Fuck Steam is an annoying piece of shit

[Alyeska]

How is that relevant to anything anyone has said here?

It provides a counter example. It shows that existing problems do not affect everyone.

[Lief]

Exactly, and stark surely you know bad news spreads faster than good?

Two of my brothers also use steam, and have never had any problems, or any of my friends.

The main problem I have heard about steam is the annoyance of having to re-download games in the event of a HDD nuking.

[weemadando]

I have only really started having problems with Steam in the past month or two. Prior to that, the last issues I had with Steam was back in the days when I had 56k and was trying to get HL2 to work.

[Stark]

How is that relevant to anything anyone has said here?

It provides a counter example. It shows that existing problems do not affect everyone.

That might be relevant if anyone had said it did. Indeed, the shifting and intermittent nature is the whole point!

[Steel]

Hope this isnt too much of a necro, but this seems the most appropriate place.

Until now I've never had problems with steam, but it has found a way.

I'm in a place where I should have no internet access. This is fine, and steam was cooperating, working in offline mode and not complaining. Then suddenly my laptop gets a sniff of some random wireless network and tries to connect. Steam sees this connection and tries to start in online mode automatically with no prompting. It then fails, and when I try to start it again it has erased my login details and says I cant start in offline mode again until I reconnect to steam with an account. After searching around I found an unsecured network to connect to and finally log in... Only to find the games I wanted to play had autopatched(couldnt have known to turn this off, surely steam couldnt autopatch when I knew there would be no internet) to 0.1% and refuse to play in offline mode!

[Executor32]

I've only ever used Steam on desktops, so I've never had that problem, not even when I had it running in offline mode all the time when I was on dial-up. That was five years ago, though, so they might have added this stupid bug nifty feature in the meantime. As a workaround, couldn't you just turn off your wireless connection when you're not using it? You'd save some battery power that way, too. If it's a newer laptop, there's probably even a button for it above the keyboard so you don't have to dig around in the Control Panel to turn it off.

[Vendetta]

Then suddenly my laptop gets a sniff of some random wireless network and tries to connect. Steam sees this connection and tries to start in online mode automatically with no prompting.

You want to get that looked at. Your computer should only be connecting to wireless networks if you've previously manually connected to them and stored them in your preferred networks list.

[Edward Yee]

Could it be a case of a shared SSID with a previous network that he connected to?

[Boombaye]

Back when I had my internet capped at 5 Gigs, I'd get 41kb/s on a good day.

I had to ration my bandwidth to those Steam updates. When the Orange Box first came in, I waited a good hour for the installation. Then I ran into the updates.

Played it for the first time the next morning.

Now I'm uncapped and getting 41kb/s on a good day, I've been doing overnighters on updates, patches and such. It's a hellscape.

I wish Steam never auto-updated.

[Rossum]

I was just today able to solve a problem with Steam thats been giving me problems for some time now.

I guess the main problem with my setup is that I have two computers: My desktop PC that is almost brand new and has the RAM and capablilty to play games like Portal, and my laptop which is older and cannot. I have dial-up at home (before anyone says anything I want to point out that I life a fair distance from town and getting broadband would be much more expensive than I want to spend. Every... single... time... I mention that I have problems with Steam and also mention that I have dial-up some joker says that I should stop "living like a caveman" when I am perfectly aware of the difficulties that dial-up and Steam have together and I just don't want to fork over a hole mess of money and have higher bills every month just so I can waste more of my time playing video games!).

Gah, sorry about that.

Anyway, I was able to solve the problem by installing Steam on my Laptop and going to my local library which has free Wi-Fi access. I had Steam download all the crap it has to and then copied the whole folder containing 5 Gigs of information onto my 8 Gig thumbdrive, then brought it home and copied the whole folder into my C:Program File/Steam directory on my PC. A short time later and I could play my game for the first time in months.

Though... to be honest I had gotten Portal to work before several months ago. See, I bought it on CD from Target and came home trying to install it. I ran into trouble there but was able to solve it by doing something (downloading wasn't the problem. It was some kind of problem with the installer on the CD and I managed to install from CD and just with an hour on dial-up getting a few files ready.) So I was able to get it working before... until Valve did their latest update thing that added a whole bunch of stuff to the game.

By which I mean, they added a bunch of radios to the test chambers, some developer commentary that I don't care about, and a 'surprise twist' at the end when an invisible robot drags Chell back into the building during the end cutscene. I think those changes added half a gigabyte to the size of this game and made it impossible for anyone with dial-up to install the game from CD even if they don't give a flying fig about invisible robots or radios or running commentary. So yeah... this time I installed the thing on my laptop and just copied the files to my PC via thumbdrive.

It actually took me a few weeks to do even that (I'm embarrassed to admit) because before I would try doing overcomplicated things like using Steams 'data backup' feature or moving the files from the C:/Program Files/Steam directory on my WinXP laptop to the C:/Program Files (x86)/Steam directory my Vista PC uses. Turns out doing that causes steam to spend five years downloading the entire 6 Gigs of its contents onto my hard drive despite the fact that its all sitting right there. Plus, even installing Steam by itself without any games in it at all is impossible now because their installer apparently doesn't have enough of its own data to function without downloading crap from nowhere.


Soo... anyway, I solved my problem and I think I can handle any other problems I have with it from now on. I just really hate how this program relies on the user downloading tons of stuff from the internet. Just going online to verify that my copy of the game is legal sounds fine with me but if this thing has to eat up my bandwidth to download crap I don't want it to then thats just inefficient. I read a Cracked article about how the introduction of high-speed internet has resulted in so many services that rely on sending loads of data around... if there are millions of gamers out there who have to download gigabytes of data just to make their games function (even if they don't want the stuff the updates provide) then that's just putting unnecessary (albeit miniscule) strain on our information infrastructure.

[Samual99]

Yes OP you are right. Steam is a miserable disgrace that makes me sick. I truly hate it like the devil hates god.

It literally has a mind of its own, it updates "gibberish" all the time. MY GOD how many times in 1 day does it need to download whatever the hell its downloading in steam?? Single player games keep on updating & things change in settings. So many times it doesn't remember login password. Turn the update games automatically shit off, & next time its back to keep updating & downloading pointless fking shit. So sick of it. Its a disease. I really really hate it so much.