Valve's Gabe Newell Inducted Into AIAS Hall of Fame

[lpedraja2002]

[citation][nom]Marcus52[/nom]I agree that Steam is better than it was. It is also one of the best services for people to co-op on the internet. However, that doesn't mean it's good, the state of existing services is rather poor for the technology we have in this day and age.I'll give my latest problem with Steam as an example, but do to the limited space, I won't list everything I've had problems with.I was playing Borderlands 2 a couple of weeks ago, and the game crashed. I used Task Manager to get out of it when I did I found that Steam has decided in it's glorious wisdom to start downloading a game listed in the files of the account Borderlands 2 was on. It decided to download a game just because it was on the list, failed to recognize that the game was already on the computer and all it needed to do was tie the account to it, and couldn't manage running a game and downloading another at the same time. (I highly doubt it was my computer since I've run as many as 5 World of Warcraft accounts on it simultaneously.)I sent in a ticket describing what happened, and it took them almost 2 WEEKS to respond, and guess what, big surprise, I got a form letter that had nothing to do with my issue.I posted on the Borderlands 2 forums, asking if Steam crashed a lot for those who played it co-op, and no one rushed to Steam's defense. I got 2 responses, both indicating that yes, they had problems, and nobody posted saying anything else. Considering the popularity of the service I thought I'd get a bunch of posts, but I didn't, and am left with the idea that people didn't want to say anything bad about something they liked.The reason I asked the question above is that Steam insists on starting an online session whether I'm playing solo or not, unless I start the service in offline mode (and of course get dire warnings about how running offline is a bad thing.) The whole reason I played with Steam in online mode is to keep an offline backup of my game, especially since I play on more than one computer, but I've found it's not a very reliable source for back-up since it disconnects itself from my computer fairly often. I once lost several hours of game play, not just a couple of minutes, because Steam's files were so out of date. (This was recently, not something that happened years ago.)I've mostly avoided using Steam, but these days it's impossible to do, as gaming companies have taken to using it for DRM management and keeping their games up-to-date (regardless of ability to play co-op), but even being some one that avoids Steam, I've had more problems than I should have with the games that I play that are associated with it (not problems with the game itself, but with what Steam is supposed to do, like DRM management). If you were in my shoes you wouldn't wonder why I don't care for steam, you'd wonder why anyone liked it.[/citation]


I can see why you're frustrated. I think I only needed to submit a ticket for tech assistance once and I got a quick response but that was very long ago. Now it's weird that you decide to play in offline mode to backup different saves. I also have Borderlands 2 installed on 2 different PC using the same Steam account but with different characters in each PC and every time I start the game I get a popup message telling me that the save data stored in the cloud is different than what its stored in that specific PC, since I share the account with my dad he has a different progress and character than me and thus why we get the message each time we start the game. But after clicking on update from data stored in local machine or something like that we get to play the game exactly where we left off, no matter in which PC we're in.

The few problems that I've had with other games were soon fixed by Steam itself or by verifying the integrity of local cache. I can understand there is some frustration when using the forums as you'll sometimes get some assholes replying defending Steam when there's a big problem or just posting crap, but they're usually dealt with and I have seen a lot of them banned by moderators so all is good.

If you still have crashing problems try a different video card driver or re-installing the game.