is down or Steam is down, I can't play HL2, not even single player offline.

I don't know what content server you connect to but my downloads are fast, and If your game is 100% updated, play in OFFLINE MODE

STEAM DISADVANTAGES
1) Requires internet connection.

It clearly says it on the box when you buy the product, so you should know what your getting into when you buy it. Plus its 2005, anyone buying games like HL2 should have some kind of internet.

5) When the Steam servers are down, you cannot play any of your Steam games at all, period - even if you have the retail CD/DVD in your drive ready to play offline with the CDKEY. There have been several occasions where they have been down for a few minutes, and there was one occasion they were down the whole weekend, locking out users. In fact, there was a thread on Hardforum regarding this very downtime. Even with today's cable modems and DSL, the internet does go down on occasion, and the Steam servers also go down on occasion. Generally when you can't use the net but want to play games, you would probably play an offline single player game - but you can't do this with HL2 because of Steam.

When was the last time they were down for everyone? and for how long?

Oh nooo! i can't play my games on steam for a few hours, the world is gunna end!!!11

6) Steam gives you no physical media for authentication. It's much easier to steal an online Steam account and the 6 games you bought for it than to steal the physical CD media out of your house/apartment.

Don't give out your username/password/email, you gotta be a real bozo to do that

7) Sometimes due to glitches in the system, the games you bought will disappear off your Steam list, often requiring you to contact Valve to fix the problem if a reinstall doesn't work, leaving you gameless until they respond.

Never saw that happen. And when people did say it happened it was because they were logging into the wong account.

8) Steam gives Valve too much control - if Valve thinks you are doing something they don't agree with, they have the right to terminate your account and all games on it. This gives Valve the power to disable your games from being played at all, even single player offline. Correcting an error like this if one is made generally takes 4-7 days according to the Steam forums.

Then don't do anything illegal or against the terms you agreed to when you bought/installed the game.

Wow 4-7 days, it takes longer to RMA a fuggin piece of hardware, i think we can all go a week without Steam, seeing how you think its Sooooo bad and plus you have all thoes other great games to play in the meantime like Doom3 and FarCry..right ?

9) Steam is clunky. There is no well programmed offline mode or levels of intrusion and it does not remove itself from memory after you have played a game. The interface is also poor - compared to other protected content delivery systems like XBOX Live the interface leaves much to be desired. Steam also makes starting and quitting the game take longer even when there are no updates.

Mine works just fine, and as far as the interface goes, you can get Skins for Steam, i happen to have one applied. My games close as soon as i press quit? and i could care less if steam ran for 15seconds after i closed it. Big deal its using like 35mb of memory for a few seconds.

10) Steam takes up resources while you are playing your games.

What like 40mb of memory? If your consider youself a gamer you should have Plenty of resources (1gb of ram or more)

 

[Nasty_Savage]

Well, EA is just going to slap a sticker on the box and put it on the premium shelf space so it 'sticks out and trips ya' when you walk down the aisle. The Sucktastic virtues of Valve + Steam + EA all cancel out. They all still suck but there shouldn't be any extra suck factor from either sucky company or their suckilicious distibution system. The suck factor should remain constant.

 

[Mindriot]

Right, but if the internet is down or hardforum is down and I can't flame Valve, I can play Doom3 single player. If the internet is down or Steam is down, I can't play HL2, not even single player offline.

You only need the internet to verify the installation. There is "Offline Mode" and you can do whatever you want after installation verification is done. Jeez, a 56k Modem can get that job done. You don't need a 6Mbit Connection to play HL2.

Where are you getting your facts???

 

[Staples]

This is just a distribution venue. EA will have little to no influence over Valve's games.

This is just like Activision does with Id and Epic games. Id and Epic really produce most of their games and Activision boxes and takes a very small cut of the sales.

 

[jon_k]

wow I can't believe there are end users who actually support steam....

 

[PNut12345]

i lost all respect for ea for what they did to madden 2005
that game sucked hardcore, tgier woods pga 2k5 was awesome though.
as long as they're just distributing it then im good.

Someone hasn't played BF2.

 

[PNut12345]

This is just a distribution venue. EA will have little to no influence over Valve's games..

Yeah, they'll only have influence over release dates, and QA.

 

[finalgt]

12) Use foresight. There is no unified standard for content delivery on PC (unlike XBOX Live for XBOX). Fine, Steam is no problem now for you now. Let's say it catches on. Then you will have both developers and publishers pushing these content delivery systems onto your systems - I could easily see EA, for instance, pushing one of these for their games. Then you will not only have Steam, but a host of other intrusive programs that all do the same thing from different companies. Do you think EA's content delivery/verification system would work as good as Steam based on their other software work?

You realize that EA's main role is as a publisher, right? As in, they make their revenues based on the sales of the physical medium? And that switching to a digital distribution model, like what Valve did to eliminate companies like EA as publisher of their games, would destroy their sales? Uhh, yeah. Think about that.

 

[Michael.R]

Yeah, they'll only have influence over release dates, and QA.

No im pretty sure that they wouldnt even have influence over that. From what I understand because valve is essentially funding the entire development of their games they have control over everything, Including release dates and quality inssurrance. All EA is doing is distributing the game. When Valve is done the game they hand it over to EA who then packages the game and sends it to retail. Im not to sure who would take care of marketing though.

I got to do a little research though because Im myself and not %100 positive what a distibution deal entitles the distributor and the developer. A distributor and a publisher may seem like the same thing to many people but they are infact very different as someone posted above. Now Below I generally concur with what is said below but because each contract is different we may never know what Valve and EA are doing.

To clarify what is a distribution deal vs. a publishing deal. Distribution means that all EA will do is take the finished product and use their supply chain to get the product into stores and most likely handle in-store advertising and marketing. EA might not even manufacture the CDs or boxes. Valve could get a third-party to do that. In return, EA gets a cut of every boxed copy sold. Valve stays independent and is allowed to set their own schedule and has no restrictions on content.

Publishing means that EA will front the money for development, take a larger cut and do all of the above including handling manufacturing. The publisher usually works into the deal some ownership of the IP rights as part of the financing, dictates the terms of release and has input into content.

 

[fromage]

I
STEAM DISADVANTAGES
1) Requires internet connection.

If you have a good enough computer to run HL2, you have broadband. There's no reason otherwise.

2) Takes an hour+ to install and update even on a fast broadband connection installing off the retail CD/DVD. Even longer for the download.

Even if you don't have broadband, you can disable updates. It took me 5 minutes to install HL2 from the retail CD on the day it came out.

3) Needs to login and verify your account every time you play even single player

Steam can auto-remember your user name and password.

4) After verfication, you can trick the program into working offline for single player through an annoying process, but after you go back online to play multiplayer the program tries to reset itself back to online mode, defeating the purpose of said settings.

You don't have to trick it or anything. Log in, click settings, click Use Offline mode for next start up, make sure your auto-remember userinfo is checked, and voila. Offline mode the next time you start Steam.

5) When the Steam servers are down, you cannot play any of your Steam games at all, period - even if you have the retail CD/DVD in your drive ready to play offline with the CDKEY. There have been several occasions where they have been down for a few minutes, and there was one occasion they were down the whole weekend, locking out users. In fact, there was a thread on Hardforum regarding this very downtime. Even with today's cable modems and DSL, the internet does go down on occasion, and the Steam servers also go down on occasion. Generally when you can't use the net but want to play games, you would probably play an offline single player game - but you can't do this with HL2 because of Steam.

Steam servers maintain a 99.99% uptime in the past 6 months atleast. I don't think they go down very often now.

6) Steam gives you no physical media for authentication. It's much easier to steal an online Steam account and the 6 games you bought for it than to steal the physical CD media out of your house/apartment.

That's false. The fact that your games CDkeys are LOCKED to your account makes it much more secure than anything anyone else has. With BF2, even if you purchased the game, the cdkey can be used by anyone in the world, thus a keygen or whatever can generate that same cdkey and voila, it's stole right from you. They don't need any of the physical media. If games needed the physical media to run, they'd won't have cdkeys. Simple as that. Steam is more secure, provided you have a good password and what not.

7) Sometimes due to glitches in the system, the games you bought will disappear off your Steam list, often requiring you to contact Valve to fix the problem if a reinstall doesn't work, leaving you gameless until they respond.

Never happened to me, nor have I seen that on Steam Powered forums

8) Steam gives Valve too much control - if Valve thinks you are doing something they don't agree with, they have the right to terminate your account and all games on it. This gives Valve the power to disable your games from being played at all, even single player offline. Correcting an error like this if one is made generally takes 4-7 days according to the Steam forums.

No different than EA or Infinity Ward. I've seen people who's CDkeys have been banned for no reason. Atleast Valve does have an appeal system.

9) Steam is clunky. There is no well programmed offline mode or levels of intrusion and it does not remove itself from memory after you have played a game. The interface is also poor - compared to other protected content delivery systems like XBOX Live the interface leaves much to be desired. Steam also makes starting and quitting the game take longer even when there are no updates.

I don't understand, offline mode works for what it's intended to do. Steam is meant as a platform to play your games from. If you're playing DoD, then want to play CS, you just exit one and double click the other, would you want to have to restart Steam every time you wish to play a different Steam game? Oh wait, you're the guy who doesn't like to click on Exit after your finished. [/quote]

10) Steam takes up resources while you are playing your games.

And? It's built into the requirements of the game. I can play every game fine, I don't think I'd notice the extra 15mb of memory.

11) Required auto-updates when playing single player/offline is nonsensical. If you want to install HL2 off a retail CD onto a secondary laptop that has dialup, for instance, you will probably have to connect to the net over the phone line downloading updates all day long. That is unacceptable when you simply want to play the single player game offline and updates are not necessary.

Turn off auto-updates.

12) Use foresight. There is no unified standard for content delivery on PC (unlike XBOX Live for XBOX). Fine, Steam is no problem now for you now. Let's say it catches on. Then you will have both developers and publishers pushing these content delivery systems onto your systems - I could easily see EA, for instance, pushing one of these for their games. Then you will not only have Steam, but a host of other intrusive programs that all do the same thing from different companies. Do you think EA's content delivery/verification system would work as good as Steam based on their other software work? How about Blizzard based on their WOW server performance? Do you really want to be at the mercy of the publisher/developer when simply wanting to play the game you bought offline and single player?

Considering that the PC industry is much bigger than any console, it's hard to set a unified standard for a peice of software. Microsoft has tried that approach already, with their auto-updates for Windows including driver updates and software patches. If EA or anyone else goes the route of Steam, perhaps they will use Steam, or if they make their own, it wouldn't be long till GameSpy or whoever launches their own software combining these things(it will most likely be buggy as hell, though). This is just evolution though. Would you rather we get stuck on the old system, without any sort of content delivery system? Steam is a platform to get updates out to the end user, as fast as possible and as frequent as possible. If others follow suit, that's great. If it doesn't work for them, I wouldn't play or buy their games. Simple as that. Steam works for me and I will buy their games.

If you want to smile and wave as you gleefully let a Trojan Horse sail through your gates, that is fine. I'll put up more of a fight, thanks.

So you're saying Steam is such a bad thing because, it's now 2 years old, and it had a few problems in the beginning which almost all have been fixed.

Yeah, they'll only have influence over release dates, and QA.

Somehow, I doubt even that as someone said EA's aggressive release dates will not be applied to Valve.

 

[ray4389]

Thats not true, Valve cares. They listen to the community. It just takes them a while, before its actually implemented into there games.

EA listens....and then forget's like a 5 year old.

 

[Sly]

Don't give out your username/password/email, you gotta be a real bozo to do that

I work part time for an MMORPG company, the number of hack cases from keyloggers is astronomical. Most players (the average gamer) simply doesn't know what a trojan is.

You might say that a person targetting you for just your HL2 is crazy, but the that one keylogger that got through to your PC can get your Creditcard, YM, MSN, WoW, GuildWar, ROSE, Ragnarok, UltimaOnline AND your Steam account, either through actual keylogging, clipboard monitoring or cache scanning (including the autoremember password features in applications).

Erk... one sentence paragraph. Hope my english teacher doesn't see this.

 

[Psyc0tic]

I dont really care about any of this,
aslong as ea keeps there bs logo's and merchandising outta my css im happy

 

[tranCendenZ]

If you have a good enough computer to run HL2, you have broadband. There's no reason otherwise.

Laptop, travel, next.

Even if you don't have broadband, you can disable updates. It took me 5 minutes to install HL2 from the retail CD on the day it came out.

No, when you install the game, you are forced to download ALL updates.

Steam can auto-remember your user name and password.

That's not the issue, the issue is that it has to actually log you on to a server to play a single player game every single time you play. Uncalled for.

You don't have to trick it or anything. Log in, click settings, click Use Offline mode for next start up, make sure your auto-remember userinfo is checked, and voila. Offline mode the next time you start Steam.

And then when you want to play online multiplayer it attempts to reset back to online mode.

Steam servers maintain a 99.99% uptime in the past 6 months atleast. I don't think they go down very often now.

This was unacceptable:
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=861497

That's false. The fact that your games CDkeys are LOCKED to your account makes it much more secure than anything anyone else has. With BF2, even if you purchased the game, the cdkey can be used by anyone in the world, thus a keygen or whatever can generate that same cdkey and voila, it's stole right from you. They don't need any of the physical media. If games needed the physical media to run, they'd won't have cdkeys. Simple as that. Steam is more secure, provided you have a good password and what not.

The difference is with BF2 you have a physical CD/jewel case/cdkey in your hand that proves you own the game, therefore you can get reimbursement or a new key and have proof of ownership. With Steam you have absolutely nothing physical if someone steals your account except your confirmation which you hopefully printed out and still have somewhere. You just have to email Valve and hope they are nice to you - meanwhile you are out of a game for almost a week.

Never happened to me, nor have I seen that on Steam Powered forums

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=51499&page=1
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=270619
etc. that was from 30 seconds of searching.

No different than EA or Infinity Ward. I've seen people who's CDkeys have been banned for no reason. Atleast Valve does have an appeal system.

Except when EA bans your CD-key, you don't lose offline play, and even if you did lose offline play, you lose it for one game, not every single game you own under your Steam account. Valve could render hundreds of dollars of games worthless by disabling your Steam account - no other dev or publisher has this level of control over ALL of the games you own by them together.

I don't understand, offline mode works for what it's intended to do. Steam is meant as a platform to play your games from. If you're playing DoD, then want to play CS, you just exit one and double click the other, would you want to have to restart Steam every time you wish to play a different Steam game? Oh wait, you're the guy who doesn't like to click on Exit after your finished.

No I'm the guy who doesn't want Steam at all. If it has to be there, there should be an option to make it transparent to the user. Shortcuts and the Start Menu work just fine for my games menu, I don't need a second menu.

And? It's built into the requirements of the game. I can play every game fine, I don't think I'd notice the extra 15mb of memory.

It's also unnecessary.

Turn off auto-updates.

Again, you can't on first install, which makes the laptop scenario very real.

Considering that the PC industry is much bigger than any console, it's hard to set a unified standard for a peice of software. Microsoft has tried that approach already, with their auto-updates for Windows including driver updates and software patches. If EA or anyone else goes the route of Steam, perhaps they will use Steam, or if they make their own, it wouldn't be long till GameSpy or whoever launches their own software combining these things(it will most likely be buggy as hell, though). This is just evolution though. Would you rather we get stuck on the old system, without any sort of content delivery system? Steam is a platform to get updates out to the end user, as fast as possible and as frequent as possible. If others follow suit, that's great. If it doesn't work for them, I wouldn't play or buy their games. Simple as that. Steam works for me and I will buy their games.

Content delivery systems are cool, but they should be an option not a requirement. If Valve released both the Steam way and the standard retail cd w/ cdkey way without steam, that would be fine with me. Just as Steam works for you, it doesn't work for plenty others.

So you're saying Steam is such a bad thing because, it's now 2 years old, and it had a few problems in the beginning which almost all have been fixed.

No, I'm saying accepting Steam with a smile is similar to accepting OPM with a smile, or any other number of technologies that restricts user freedom and makes using the computer in general more cumbersome and takes away control from the user. I'd like to retain as much control as possible over the behavior and usage of software I bought for my computer. Otherwise I'll end up with one big bloated mess of DRM starting with my music and ending with my games and their 27 required content delivery programs.

Somehow, I doubt even that as someone said EA's aggressive release dates will not be applied to Valve.

EA is just a distributor on the PC end, they don't have much say in the matter.

 

[bjork]

I'm sure somewhere in the contract it states that EA can't try to rush game development.

wow. how would you be sure of that?

 

[rowbear62468]

i have not had one problem with steam.... hl2 loaded with no probs... updates with no probs and fast... i can understand why valve wants to distribute somewhere other than steam, but ea... does this mean that all future games from valve will cost 10-15 dollars over retail... because it seems that ea games are over priced... and as far as ea having a say in valve time tables or game design, im sure valve learned a lot from their troubles with vu.... ill still do updates and future downloads from steam...

 

[fromage]

Laptop, travel, next.



No, when you install the game, you are forced to download ALL updates.



That's not the issue, the issue is that it has to actually log you on to a server to play a single player game every single time you play. Uncalled for.



And then when you want to play online multiplayer it attempts to reset back to online mode.



This was unacceptable:
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=861497



The difference is with BF2 you have a physical CD/jewel case/cdkey in your hand that proves you own the game, therefore you can get reimbursement or a new key and have proof of ownership. With Steam you have absolutely nothing physical if someone steals your account except your confirmation which you hopefully printed out and still have somewhere. You just have to email Valve and hope they are nice to you - meanwhile you are out of a game for almost a week.



http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=51499&page=1
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=270619
etc. that was from 30 seconds of searching.



Except when EA bans your CD-key, you don't lose offline play, and even if you did lose offline play, you lose it for one game, not every single game you own under your Steam account. Valve could render hundreds of dollars of games worthless by disabling your Steam account - no other dev or publisher has this level of control over ALL of the games you own by them together.



No I'm the guy who doesn't want Steam at all. If it has to be there, there should be an option to make it transparent to the user. Shortcuts and the Start Menu work just fine for my games menu, I don't need a second menu.



It's also unnecessary.



Again, you can't on first install, which makes the laptop scenario very real.



Content delivery systems are cool, but they should be an option not a requirement. If Valve released both the Steam way and the standard retail cd w/ cdkey way without steam, that would be fine with me. Just as Steam works for you, it doesn't work for plenty others.



No, I'm saying accepting Steam with a smile is similar to accepting OPM with a smile, or any other number of technologies that restricts user freedom and makes using the computer in general more cumbersome and takes away control from the user. I'd like to retain as much control as possible over the behavior and usage of software I bought for my computer. Otherwise I'll end up with one big bloated mess of DRM starting with my music and ending with my games and their 27 required content delivery programs.

1) Install it before hand.

2) Install it before hand

3) Ubisoft does the same thing. SC3 has the exact same feature.

4) Well I guess because online mode is needed for playing online...

5) Note how I said 6 months ago.

6) You'll be out of a game for more than a week with EA. Regardless, just maintain your security on your end, and Valve will do there's. These types of theft only occurr with end-user negligence.

7) A 4-post thread and a 20-post thread doesn't signify anything big. Hasn't happened to me or anyone I know. Of course there's always going to be oddball people getting various different types of problems. Every piece of software has these quirks, and atleast Valve updates it every so often.

8) If you don't do anything wrong, you won't get banned. Don't break the EULA and you'll be fine.

9) If you don't want to run Steam, fine, don't. No ones forcing you too. That's like owning a Hummer and not wanting to pay the gas for it.

10) People only complain when bad things happen, they don't comment when it works right. I'm sure the majority of people are not having problems with Steam.

11) Well what can I say, with new technologies for faster internet, content delivery is going to become mainstream in the near-future. Better get used to it. It's not like you can't end-process or quit them. You could also just boycott them, no one really cares if you don't use it. Just like no one really cares if you don't like Steam or if I prefer Steam over say GameSpy or something. I'd like to compare Steam to FIOS. Considering that in the near-future, these 2 technologies would most likely go hand-in-hand.


Bottom line is that Steam works, and it works for most people I encounter. And there's definitely thousands of people who enjoy playing on Steam, and enjoy playing Steam games. It does what it's intended to do.

 

[finalgt]

If there's one area where I'll disagree and say that Steam fucking sucks, it's with the Valve Anti-Cheat. I was banned from CS1.6 and below almost 3 years ago, and I still don't know why. I was playing in a server for 20 minutes, retried for some reason, and was banned on the reconnect. I used Valve's stupid fucking "plea" form, if only to ask what the hell I did wrong, and they merely said they don't discuss cheating infractions. They never gave me a reason why I was banned. Their "tech support" guy did, however, make the assertion that VAC has never been responsible for a false positive. He said it just like that, bold and all...I replied asking what the deal was with the Winamp plugin, the IRC plugin, etc...and didn't get a response to that e-mail.

Oh, and that was during the 2-month-or-so-period where they were experimenting with 5 year bans, instead of 1 year. Yeah, that seems fair.

 

[Obi_Kwiet]

Argh! Why, Valve, why? Not EA! This is A Very Bad Thing (tm)