Is Steam as bad as it looks?

[sheik124]

Honestly, I was planning on grabbing Half-Life 2 off newegg for only 40 bucks, or getting it off Steam for the convenience factor, but after hearing about waiting for it to authenticate all your HL2 files, and "phone home" every time you even want to play single player, as well as having steam be a PART of the game, I don't think I want it anymore. And whats this crap about buying a license to use the software, but its not really yours. Excuse me, when I buy a car, its my car, Nissan doesn't have "the discretion to stop use of my car" whenever they feel like it, I bought it from them, period. I can understand when CC companies put that same thing on there, BUT THEY MAKE IT CLEAR.
If I buy Half-Life 2, I expect to be allowed to take it, drop it off Mt. Everest, run it over with my dad's SUV, and give it to an orangutan for a christmas gift, its MINE. Honestly, Valve thinks that STEAM is more secure blah blah. If it turns out to be the load of shit that it looks like, I'll just snag a fake copy, at least I don't have to use steam. Its intended to stop the pirates, but they are bypassing steam, so it ends up screwing everyone that bought it over. Unlike Windows XP OEM Activation, which does what it should, QUICKLY AND EFFICIENTLY. This is starting to look scarier than MS's mystery XBOX Live bannings that took place with the release of Halo 2. What both MicroShaft and Valve seem to realize, is that bullshit like this will only INCREASE piracy, and INCREASE the amount of disgruntled customers that will never buy your crap again.
/rant, and i haven't even seen Steam yet :happy:

 

[pj64er]

I've got no experience with HL2 (system spec isnt good enough to buy that right now), but I can tell you steam, pre-HL2 works just fine. As long as you have broadband (if you wish to have a half decent multiplayer experience, you should have this already), theres no problems whatsoever.

What Ive heard about HL2:
-Steam is still more convient than a store bought version, you wont need to fool around with a no-cd crack (which got people banned..)
-Most of the problems is due to people clogging up the authentication servers during release date. Getting and unlocking the game SHOULD be faster and easier now
-You can set steam to offline mode. Just dont have an active connection when turning on steam. You can play HL2 offline like this. I can verify that this is possible for HL1.
-Beware if your graphics card is a radeon. Theres apparently some studdering or performance problems.


edit: a lot of industrial software have always worked on the "license" model. In fact, in most cases, you must renew your license if you wanna keep using it.

 

[AlphaWolf]

I remember during the early early days of the steam beta (long before most people even heard about it, including the regular HL players) it was actually pretty neat. You'd just install the software, then double click your game and it would be fully up and running within two minutes on the first time, instantaneously every time after that. Took a good 180 seconds tops to have half life running on a freshly formatted HDD, vs finding and fiddling with the cd, finding and grabbing all of the patches, etc (downloading 100MB+ files from fileplanet and most other gaming sites just plain sucks with all of the hell they put you through to register, wait, etc, fast connection or not.) And also steam didn't have to run 24/7, in fact you could even turn it off while the game was running (but there wasn't much point since it only took like 300k of memory.)

Nowadays that is much different though. Now steam includes occasional popups spamming you about valves future products, you are expected to run it 24/7 and it consumes 24 megs of ram while it is doing nothing at all, then when you want to play your game you often have to wait 30 seconds for it to download a new platform update which only affects some game that you don't even own or have installed, and you can't have the client exit automatically when you are done with your game. If the central network is down, you're utterly screwed, and this can be prolonged. Sometimes they've even left it down for up to four days at a time, leaving all of the players in the dark, and these outages weren't even related to any attacks or ddos, rather just plain technical fuckups. WON never had this problem, not even one time, which is probably due to the fact that all it did was authenticate your cdkey and nothing else, it was just simple. No userid tickets, session certs, etc, that always had to be checked and authenticated. Steam could easily be that simple if valve wasn't so anal (and at one point it was that simple.)

If I had a choice of going back to the fileplanet bullshit rather than staying with the current steam, I would pick fileplanet bullshit anyday.

 

[smcd]

The biggest disappointment IMO about Steam is what you mentioned... the lack of "owning" your game. Instead of using it on your terms, you must go by their terms 100% or not at all. If they don't want you playing the game anymore sometime in the future, simple... they can kill it. Also, how are you supposed to sell a game that was purchased through Steam? You don't physically have the game, and selling an account is against the EULA (read this on another site, I need to review the EULA but it's probably true).

 

[sheik124]

yes, WON was truly awesome, i remember having it with the first TRIBES. for now, i am holding out on HL2 until all these f-ups are fixed, i'll just get doomIII for now

 

[GogoTheMimic]

What both MicroShaft and Valve seem to realize, is that bullshit like this will only INCREASE piracy, and INCREASE the amount of disgruntled customers that will never buy your crap again.

Kinda like when I installed XP Pro, had an error on the disk while installing it and when I tried to reinstall using my serial it said it was invalid? I spent over 30 minutes and a nice chunk of change calling their long distance tech support to get me a new key for my XP Pro. I had the same problem when trying to activate it after the 30 days. Ever since then I vowed never to buy another piece of software from MS.

Thanks for screwing over the legit buyers you fuckers. -_- Servers me right for not warezing my OS like the rest of the Internet community, huh?

 

[sheik124]

Don't know why you had a problem with XP Activation, when I mentioned MicroShaft, I was talking about their gay XBL bannings. When I needed to replace my motherboard, my Windows XP install happened to get whacked due to a personal fuck-up before the power shot the mobo, and I had to do a repair install to rewrite some system files, I just called the number at told the guy exactly what happened, and he kindly gave me exactly what I needed. XP OEM Activation is one of the only activation based software thingies that works exactly like it should, or at least its kind to the legit users, of course, WON worked great too.

 

[Modem]

I like steam personally. Never had any problems with it at all, and I've been using it long since the beta. I had my HL2 authenticated within about 3 minutes of release and was playing about 60 seconds later. Offline mode is key for modem users, and as long as you don't do something stupid to get your account banned (such as illegal cracks ect. ect. which you don't have to worry about if you purchase HL2 via Steam), you have nothing to worry about. The only serious bug I've run into is the occasional slow down to 5fps, which a reload of a save fixes it. And the problem goes away a hour or two into the game.
- Modem

 

[pj64er]

alpha: when did we have to run it 24/7? I havent actually turned it on for days now..


And yea, the addition of popups in the weeks (months?) leading up to HL2 release is disappointing.

 

[AlphaWolf]

alpha: when did we have to run it 24/7? I havent actually turned it on for days now..

You don't *have* to but you are definitely expected to.

 

[Stalkid64]

Valve Did It Again...
Yes having released HL2DM, thousands of frantic people rushed to download it... Then found that not only would it not run, their existing games broke too. Yes, really.

Thread title examples from just the first page of the HL2 forum;

Official THANKS FOR NOTHING thread
Trouble launching games
who thinks valve need to test more before releasing things
Well this is just great - GAMES WONT STARTUP!
Can't play any steam games since update!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Cannot run Deathmatch nor any other games!
HL2 DM is not working
New Patch Breaks Timedemos

Bravo Valve, bravo. *sarcastic applause*

 

[JinXD]

So long as HL2 works offline I'm happy. I don't play any online steam games anyway.... stinkin dial-up

 

[Trotterwatch]

Just read that they fixed this problem already Stalkid by restarting Steam it should download the fix? Can't verify it myself.

Regardless the fact they fucked it up so badly the first time, doesn't exactly endear me to Steam.

 

[mezkal]

Actually as a previous beta tester and hater of Steam I think Valve has come a LONG way. Steam can be turned off and it can be used in OFFLINE mode for LAN games etc (which is nothing more complicated than starting Steam w/o an Internet Connection or blocking it's outgoing access via a (personal) firewall).

I recently lost my internet access for a week (bills bills bills) and played Half Life 2 in Offline mode for that whole time. Once I got back on and restarted Steam (yesterday) I was happy to see that the Half Life 2 patch installed automatically and now I can play it in Widescreen @ 1280x720x50hz Progressive on my Loewe Xelos TV in the Directx9 path with FULL reflections and NO MORE ANNOYING PAUSES (yes I already had -heapsize 512000). Aside from MMORPGS, how many other games are patched so quickly?

I think all the Anti-Steam hoo-haa is just that. People need to get a life and stop looking for demons where they don't exist.

 

[JinXD]

Well I've just restarted steam, and HL2 worked fine in offline mode after that. Now I'm installing HL2 DM.......

EDIT: Every game I've got for steam CSS, HL2, HL2 DM are all running fine after installing the latest updates. w00t.....

 

[mezkal]

aaaaaand.....HALF LIFE 2: DM ROCKs!!!

I spent three complete rounds in the city making kills with only the grav gun and I was top 3!!

The Grav Gun and the Havok2 physics in general truely make this an unbeatable multiplayer experience.

I can't wait for SVEN Co-Op for HL2.

OMGOMGOMGOMGOMG!!!

there...

I'm done.

 

[smcd]

This thread seems to be going off topic but anyhow, in the map i played this morning (from nova prospekt) there were 14 people and it was INSANE. As soon as you spawned you'd be dead most of the time... They should choose larger maps or put a smaller limit on the number of people per map.

 

[DarthDazDC]

Now that half life 2 deathmatch has come out, i think i'm gonna buy half life 2 in a few days...

 

[smcd]

DarthDazDC: It's pretty crap at the moment... 2 maps and laggy as hell

 

[Stalkid64]

That seems to be the general feeling over at the forums (though I'm glad it was fixed, the issue I posted more as a warning than out of personal experience), that it's a stripped-down, basic and unpolished add on just now. I only tried it briefly before realising the stutter was as bad there as in SP mode, but it's given me a few ideas for playing around in the SDK while I wait for `stutterworld` to be fixed once and for all.