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I've heard about how steam is 'better' now, and that it even 'works' sometimes. The days of staring at the 'updating' bar for weeks are over, people say.

Well, that's as maybe. But I decided I wanted the demo for Ragdoll Kungfu enough to install the demon beast on my machine, so I pull the client down and install it.

Guess what?

It sits on the updating bar forever, then crashes with a library violation. What a fucked up piece of software - doubtless it's having a problem with my network security... but it NEVER ASKED and I CAN'T CONFIGURE IT because it's 'designed for idiots' bullshit that tries to update FIRST. So... can I use steam? Or is it still a worthless pile of shit like it was from day one?

Steam is a hell of a lot better then it used to be. Does that mean its good? Nope. Best I can say is grin and bear it. Go to the Steampowered forums and post your problem. I've found the developers do a very good job fixing problems and getting you running.

Stark wrote:I've heard about how steam is 'better' now, and that it even 'works' sometimes. The days of staring at the 'updating' bar for weeks are over, people say.

Well, that's as maybe. But I decided I wanted the demo for Ragdoll Kungfu enough to install the demon beast on my machine, so I pull the client down and install it.

Guess what?

It sits on the updating bar forever, then crashes with a library violation. What a fucked up piece of software - doubtless it's having a problem with my network security... but it NEVER ASKED and I CAN'T CONFIGURE IT because it's 'designed for idiots' bullshit that tries to update FIRST. So... can I use steam? Or is it still a worthless pile of shit like it was from day one?

When I started up Red Orchestra the other day, it took the charactereistic one minute to finally get on it's feet. When I tried to start RO, much to my dismay, Steam was trying to automatically update RO, CS:S and HL2 all at the same time and at less than 50 kb/s for each. I cancelled the other 2 but I still had to wait about 3 minutes for that patch to come up.

"Better" and "works" are such very large words I'd say.

edit: fixed eye-bleed-inducing grammar

Ah. Well, thanks for letting me know it's still a bit wobbly. A pox on exclusive steam distribution deals - since steam DOESN'T WORK, maybe I should hit the torrents? Yeah, steam does wonders for online sales lol.

So what's with it's retarded need to update as step one? I haven't seen anything like a configuration screen - the damn thing has almost zero chance of finding a route out on a port other than 80. So... can I edit a file or something?

PS, trying to update before asking for netconfig is fucking gay bullshit stupid crap. Valve = retarded.

PS, peerguardian tells me the updater is sending traffic to 'offeroptimiser.com/static.callinghome'. I'm not surprised that steam is packed with spyware, but I AM surprised they don't do it smart and tunnel it through their own servers, preventing pg from blocking it. Shoddy ass software.

How much are we betting if I stop blocking the phonehome the updater will work?

Despite improvements, Steam has big issues that need taken care of. Getting into the SDK menu takes forever, and I find it hard to believe that it receives updates every single time you get into it. When I do get into the SDK menu it gives me a BS error whenever I try to launch anything (and as I'm typing this it is telling me the SDK is unavailable). It takes 10 minutes or longer to get into offline mode, and that's if it feels like letting you into it in the first place. Several times a day Steam gives me bullshit when I try to start a 3rd party game - it either tells me the game is no longer free or it doesn't do anything period, then I have to restart Steam to get things working again. The default interface is some annoying huge window and I'm always telling it to go back to the mini games list. Another problem with the interface is that it is butt ugly and only skinnable to the point of slapping a BMP on it which will stretch and look crappy if you enlarge the window. It needs to be more like Xfire in the customization department.

I still think, to this day, that Steam was a bad idea, as it is tightly integrated into Valve's games. If Steam is fucked, you lose access to every Valve game and anything based off of them, for all intents and purposes. The offline mode is too dysfunctional to even be considered. It's just another part of the machine which can fuck everything up if it has a problem.

Stark wrote:PS, peerguardian tells me the updater is sending traffic to 'offeroptimiser.com/static.callinghome'. I'm not surprised that steam is packed with spyware, but I AM surprised they don't do it smart and tunnel it through their own servers, preventing pg from blocking it. Shoddy ass software.

How much are we betting if I stop blocking the phonehome the updater will work?

I am sorry to say this, but peerguardian is pointless.

All the RIAA MPAA or whatever needs to do is to buy a dirt cheap ADSL connection, ang your peerguardian will not do any good.

You might as well uninstall it.

No way, Steam doesn't have any spyware, I grabbed Peer Guardian, and it's blocking connections to Limelight Newtorks, a content delivery company(and as far as I can tell, in no way related to spyware), though that isn't acutally preventing me from pre-loading Ep1.


This peer guardian software is blocking some really crazy shit however, "Office of the Republic of Lithuania" and "CITY OF TIFTON", "Ministry of finance", "nvidia India Limited", "ENTE MILITARE ALLEATO USA/NATO-US NAVY NAPOLI", "SafeNet inc"; crazy... crazy shit.

I can't understand what you're saying. However, turning off PG2 does, indeed allow steam to start. This renders steam pretty useless to me: I'm not going to turn off my torrent defence just to play the demo for a silly game I can far more easily acquire in other ways.

I use PG2 primarily to stop torrent 'poisoners'. It's deeply suspicious to me that it blocks steam traffic, considering it doesn't care about other streaming content, anonymous updates, etc.

And Faram, you're full of shit. I don't use PG as some kind of anonymous defence: I use it because toggling it on/off shows a dramatic difference in my torrent throughput. I'm going to continue using it until turning it off doesn't reduce my speed to 20%.

Honestly, you can trust steam.
See this page on the subject, you shouldn't really be concerned, and a few steps can be taken to make them go away, without sacrificing security, because god forbid you get ping requests or something by the 'Office of the Republic of Lithuania', or whatever the fuck it blocks.

It blocks ips because they give rubbish p2p data. I use p2p alot: turning it off basically means my torrents slow down and I get corrupt pieces. How would the steam system even end up on such a list?

Okay I will make my point clear.

Peerguardian as a “protection” for people that uses p2p and stuff, for them it is pointless and might infact be worse that not using it.

All someone that is on the PG block list have to do to buy pass it is to buy a ADSL connection and the PG will do jack shit for you.

If the police raids you for D/L stuff, PG is not a app that you want them to find. That might be considered an incrementing piece of evidence, you know what you did was wrong and try to hide what you where doing.

Peerguardian also blocks steam, because many that use PG also use a hacked steam.

And also how can you be sure about what ever other stuff PG do to your system?

Dump it is my advice.

What are you smoking? I'm not concerned about the police RAIDING MY HOUSE! I'm concerned about download speed, which PG2 helps a great deal. You saying it 'does nothing' really doesn't convince me, when I can turn it on and off RIGHT NOW and see speed differences. Not using software because YOU THINK THE COPS WON'T LIKE IT is retarded: I have DVD shrink too - will the MPAA jump on a plane and bust my ass for that too?

PS It turns out that Valve-owned systems have posted fake files in the past, so that's how they got on the blocklist. I'll just remove them.

Hrm, yes I seem to recall that; they put up some stuff and caught some folks stealing HL2; or caught the accounts whatever. However a quick google search reveals otherwise.

Stark wrote:I have DVD shrink too - will the MPAA jump on a plane and bust my ass for that too?

If you tell them about it...

I don't understand this fear of being bustzored for piratezors. I was referred to the soft due to a torrent I had being slow, and I installed it and it was proper speed. Now I find that turning it off slows down my speeds, and I've never had a hash fail while it's running - usually I get 1-2% hash fails. I consider it very useful - the idea of 'torrent poisoning' is apparently pretty widespread these days.

Steam is fucked. I got home today and decided to download that silly demo: so it takes ages to start, takes five minutes at 100% of my dual-core CPU to update the six-odd megabytes of steam that's on my system... then breaks my net connection and forces me to restart. YAY FOR STEAM. What a pile of worthless shit.

Strange thing is, I've never had much problems with Steam.

Well I hate you. All I want is this stinking demo, and Pirates of the Burning Sea is going to be steam-based, so I'm going to HAVE to use it eventually. HOW THE FUCK it can spend so long - and waste so many CPU cycles - 'updating' the tiny client is utterly beyond me. It'd be neat if the client worked, too.

Things of note:
Do not use the following while updating/installing steam -

• VPN Software
  P2P Software
  FTP/Web Server
  Peer Guardian, CYBERSitter, Netlimiter, other IP Filters
  IP Masking Software

Do not use the following ISPs:

• Dutch Telecom
  ISPFree
  TalkTalk
  Bluewin

You could try this
I've put steam on three computers; 2 of them twice - none have ever had a problem. Of course I'm sure I walked off for an hour or so while it was happening.

I think you're cursed

Try walking away from it, maybe an updating steam never boils.. err updates? Whatever.

LOL. Does it take that long to update all the time? I wasn't running anything network-related when I updated it, and somehow it maxed out my CPU for five minutes. That's just ODD.

What kind of overhead is there in the system? The steam estimate for the 300Mb demo of RDKF is more than it'd take me to download the whole game. What's up with that?

In recent memory I don't recall any patches taking more than a minute. As for full downloads; they will take longer than if you were to just download them directly, but there's all sorts of crazy shit that goes on when steam is involved; encryption and what-not I suspect.

Do you use Netlimiter? Steam would not play nice at all when I had Netlimiter running.

I don't know what that is, so no. And I've taken to disabling anything network-related before attempting to use steam, which really shows what a total failure the software is. Does it do anything ingenious or difficult? Is it full of secret technology? Because streaming stuff really doesn't sound like it deserves all this trouble. Guild Wars streams shit all the time, while playing, while I'm torrenting, with PG2 running, while I'm doing other stuff, without interrupting or me even noticing.

Basically, why is steam still dodgey five or six years after it came out? What kind of bullshit is that?

Mind you that steam does a lot more than just download shit. A lot of the stuff it downloads is encrypted and what-not, and is supposed to work on as many systems as possible. For all the trouble I had playing online games when I lived in a dorm, steam was one of the few things that worked, and it worked very well. If you don't screw around with absurd security measures it should work just fine.

Does guildwars let you download stuff before it's fully released, and then unlock it when finished? Does it include a fairly extensive anti-piracy and anti-cheating ... things?

Steam works well, except for you. Of course, I remember it back when all I had was my P2 450; it has come a long, long way since then, so perhaps I'm a smidge biased.

Really? I play a lot of online games too, and something like steam *that worked* would be neat. Demanding I shut down everything else that uses the network is not normal. Can you even imagine a need for this? Is it sloppy coding? How does encrytption translate into slow-as-molasses download speeds and massive CPU hits? I use VPNs *every day*, and they don't show any of these problems. So is there an excuse? How can such a single-role piece of software still be so broken after years of millions of people using it? Whole pieces of steam (like the IM client) have been broken to the point of uselessness since day one! This is *not* quality stuff... but I'd be glad to hear the problems the development team encountered.

And, yes yes and yes. GW does all that: I was preloaded on all the Factions shit way before it came out (well, it started a month or two before launch and I wasn't on much, so maybe a few days ). It's not even a proper sale-content delivery system, but I could have just called them for a key, etc. This is why I hold steam to such a high 'work, don't fuck my network, don't cripple my CPU' standard. Shame on me!

The worst part is I have to keep trying to get the piece of shit working, since I want to play Pirates of the Burning Sea. Dammit. A quick check of all the AU-ian HL2 owners I know confirms - steam just sucks balls, is slow, touchy, etc and if they didn't need it they'd remove it.