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Monday 15 September 2003

Steamed turd! [lurks]

Valve. Sigh. I'm forcing myself to confront the issue at hand and not chat about the company that has wronged us in oh so many other ways such as never bringing out Team Fortress 2, fucking up Counter-Strike, taking over 5 years to create a Half-Life sequel and as if all that is not enough, now foisting upon us a badly conceived and poorly implemented broadband delivery service called Steam. Over the last few days, we've been fighting with getting this working. Not because we want to, none of us ever asked for Steam. It's a shit idea.
The fact is, when we want to patch up a game for playing, we want to do it ourselves. Get the file from a fast location so we know when our bandwidth is being used and we'll know when we have the files. What we don't want is some super lame tray icon thing which leeches unknown quantities of bandwidth for an unknown length of time. And then of course, the application itself is a steaming (ho ho) pile of turd. It's unresponsive, it crashes, it hangs, it provides cryptic error messages and just plain sucks.
None of us wants to run it but we have to because soon you'll have to authenticate with it, no more playing of CS without it. It's just astounding that a company like Valve feels that it has us all over a barrel enough that they can foist this shite on us. Who in fuck do they think they are? Oh yes, we're all sign up for a subscription so we can get all the extra content they put out, right?
Ahem, far be it for me to point out that Valve are hardly prolific going on past experience. It's just so infuriating! We've got systems that work, who in fuck do these people think they are?! They are not fucking EA. They aren't even a fucking publisher. It's one poxy game developer. I'd have more time for their grandiose plans if Steam actually fucking worked properly but it doesn't. It's falling over badly before HL-2 is even out! This is rock star game developer mentality taken too an extreme. Everyone wants to play our games and they'll do whatever we ask to make it so.
I'm running out of patience with Valve and a quick straw poll says I am not alone. The way things are going, I can see some hacker group stepping up to the plate releasing hacks and patches so people can play Valve multiplayer games without all this shit. Fucking tossers!

9 comments:

  1. I agree.
    Installed this shit last night, and it insisted on copying my CS folder to /Program files/Steam/Turdapps or something. Thing is I like to have my games installed in a folder called /games, since my /program files folder is so full of crap that one looses control over what's in there... But, as I have Raven Shield and some other crap in my games folder, I didn't dare pointing Steam at my games folder. It moved my Half-Life/CS folder, detected all my mods and shit and said it would preserve my savegames and shit. Did it copy my custon .cfg with all my keyboard settings? Fuck no. So after taking ages to install (including timing out, not showing the icon in the systray and generally being crap), I had to fuck around to get my settings back.
    Half-Life 2 better be worth this pile of turd, or I hope some cracker will provide a non-steam patch facility.

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  2. If it's shit, then after I've played the single player I'll wait until someone haxors it before I go mad with the mods I reckon.

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  3. Where can i update my NON-STEAM?Because it says that the protocol aint right:Scan you help me

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  4. if i want to play half life 2 over 10 yearsand maybe steam is no longer on the interneti can not install or play the ff..game anymore ?????????

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  5. What is this, computer gaming tips for the developmentally delayed?

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  6. logically, if valve decide to give up on steam then they will probably release a patch to remove the need to activate it, its not like they are in any danger of going bust in the immediate future now are they.

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  7. Yes but Sauron would say that.

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  8. There doesn't appear to be a Valve plan to deal with, say, people working in remote far-away places. Let's pick a random example... uhhh... how about some guy working on an Oil Rig.
    He buys HL2 from Amazon, he can't get online to activate it (do Dads buying HL2 for little Jonny at Christmas know this?) and so he can't patch and play the product he bought and has in his hands.
    Now in that case, presumably Amazon will refund said Oil Rig Worker.
    However, if this Oil Rig Worker has already paid for the product using Steam *on a different computer* and can't/won't download it for whatever reason on another computer, Valve aren't doing Steam refunds. So the Oil Rig Worker will have to wait until he gets home to civilisation to play what he already paid for... ho hum

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