MasochisticAvenger said:
Honestly, I'm surprised there hasn't been a mass amount of comments blasting the OP for speaking negatively about Valve. I mean, aside from the Original Poster himself, the comments have been rather mature.
Sorry to disappoint but I guess I'll have to be the first "immature" guy to point out that this whole thing is more on the OP's shoulders than on Steam's.
And the entire problem starts at:
bigfatcarp93 said:
So, I went on Steam and found the GOTY edition, even better. I had to set up a new Steam profile to buy it, because my old E-Mail was defunct. Fair enough.
What was "defunct" about your original profile that it literally prevented you from playing games? You can change the email attached to your existing Steam account by going through the settings, and that doesn't take long. And your email shouldn't prevent you from purchasing a game on Steam.
Your entire story hinges on the notion that you needed a brand new account to buy this game, but I'm not sure you've really explained why you needed a new account at all. And you know that in Steam's Terms of Service, they don't do account mergers, right? So now you're stuck with two separate accounts when you might not have even needed the second one.
So, that takes about twenty minutes, and I gladly shell out $10 on the game and sit through a few minutes of download. I'm quite happy: low price, quick download, and a game I'm very optimistic about as my evening's entertainment. But, lo and behold, the game is suddenly nowhere to be found on my computer.
Did you doublecheck which account you were logged into? If you were seeing options for all of your old games but not Deus Ex, then you were just on the wrong login. Remember that Steam isn't aware of multiple accounts, and will only identify games that it has in this particular account's library. So if you're logged into Account 1, you see only the games owned by Account 1, and none of the games owned by Account 2.
So, I go through the obvious checklist: check Steam Libray, check Games, check Downloads, try in vain to contact Steam for help, start thread on Escapist fuming about Valve, get tidal wave of unsolicited, yet appreciated, advice, finally get contacted by Steam, fix problem.
You started fuming at Steam/Valve this quickly? I usually wait until I've actually made sure that I've done everything correctly first. Save rage for when it's merited.
The first and most obvious course of action should have been to log out of Steam and then log back in using the new account information. Did you do this? Did you try logging in through a web browser instead and looking at your game info that way? There's a lot of things you could have tried before what you did next.
Ultimately, I had to uninstall Steam and reinstall it. This meant deleting the two Steam games already on my PC: Half-Life and TF2. I figured this was no huge deal if I could finally get to Deus Ex: a game I had never played before for two games I had played at nauseum. Fine. I mean, I could download TF2 again for free.
Why? You can copy your save-files with relative ease. Just locate where they are stored (sometimes it's in the Steam directory, and sometimes in My Documents) and copy them to another location on the computer, or to a flash drive/external HDD if you have one.
So, I did it. And now, GUESS FUCKING WHAT? Deus Ex is on my computer, but won't fucking play.
This is the first thing you've said that actually sounds like it might be a Steam problem, since this has been reported in the past. On the other hand, there's a thread on the Steam forums full of people registering this same complaint so it might not have hurt to check their forums before buying it. There's also various websites that allow you to check for your computer's compatibility with video games, so using one of those might have saved you time, too.
All the same, this part is actually Steam's fault.
And yeah, I got TF2 again, but I forgot all my items, which are now lost. Including several very rare ones.
Check your login. If you're using the new login, of course it won't remember the data from your old login. I'm fairly certain that the data is not lost or gone, you're just using the wrong login. Since you decided to make two logins instead of just fixing the problems on your old login, you'll have to switch back and forth between the accounts.
So, I am out:
-$9.99 for Deus Ex.
This much is true. The rest though?
No, you still own this game, it's just on your old login. If you lost access to it somehow when you created your new account, that's your fault, not Steam's.
-1 copy of half-Life plus save data.
You said this already, and as mentioned earlier, the save data could easily have been copied if you had taken the time to look up where it is stored. But you didn't.
When I moved my games to this new computer, I brought pretty much all my save files with me and had no trouble getting them working. So yeah, the lost save data is pretty much entirely on you.
-$20.00 worth of TF2 items.
Again, did you make sure you're logged into your old account when checking for your items? I'm pretty sure they're still there.
Now, I also can't contact Steam. Awesome.
Yes you can? They have an entire help service for stuff like this. Just don't expect them to be able to merge your accounts together or anything like that, because they usually don't do that sort of thing.
You really should have taken the time to fix your original account first, you probably would have avoided most of these issues. I don't want to sound insensitive or to sound like I haven't had issues with games before (I was a victim of a Steam sale on Heroes 6, but that was an Ubisoft screw-up and not a Valve/Steam one), but a lot of the stuff you're complaining about could have been avoided or solved pretty easily if you'd put in the effort to do so. I'll join in with you in complaining about things that are actually the game dev's fault (like them selling a game that isn't working), but stuff like save data? That's on you.
