Steam suxs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by Les

A little bit off topic, but can anyone confirm, definitely and without a doubt, that the original DVD version of the sim did not in fact have a copy of the sim on it, just a Steam download link.

I'm asking because I'd like to try installing that original version and then only patching it up to a certain point, and perhaps even trying to mix different parts of different patches together (using the graphics from one and the sound from another for example). This would be for off-line use only.

I never backed up past patched full versions of the game and found I could only roll the patches back so far from the current version before I needed to start adding them to an older full version of the sim.

You can't roll back patches with Steam. If you install the very first version it will patch it to the latest version in one go (patches are cumulative, not incremental), so you're either stuck with the initial version or the last one, nothing in-between.

That's why i used to keep backups during the early patches when performance tweaks were a bit hit and miss: if the patch resulted in worse performance on your system, there was nothing you could do to roll back.

That's actually my principle annoyance with Steam. For a service with so high bandwidth costs, one thinks they could have seen the benefit of enabling incremental patching to give their customers some finer control if they want it, while also saving themselves some bandwidth.

Right now it's inefficient for both steam and customer if a game goes through a prolonged optimization patching process (like CoD): they stream all those GBs to you even if you don't want them all, while you take up space on your HDD or copying them to DVD for keeping backups of older versions.

Originally Posted by Fjordmonkey

Add in the fact that it's a damn hassle to pirate anything from Steam, and it's a win for the companies that use those portals.

Actually, Steam is one of the easiest protection methods to bypass. The fact that it also has a pre-load feature when you preorder high profile AAA titles (download the game ahead of time but it doesn't activate before release day) makes it a pirate favorite: they can preorder one copy, preload it a couple of weeks before release, crack the protection and release date check and have it on the torrents weeks before it's out in the stores.

In all fairness i haven't had much trouble with Steam, but it would be better if it stuck to doing what it does best: content delivery.

It's useless as an anti-piracy measure (crack one game and you've cracked them all) and depending on who you ask, it's a mixed bag in terms of support and user experience: some people swear by it, others have permanently lost access to hundreds of $ worth of games.

If it was just an interface to buy and download games, without having to run the client in the background to play, it would rock plain and simple.

As a small example, a month ago my secondary HDD died so i had to reinstall Steam and download CoD again. Well, the registry information about the previous installation was still there, so i thought "ok, let's uninstall normally through the control panel, it will clear the registry and just tell me it didn't find files to delete".

Well, no dice. Steam wouldn't install because it thought it was already installed and it wouldn't uninstall either because it didn't find the path to the files to delete.

I ended up finding a solution after scouring the net for a couple of hours and it wasn't even documented in steam's official FAQ. The official troubleshooting guide had me download a "steam remover" tool that also failed to work, the solution was found in a user forum.

It's stuff like that which annoys me when adding layers of complexity not directly relevant to the software i'm going to use: making it harder for the legitimate user to use the software without it even being his fault that things got messed up, while a pirate copy will play flawlessly regardless of anything.

I know what i'm talking about, i keep my original game discs in good condition by doing just that: applying cracks on games that i actually bought

I guess Steam is one of those things that works well when it works, but you keep your fingers crossed it doesn't stop working.