Poll: My rant to Valve about Steam.
- Thread starter QuadFish
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Again, it's rarely an issue, you just lucked out this time.QuadFish said:I forgive you for not having much sleepWoodsey said:
Basically, I'm having an extremely busy week so this was the only time I could find to play Portal 2. Now I have not long at all to play it after so much hype.
It's not the slow download that bothers me. More that there is a download in the first place. That extra download is (not was, is: it's still going) so unnecessary and so badly timed and the only reason I have to do it is because of a major Steam malfunction.
Maybe for you. With us 1.5 mbps (roughly 165 KBps) connectioners even the small failures that happen (and more often than you might think) will 1) take many hours to fix up and 2) knock out any possibility of playing anything multiplayer in the meantime, since that would slow down the download and lag the game in question.SL33TBL1ND said:
I suppose my major gripe is that Valve effectively promised that I'd be playing Portal 2 within minutes of release thanks to the ability to pre-load and that went down the drain the moment the files unlocked.
@OP I'm sorry if this sounds harsh but you sound like a spoilt child.
Is it valves fault your busy all next week? NO. Or maybe you'd like them to release it a week late to everyone so you don't have to suffer alone?
Is it valves fault your download is slow? If their servers are overloaded (likely this week) then they could upgrade them, but lets be real, they're a business. They're not going to spend several thousand upgrading servers for one week.
At the end of the day valve don't even have to let you pre-load it at all so just be grateful you don't have a 6 hour download instead of 2
Is it valves fault your busy all next week? NO. Or maybe you'd like them to release it a week late to everyone so you don't have to suffer alone?
Is it valves fault your download is slow? If their servers are overloaded (likely this week) then they could upgrade them, but lets be real, they're a business. They're not going to spend several thousand upgrading servers for one week.
At the end of the day valve don't even have to let you pre-load it at all so just be grateful you don't have a 6 hour download instead of 2
Im on a 56kb connection so yeah
its taken steam over a day and half to download portal first slice
its taken steam over a day and half to download portal first slice
You know, the servers are more than likely crammed full of people just like you who are wanting to play Portal 2. I had to wait for a day and a half for Team Fortress 2, so I know your pain. Just go kill some time or something man.
If a download stops because of a connection issue, it should resume from where it left off. Likewise, if you pre-loaded properly, what are you downloading 1.7GB worth of?QuadFish said:I forgive you for not having much sleepWoodsey said:
Basically, I'm having an extremely busy week so this was the only time I could find to play Portal 2. Now I have not long at all to play it after so much hype.
It's not the slow download that bothers me. More that there is a download in the first place. That extra download is (not was, is: it's still going) so unnecessary and so badly timed and the only reason I have to do it is because of a major Steam malfunction.
Maybe for you. With us 1.5 mbps (roughly 165 KBps) connectioners even the small failures that happen (and more often than you might think) will 1) take many hours to fix up and 2) knock out any possibility of playing anything multiplayer in the meantime, since that would slow down the download and lag the game in question.SL33TBL1ND said:
I suppose my major gripe is that Valve effectively promised that I'd be playing Portal 2 within minutes of release thanks to the ability to pre-load and that went down the drain the moment the files unlocked.
I'm not entirely sure what you want them to do. If you have a shitty connection then buy the boxed copy. They're not antagonising you on purpose because you have a bad connection. If I have download issues its very rarely because of a problem at their end.
This is such a non-comment... 'Stop whining' is hardly a good solution is it?SL33TBL1ND said:
Comments like yours pop up whenever there are any criticisms against Steam, even when there are some valid issues that aren't addressed by Valve.
I like how you try to justify issues with Steam with what is essentially 'a lot of people are playing the same game'.
Alright then. You try running a massive network of servers that deliver games to people directly from the internet, develop AAA games and constantly update a client for purchasing games, talking to friends and playing those games so without there being any issues from time to time. I'll wait.GamesB2 said:
For the great prices they give us, I think bit of tolerance when a bug rears its head is not much to ask.
I'd rather they give me the option to download the game then remove the client...SL33TBL1ND said:
I can understand some bugs, I can go part way to appreciating that bugs have to appear sometimes, but my experiences with Steam and CD bugs are just inexcusable...
Still, I haven't the motivation for a full fledged debate today, you are right, bugs are to be expected.
I do appreciate the difficulty of it (as I wrote in the email), but my gripe is the specific area they went wrong. The game is great, the pre-load was easy and the download went reasonably quickly. What annoys me is that the one area that went wrong to major inconvenience for me was purely a software issue where it decided it suddenly hated a portion of the data. In other words, everything went smoothly except the one thing I should have never had to worry about.SL33TBL1ND said:
The wonderful irony here is that it was actually a 6 hour download in the end. Am I blaming Valve for having lots of hungry customers? Of course not. That would be ridiculous. But I am blaming them for getting wrong the one thing that should have gone absolutely smoothly. It was just incredibly frustrating that everything worked perfectly (pre load included) except the file verification (which worked for all of my friends). It is just bad timing really that the bug would happen today but, you know, frustration drives my writing so that's sort of inevitable.andz_ryan said:
You keep suggesting I'm some sort of grumpy, spoiled child, but can you honestly say that, if you were on the very edge of playing a long-awaited game (right to the "Preparing to launch..." Steam screen) and it suddenly went "HA, just kidding!" and cut you off for the most trivial reason you wouldn't be just a little annoyed?
I've had no problems other than the occasional "Server too busy" or when they arbitrarily throttle my download speeds, which gets very annoying when you have a 20MB connection..
I've been exceptionally lucky then as I've been using it since inception, have over 100 games on steam and have not experienced any of these problems. Not to say steam never has problems but then every system has problems, and I say that as a professional system administrator.darth.pixie said:
This is why I buy retail. Downloading shit on my connection is a massive pain in the ass. If its more then 2gb, I'm buying retail, or going without.
Unless the game has an absurdly stupid DRM system, like Mass Effect. In which case I'll put up with downloading 10gb instead of dealing with the utter piece of shit that securom is. And when downloading Mass Effect I had to put up with the download resetting itself for no god damn reason. The data was there, verifying the local cache helped and all, but the fact that it reset is just stupid as hell.
Unless the game has an absurdly stupid DRM system, like Mass Effect. In which case I'll put up with downloading 10gb instead of dealing with the utter piece of shit that securom is. And when downloading Mass Effect I had to put up with the download resetting itself for no god damn reason. The data was there, verifying the local cache helped and all, but the fact that it reset is just stupid as hell.
The only problem I've had with Steam was when I downloaded a game and it ruined another. I forgot what game it was that I downloaded, but right after I did some files must have been screwed up cos every time I started Full Spectrum Warrior it ran so slow it looked like my PC was having a bad acid trip. Although that could've been a video resolution issue.