Steam and performance.

**Gregoshi** · 03-05-2005, 06:08

Computer Gaming World was less than complimentary about Steam. According to them, everyone and his mother bought HL2 on the day it came out, took it home, installed it and then had to wait hours (about 8 for the CGW chief editor) just to play the game as the servers were overloaded with everyone's Steam trying to register their copy. Me thinks someone hadn't thought the idea through completely.

I got Steam compliments of having downloaded and installed the HL2 demo. I can't say I'm thrilled about it - just more junkware to gunk up my PC.

**Uesugi Kenshin** · 03-05-2005, 06:13

Yeah, luckily or unluckily I had to wait a week or two so I could get my computer to someone's house where they have broadband. I missed the crowd.

It is annoying, it never seems to start up quickly when I want it to and when i don't want it to it does.....

**Crazed Rabbit** · 03-05-2005, 08:31

It's like windows ME, but somehow less usefull.

I really wish valve had just kept the WON servers, which they wre using for MP before they built steam. The WON servers worked, and let me play. When I got steam, the CD keys from several half life games I had purchased were no good.

Oh, and steam has been hacked, with account name and password info posted on the net.

And the fact that you have to have it running to play HL2? And it's pig-like consumption of resources? Why, oh why did they make it?

Crazed Rabbit

**therother** · 03-05-2005, 14:42

I read the title of this thread, and who posted it, and every so briefly thought to myself - "is there nothing TosaInu won't do to improve the performance of The Guild? A steam powered server? That's something I've got to see." Unfortunately lucidity eventually returned, as it has the very annoying habit of doing, and I realised it was just about Half-life 2!

**KukriKhan** · 03-05-2005, 15:23

Originally Posted by therother

I read the title of this thread, and who posted it, and every so briefly thought to myself - "is there nothing TosaInu won't do to improve the performance of The Guild? A steam powered server? That's something I've got to see." Unfortunately lucidity eventually returned, as it has the very annoying habit of doing, and I realised it was just about Half-life 2!

LoL. A steam-powered server was an upgrade from our former power source. Here's staff from a couple years ago, trying to eak out a few more bits of bandwidth for the Org:

I leave it to the reader to decide who is whom in the pic.

**Red Harvest** · 03-05-2005, 19:32

Steam really sounds like a bad idea, that was then poorly implemented.

I used to play on WON back when they hosted Civil War Generals II. It actually worked very well. That is about the only MP experience I can speak of glowingly. We did a pretty good job of self-policing and they even offered me a moderating job with some pay, but I didn't want fun to become work.

I tried some online flight sim stuff (IL2, and some online Starcraft, etc.) The jerk to player ratio was too high for my tastes and the blatant cheating was annoying. Lag with flight sims was too high for a good experience, warping was a big problem.

**lars573** · 03-05-2005, 19:54

As bad as most of you think steam is now, trust me it was worse. My brother got the public beta build in 2001. Now THAT didn't work at all. When ever we tried to start it up to play a game if it didn't lock up our system immediatly it was a miracle. Then it would lock up when we tried to search for servers. About a year and a half later when after steam had been released for a while the dwindling WON servers made me decide to try to make steam work. I got the 649k exe file and registered it. It works very for me, connections to online games are as good as they ever were with WON. Downside is that only official valve games (HL CS DOD) get autoupdated threw steam. I just checked my task manager and right this second steam is using 9 megs of ram. Which is about normal and it never impares my systems preformance. Now don't misconstrew the fact that I don't hate steam as me liking the way HL2 is set up. Cause I hate that you have to dump 5 gigs of data from 5 disks onto your HD then decrypt them to play HL2. Right now my steam folder takes up about 7 almost 8 gigs of HD space.

**Productivity** · 03-07-2005, 11:55

Originally Posted by Red Harvest

Steam really sounds like a bad idea, that was then poorly implemented.

The first half of it, the distribution system wasn't a bad idea really, although I fail to see what it brings that the conventional system doesn't (how hard is it to get to a shop, and you still need publishers to provide capital while you develop a game).

The second half as a piracy prevention measure was an utter failure. It was freely available if you knew where to look the day it was released, infact more so at times it appeared that it was allowing pirates to download through it the games. The only ever effective piracy protection will be a strong multiplayer side, with a cd key list.

Aside from this failure, it also annoys legitimate users, with it's checks and so on, and general flakiness. Also as an automatic update system I would be a bit worried, given the theft of the HL2 source code from Valve as to it's security.

Added to that, Valve's generally shady business practice re. ATI and Nvidia don't give me great confidence in them.