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Wouldn't it be nice if Steam would tell you something like:-

"Hey, we're updating your game. Oh, wait, sorry, no its not an update, we're actually downloading the entire thing from the internet again for absolutely no fucking reason."

This happened to me - twice - with Empire: Total War. I didn't notice the first time, and it ate a substantial portion of my monthly bandwith. I deleted the stupid thing, reinstalled it from the disk, and it was fine.

A few weeks ago, it did it again - so I repeated the fucking process.

Now its doing it with DoW2. So again, I have to go through the tortuous process of deleting the local content and reinstalling from scratch.

Why the fuck is it doing this? I verified local content and everything was fucking fine, there's no new update (the update news is as of fucking early March 2010) and yet Steam insists on doing this useless fucking shit and raping my bandwith. Godfuckingdammit.

Can't say I've heard of steam doing this before... Not something stupid like an AV or dying hard drive buggering up files by any chance? How long before it decided to re-download the games did you run the verify local files?

I noticed it do this with the Total War games, but it doesn't seem to do it with anything else.

Is it really downloading the entire game, or is it just that the updates are so huge that it seems like it's downloading the entire game?

Supreme Commander 2 on release had a 3.5-4gb patch where as the game is ~5gb. And due to how steam works, you can't preload patches and they don't burn the patches into the game you are downloading very often.

Steam assumes bandwidth is stupidly cheap, and this makes thier patching policies suck.

Is it really downloading the entire game, or is it just that the updates are so huge that it seems like it's downloading the entire game?

Its the entire game - 600kB a second for minutes on end wasn't even putting a dent in the percentage completed, and there's been no update for DoW2: Chaos Rising released lately.

The final proof came when I deleted local content and then reinstalled the game from the disc- after a trivially quick real update, the game is fine and fully patched.

Can't say I've heard of steam doing this before... Not something stupid like an AV or dying hard drive buggering up files by any chance? How long before it decided to re-download the games did you run the verify local files?

AV? I checked the local content once it had started its supposed 'update' - everything was verified successfully.

Re: Total War, this is apparently something of a common problem - I read a thread on Steam about it, no clue as to what is causing it though.

Steam assumes bandwidth is stupidly cheap, and this makes thier patching policies suck.

The worst thing is that even if you tell Steam not to update games automatically, it outright ignores you and the settings revert for some reason.

Xon wrote:Supreme Commander 2 on release had a 3.5-4gb patch where as the game is ~5gb. And due to how steam works, you can't preload patches and they don't burn the patches into the game you are downloading very often.

Steam assumes bandwidth is stupidly cheap, and this makes thier patching policies suck.

The lack of configurability is the real problem. Why can't you configure it to require your approval before downloading or applying patches?

Luckily, bandwidth is cheap for me, which is good because I have approximately 500 GB of porn. But I do realize that not everyone is in that situation.

Some steam games have to be redownloaded completely everytime time a patch comes out. I know Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor is that way for certain. It has something to do with the way patching works through steam, supposedly any edited files have to be redownloaded, and how a particular game handles patches. For example, apparently one of the patches for retail CoH:ToV was only 26 Mb, but because how the game is designed enought files end up getting changed that you have to redownload the entire 8 GB or so. Its odd that its doing that with DoW2 since that seems to have been integrated with steam from the beginning. Could major changes have been made to the game? I wander if it could be something to do with incorporating any engine changes made for Chaos Rising into the vanilla game (I can't really say as I don't own the Xpack and don't currently have DoW2 installed).

Mike, I think part of the issue is with the whole always keeping your games up do date automatically, which is I think one of Steam's supposed selling points. Then again, there is a certain degree of business sense and software design sense behind forcing customers to always have the latest product version, if only from the perspective of the support team. Mind you that only works if the publisher actually gives Steam the patches, as some games are behind their retail counterparts. For example, I purchased Act of War: Direct Action over the big holday sale at someones recommendation. While the experience was worth the money, the game is much to my chagrin still at v1.0 while retail is at v1.6 because Atari can't be bothered to give them the damn files (mind you its an older game).

There recently was a pretty big patch for DOW II, when Chaos Rising was released, i don't know exactly how big it was though, i just left it overnight when it became obvious it wasn't going to be done right away.

Also, if you don't care about the patches you can just disable automatic updating.

Vympel wrote:This happened to me - twice - with Empire: Total War. I didn't notice the first time, and it ate a substantial portion of my monthly bandwith.

I was under the impression that you could change the server Steam downloads stuff from to one hosted by your ISP so it doesn't count towards your download limit?

Darth Wong wrote:The lack of configurability is the real problem. Why can't you configure it to require your approval before downloading or applying patches?

Steam does have a per-game configuration option to disable automatic updates. I've never used it, so I can't testify to whether or not it's effective, but in both the old Steam client and the new beta client, it can be accessed by right-clicking the game, going to properties, then the updates tab, and switching the dropdown box to "Do not automatically update this game".

It isn't actually reliable at limiting which download mirrors it used. And some Australian ISPs count data from thier Steam mirrors.

Darth Wong wrote:The lack of configurability is the real problem. Why can't you configure it to require your approval before downloading or applying patches?

Steam is lacking a lot of configuration options for a glorified IM platform, application store & launcher and networking backend. The lack of delta-patching, scheduling options or even a simple way to create a downstream repository (like WSUS for windows patches) is a clear sign of exactly how limited the talent pool @ Value actually is.

Vympel, thats probably a stupid suggestion, but have you tried contacting Steam's support team?

Haven't tried contacting Steam support. My experience with pretty much all technical support is uniformly bad - you know, how you tell them everything about your problem including the stuff you've already done, only to have them tell you to do the stuff you've already done?

I was under the impression that you could change the server Steam downloads stuff from to one hosted by your ISP so it doesn't count towards your download limit?

You can set your ISP (if its one of the supported ones, mine is) to be the preferred source, but it won't actually limit your downloads to that source unless you have a third party application like Steamwatch, which I do. But really my ISP has fuck all on it, whenever I turn on Steamwatch most downloads simply stop dead.

Darth Wong wrote:

Xon wrote:Supreme Commander 2 on release had a 3.5-4gb patch where as the game is ~5gb. And due to how steam works, you can't preload patches and they don't burn the patches into the game you are downloading very often.

Steam assumes bandwidth is stupidly cheap, and this makes thier patching policies suck.

The lack of configurability is the real problem. Why can't you configure it to require your approval before downloading or applying patches?

Luckily, bandwidth is cheap for me, which is good because I have approximately 500 GB of porn. But I do realize that not everyone is in that situation.

You can, there's a "keep this game up to date" setting, which it defaults to, but you can change it. So you can set it so some games will auto-update, but some won't, as you please.

adam_grif wrote:You can, there's a "keep this game up to date" setting, which it defaults to, but you can change it. So you can set it so some games will auto-update, but some won't, as you please.

And then Steam will outright ignore that setting and update the games you told it to leave alone.

Alyeska wrote:

adam_grif wrote:You can, there's a "keep this game up to date" setting, which it defaults to, but you can change it. So you can set it so some games will auto-update, but some won't, as you please.

And then Steam will outright ignore that setting and update the games you told it to leave alone.

I wouldn't know, I've never used that setting. Sounds like a pretty significant bug to have been ignored for this long though.

For some reason Empire and Napoleon were fine for me, though I haven't logged on to them recently enough for Steam to want to patch them, and in fact two games I can remember having issues with in this regard: Modern Warfare 2, and Silent Hunter 4/U-boat Missions. Modern Warfare 2 would try to force an update if I chose a different language option even after I had changed my mind... really pissed me off, as I wanted the novelty of Modern Warfare 2... francois!, but not at the cost of several gigs. In the case of Silent Hunter 4/U-boat missions, they are bought as separate games and appear as separate games in your My Games tab, installed or not -- but if your U-boat Missions download goes bad and you end up with a non-functional U-boat Missions? Your "vanilla" Silent Hunter 4 installation goes bad and you have to delete it and download BOTH all over again, ~6 GB.

I know that apparently the Steam version of ArmA 2 is only up to v1.04, so you have to turn off/keep auto-update off in order to use the v1.05 patch, and that verifying the file cache would not work until the Steam distribution included v1.05.

The issue is why I have installer archives for all of my "large file size" Steam games.

This is why I prefer to buy my games from a store so that I have a physical hard copy in my hands.

Stofsk wrote:This is why I prefer to buy my games from a store so that I have a physical hard copy in my hands.

Me too, but you can't deny the rise of on-demand digital entertainment. I got the first Supreme Commander and its expansion for a fiver via downloads, while the physical copies would cost me £15 together, assuming I could find them.

So long as people in the industry assume ever cheaper, faster web access, then things like direct download games and always on DRM will get more and more common.

Stofsk wrote:This is why I prefer to buy my games from a store so that I have a physical hard copy in my hands.

But apparently now Steam will come with games, even if you buy it in a store. Empire: Total War does that from what I'm told. Which I think is pretty damn annoying (if I wanted Steam I'd get Steam; I don't need some game deciding for me).

I wonder if this "re-download" thing happens with a retail version of ETW.

This is one reason why if a game has Steam, it's an automatic no-buy for me.

Is unlimited bandwidth really that hard to get in Austrailia?

This kind of thing I could see pissing me off if it, say, happened to a game I wanted to play at the time, but I don't give two tosses about the bandwidth itself.

Stofsk wrote:This is why I prefer to buy my games from a store so that I have a physical hard copy in my hands.

That's ironic because the first thing I do when I buy a game is create a digital version and drop the physical disk in a box. It helps that digital is generally 25-50% cheaper. Of course you can build archives of steam installed games anyway; this doesn't help the patching system.

some idiot wrote:Is unlimited bandwidth really that hard to get in Austrailia?

Oh dear.

Valdemar wrote:But apparently now Steam will come with games, even if you buy it in a store.

This has been happening ever since Valve used HL2 to create an instant user pool for steam. This is a major reason why I generally buy steamed games on console, because steam is a horrible piece of crap that Valve doesn't fix because a) they don't care and b) they're incompetent. The only reason I even HAVE steam is because the jackass that made Audiosurf sold out.

You can get unlimited Steam bandwidth from some ISPs (cough Internode cough).