Some things that Steam COULD bring to the table

[Erkki]

Originally Posted by xnomad

First of all Steam makes it easy to release small updates frequently. If they did it the old fashioned way they have to wait for bug fixes and add-ons to accumulate till they release them. Bugs can be around for months, even though they've been fixed but not released yet. Imagine doing it the old way with frequent updates, people would go nuts and lose track which patch they need.

This is also a problem for those with not that high connection speeds. My squad plays both Il-2 and Red Orchestra/Darkest Hour, and the updates to maps and other stuff are downloaded when you join a server. Great, except the moment I've redownloaded the 40-50mb map and possibly another 20mb of textures the round is over, and I have to do this again until theres a map with no updates for the current week. Approx 60mb of updates a week... Not that much of a problem, but if CoD will, as Oleg has said, allow limited modification, I can imagine it to become one, when servers start having custom mods of their own to maps and aircraft. As it is, I dont have the time nor will to download an Ultrapack's worth of stuff a month in small pieces before I'm let in a server. I would imagine many people to be in the same situation. 1mb in is little enough to ruin a good evening if your game happens to have some updates you hadnt had the time to download.

Steam's autoupdates that cant be stopped are another thing. It doesnt even tell about them. If you exit Steam, it runs in the background until the download is finished, or I terminate the process.