Steam sucks - unless you have FIOS, Steam really sucks

[Sea Moose]

The title is misleading. I worked on a boiler ages ago and got burnt by steam. It fuckin hurt.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

You are the minority, I love steam. I almost always max my connection at 600K when downloading from them.

 

[ViviTheMage]

I don't get it, you have a slow connection speed, and you are blaming STEAM that it will take forever to download an update?

STEAM maxes out my connection @ 6MB/S, love my @home pipe 🙂.

But I can understand the frustration of not being able to play, and having to patch up constantly....if you put steam in offline mode, wouldn't it let you play without patching?

 

[Sea Moose]

Originally posted by: ViviTheMage
I don't get it, you have a slow connection speed, and you are blaming STEAM that it will take forever to download an update?

STEAM maxes out my connection @ 6MB/S, love my @home pipe 🙂.

But I can understand the frustration of not being able to play, and having to patch up constantly....if you put steam in offline mode, wouldn't it let you play without patching?

This is what ruined the company of heros games.

Too many fucking patches... took me three days to play

 

[Fox5]

Originally posted by: Sea Moose

Originally posted by: ViviTheMage
I don't get it, you have a slow connection speed, and you are blaming STEAM that it will take forever to download an update?

STEAM maxes out my connection @ 6MB/S, love my @home pipe 🙂.

But I can understand the frustration of not being able to play, and having to patch up constantly....if you put steam in offline mode, wouldn't it let you play without patching?

This is what ruined the company of heros games.

Too many fucking patches... took me three days to play

For some reason, Steam patches in an oddball way.
The official company of heroes patches using a differencing scheme (to compare the old files to the new) and update accordingly. Steam just stores updated versions of all the files, causing you to redownload the entire game whenever there is a patch. The steam method is faster to install though, those differencing patches take FOREVER to install, seem to be a heavy cpu load.

It's best to just set COH to not have auto-update on. When you turn it on, it will automatically connect and download the newest patch.

 

[ViviTheMage]

Originally posted by: Fox5

Originally posted by: Sea Moose

Originally posted by: ViviTheMage
I don't get it, you have a slow connection speed, and you are blaming STEAM that it will take forever to download an update?

STEAM maxes out my connection @ 6MB/S, love my @home pipe 🙂.

But I can understand the frustration of not being able to play, and having to patch up constantly....if you put steam in offline mode, wouldn't it let you play without patching?

This is what ruined the company of heros games.

Too many fucking patches... took me three days to play

For some reason, Steam patches in an oddball way.
The official company of heroes patches using a differencing scheme (to compare the old files to the new) and update accordingly. Steam just stores updated versions of all the files, causing you to redownload the entire game whenever there is a patch. The steam method is faster to install though, those differencing patches take FOREVER to install, seem to be a heavy cpu load.

It's best to just set COH to not have auto-update on. When you turn it on, it will automatically connect and download the newest patch.

Yeah, that's not normal..waste of bandwidth!

 

[Kirby]

I like steam, but then again i have a 20mb connection and i don't resell games. i also don't think valve will go out of business before i stop playing video games.

 

[skace]

Originally posted by: ViviTheMage
Yeah, that's not normal..waste of bandwidth!

It's nice if you download your games straight from Steam and get the latest version in 1 shot.

 

[PingSpike]

I like steam, and it works ok if you have a fat pipe...but it really needs to be better optimized for bandwidth and if you're on a low speed connection I have no fucking idea what that thing is doing. It just shits out all the time when updating, hurks and jerks, starts loading horseshit from the friends list, poops out some error message about the steam servers being to busy to handle a 2kb/s download to your machine and generally craps itself. There should be a "dialup user" config for it that just turns all the extra crap off, has a resume that actually fucking works and lets you play the damn game while it downloads the updates. Yes, I am aware it has a "offline mode"...but you have to update it before it works! Maybe I want to start playing right now and its a single player game so why am I being hassled every time I log in? This isn't even for playing online, I'm just talking single player stuff.

Also, it'd be nice if it would just soak up the updates from a nearby PC...I have two PCs so why the fuck do I have to download the updates twice? Make them like antivirus signiture files or something so I can store them and only download once.

The whole program is a great idea, but they treat bandwidth like an unlimited commodity which frankly isn't the god damn case for a lot of people. And even if it is, that's no excuse to be lazy and wasteful with it. (honestly, this is a problem with almost everything on computers these days, every doodad you install wants to search for updates or blast your with an RSS stream the whole time its on)