For those of you old enough to recall Half-Life 2's original release, you'll remember how Steam -- Valve's downloadable content system -- absolutely ruined the entire thing for many thousands of people for almost a month after the official release date. Issues ranging from broken downloads to paranoid speculation on Valve's plans to sell personal information to the Nazis, Illuminati, space aliens, Francis Ford Coppola, etc. had many people predicting a quick death for the service. Of course, it didn't die, and has flourished into the sort of cash cow a father in India might offer up as his daughter's dowry.
Sadly, it looks like some kinks still exist, and they've all popped up simultaneously thanks to the release of Call of Duty 4. If you take a look at Valve's Steam forums, you see nothing but threads complaining about Steam and people's inability to actually play the thing. As is the usual Internet protocol, people have grown quite irate with Valve's inability to fix the issue within minutes of their complaint, and have taken to measures ranging from further whining to petty threats to (bizarre) conspiracy theories involving the Medal of Honor development team and hostage situations.
Any of you having issues with the system? We can't help you, but feel free to bitch about the situation in the comments.
[Jeremy, we're sending you a hat, but we'll need it back by Monday]
Contest:
2:07 AM on 11.13.2007
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Also, ZEROTH!
Valve, in my history, has usually been pretty good with this stuff. Sierra was always the company that did nothing about any problems I had.
Kicked everyone and I couldn't sign back in.
Tested the connection and averything passed except xbl.
Laym.
WTF. I want a refund for my xbl gold.
maintenance sir
My ass.
Good thing though. I'll now get 6 hours sleep before work.
Steam is awful, like letting "someone shit on your head".
Just sayin'
But i too have been having problems with XBL when trying to play COD4. the other night, i couldn't get on for an hour and a half.... and i've experienced some other funny happenings when playing online, so i think there are some small problems with COD4.
However, they release updates for it, and it's products, that are buggy!
with last weeks update for steam and Source SDK, I am unable to load up the Source SDK! I am supposed to be working on a mod, but I cannot run hammer because of it! Their support systems seems slow (because they have an unusual high users experiencing problems), to me it seems the solution would be to fix bugs before you release it to the public. But, what would I know, i only work in QA at my work.
By 10:30 it finally unlocked, but I was getting tons of errors. There's a bug that says the game has finished pre-loading when it only actually downloaded HALF THE GAME. So again I had to wait some more after I tricked the damn client into realizing it hadn't finished (switched language to French then back to English). THEN when I finally got it starting it kept crashing on me because of PunkBuster!
Unrelated to Steam is another error I eventually have with xfire that crashes the game if you change the graphics settings. I think by 2PM or maybe 3PM I was finally playing and did so for the rest of the night.
I boycott all Steam/SecuROM/"Push" services outright, no matter how good the game is. I was frakin' mad when I found out GTR used SecuROM.
I'm also considering getting an nVidia card thanks to ATI/AMD's decision to include Steam by default with their drivers, even though I have the option not to install it. This is getting rediculous!
I for one am in shock, its not like Steam has a history of fucking things up or anything.
@Deus, CoD4 multi runs just fine without a server so your little jab is pretty much moot, it doesn't have the issue Gears has with that host advantage crap.
That's not to say that CoD4 on console doesn't have issues, I keep finding myself getting kicked from games and the like and 2 of my friends had their game lock up at the exact same time, its got some bugs that need working out.
Also, Detry, Major Nelson announced that they were going to be doing some maintenance on XBL, last night. So, your ass nothing. ;)
mostly when i need to drown my sorrow of not being able to play TF2. On and off for the last 2 weeks I have been getting an error from steam saying the "the game you requested is not available please try again later."
Is it just me or is it stupid to make a game completely unplayable if a huge and buggy system has a tummy ache? Half the time i am playing on lan with my dorm-mates so i could cut myself off from the internet and it works. HOW THE FUCK is it a good thing when i need to disconnect myself from your "support system" in order to play the game.
P.S. I will always use steam because for some strange reason the nearest game store to campus is a hour long journey.
All I want to do is kill a few hundred Marines and Muslims without interruption.
Is that too much to ask?