To Steam or not to Steam?

[rizzuh]

Edited by [user="2065"] @ [time="1043359344"]

That is someone's personal site on Speakeasy.org. That is not legit at all. I guess you are right that it wasn't posted on CSC first.



I can blame bozer for not using common sense in: a) admitting that it was a leak, b) posting a leak on a public website. I don't blame bozer for the entire leak but him posting "LOL THER WAS NO LEAK AT ALL" is just some major rationalization of his error.



edited to remove most of post

[[pr]]

spaz: excellent post (#10) totally agree.

[Shadow-Dragon]

I'ts dont, not don't.

[Farmer Jimbo]

Has anyone identified who owns/ed the ocdrum17 account at speakeasy? That seems to be one of the earliest sources of the leak. I know it's not really that important anymore because it's all water under the bridge now. Still, I for one would like to know.

[-:Nighthawk:-]

I'm going to be responding to the comments first, then I'll come back and, ahem, examine this "article" for a bit.

.OmicroN wrote..

the only other spiteful thing i have to say isn't that bad. I hope Virtuoso dies of cancer and his family dies before he dies of cancer so he can feel the way we all did reading his fucking worthless article.

Hey hey, what's up, I was playing 1.6b with you last night. :) Thanks for the pointers on silent ladder climbing, though I still suck at it. Anyway, I found this part to be horrible and funny at the same time, so nice work.

Ho Hum (Ma$h3d) wrote..

His last comment about getting on with TF2 probably highlights that he is not a reglar CS player.

I noticed that as well.

FAF wrote..

This is the sort of thing that you should be emailing to Valve, with times and system/OS setup. Thats what a beta test is.

I'm curious... I see a lot more traffic outgoing with Steam running than without. So, does anybody know what sort of system specs and general crash information it may be sending to VALVe and such? If they wanted to do a proper beta test, that would be the smart thing to do... but I'm not sure if they're just going to rely on email instead. Anybody know for sure?



I was gonna quote a bunch of bozer's stuff, but rizzuh took care of that.

Tech N9ne wrote..

lol newbie, i read the first paragraph and i already knew you're post was shit.



oOHoHOH WOW, "there are 4-5 cheat sites updated constantly" woowohwowhow! that doesnt mean there are alot of cheaters, which there isnt.

You sir, are an ignorant idiot. If you've studied anything about sociology, you'd realize just how many people are willing to cheat, even if it's just in little ways, to give themselves an advantage. With as many cheats as there are out there that currently are not blocked by VAC (VALVe has been rather inactive lately on this aspect, probably due to the Steam work), you have to get some grasp of just how many people are likely to try them out.



I'm not claiming that every tallented player is a cheater. In fact, I have rarely if ever accused anyone of cheating in the past, simply because I need to be absolutely convinced of it, not just having a BS feeling about them. However, numerically speaking, we probably all run across people who are cheating, even if just in a small way, much more often than we realize. Either way, though, it's nothing even close to as bad as things were in the hayday of OGC.

CmdrFlesh wrote..

"Quake 1"

? Didn't I say that?

Maybe "derived" is the wrong word, please excuse me in that case :)

I think possibly narby was just clarifying what q1 was referring to. You used a LOT of acronyms in those sentences, and never fully wrote out any of them. Sure, some of use know what you're talking about, but not all.



Anyway... now it's time to do a little critical analysis of the article in question...

[Wanzer]

I'd like to point out how the guy said that he "subscribed to all the newsleters." A-hem, they aren't newsletters . . . that's how you get access to play the games.

[bozer]

All I'm simply saying is that its silly for them to blame the poor launch of their beta on a leak. I honestly dont believe it was leaked, and it was posted intentionally by Valve. 5 seconds after that post was in the steam forums, there was an official page on the steam site with links to various web sites which also had it. Every other time theres been a release, there was a scramble to find working downloads. I got it first, big deal. I dont see why you have to attack me with clever wordplay upon my name, but whatever. You don't know me.

[quiv]

I thought that article was horribly written and a waste of time.

[N2]

bah, rizzuhs sphincter clenched...

when it was'nt "his glorious precious site"

that kisses all that valve ass

to post the first word of Steam's release...



that's like sucking lemons...



and he's still bitter.



whatever. he's still a little bitch, and this site still sucks.

[-:Nighthawk:-]

All quotes from the Halflife.org article in question...



First off, I will avoid pointing out the grammatical errors and such, as it'd just waste our time.

so let me sum it up in laymen's terms for you. Steam is a tool developed by Valve Software that enables you to (...)

He then goes on to give some "laymen's terms" that don't really cover what he was summing up. Steam as a system will allow more than just Half-Life mod updates. It's a technology that they're hoping to sell to other game developers, to provide the same services for games completely unrelated to anything VALVe does.

On top of that Steam users had to download the full version of Counter-Strike (409 MB!!!) in order to get the new 1.6 version

I downloaded Steam, and all the accompanying CS1.6 files, in a bit over 2 hours. It took me an additional 35 minutes to download ricochet (just for the hell of it). All of this on a 56k. His theory means that my 56k modem downloaded over 400 megs in 2-3 hours. (Hell, if that was true, I'd NEVER get broadband!) In other words, he looked at the size of the steam cache, and then spit out some BS (blatant speculation) saying that he had downloaded all of that.



Perhaps if he paid more attention to the install process, he would have noticed that Steam can look at your current HL/CS directory, and import everything that is similar. Then it only has to download new items, and (I'm guessing) patch the ones that are changed. Additionally, Steam can download compressed files, then extract them, leading to even smaller downloads.

Of course these providers would not get paid for offering over their entire bandwidth to the mighty "Valve", but still a few people signed up for the idea.

I was also surprised to see the limited amount of junk advertisements posted on Steam.

Apparently, he failed to make the connection between the small sponsor banners (not animated, and just while connecting to a server) that he saw, and the servers that helped out with the bandwidth problems.

I had to wait 2 days for all the updates to finish downloading and installing on my computer.

I don't know what was wrong there. Like I said, took me 2-3 hours over a 56k. Either he just got a bad initial connection, tried something weird with his install, or didn't notice when it actually finished.

I literally had to leave my computer alone because steam ate up all my bandwidth.

That's BS as well, and this time, I'm not talking about speculation. He's on broadband, and claiming that Steam ate up all of his bandwidth for 2 solid days. Let's do some quick math. Assuming the slowest broadband you'll get (256kb), at constant usage for 2 days, you get a total of just over 5.2 GIGABYTES downloaded.



All this, to (supposedly) download 400 megs of information, which was really less than 60 megs. Anyone else coming to the conclusion that this guy is either an idiot, a liar, or both?

(...) friends tab (which allows you to connect to the friend network to chat etc. (doesn't work)), (...)

I've connected successfully to the friends network several times. It's been sort of hit and miss, though. Only thing was... once I connected, I had no clue who I would add to my friend list, which made me want to cry. Regardless, it does work sometimes, and making that blanket statement (that it doesn't) is simply wrong.

Personally I think Steam will open up a whole new world for internet gaming.

Personally I think its just a waste of a lot of time for a whole lot of nothing.

Um... okay?

Steam can change the way we play computer games so long as they get everything right! I emailed the makers of Steam with a some suggestions of my own (example: adding an IRC system, internet browser etc.)

A ways into the article, I realized that the author had no clue what the difference between "Steam" and "VGUI2" was (he never even mentions VGUI2). As such, much of the article focuses on VGUI2 elements, under the name of reviewing Steam. We all love the new console! But that doesn't mean Steam is good or bad. Steam is a content delivery system, but much of the article focuses instead on specific game-related features, which are really off-topic in this case.

Stop screwing around with Steam and start work on TF2, you guys are all jokers!

Somehow, it's hard to take any of this seriously. The author "William (CubicVirtuoso) McMahon" has made a fool of himself all throughout the entire article. And VALVe is supposed to feel bad because he called them jokers?!?



It's possible that this guy is just an idiot, and really can't help himself, so in that aspect I feel sorry for him. However, the editorial staff at Halflife.org should be ashamed of themselves at this point. If we at CSN were featuring articles (not just linking to them) that were this poor, I would seriously reconsider whether I wanted to be associated with this site.



Granted, I think the newspost here on CSN was very misleading in labeling this as "a good article" and such, but Rufus is still new and young, so I'll cut him some slack.



The article gets an F from me, scoring 3/10 in my book for the nice screen shots, and at least basically readable language. The content, however, was essentially worthless.

[CmdrFlesh]

narby wrote..

Yep, just confirming it :x

-:Nighthawk:- wrote..

(...)I think possibly narby was just clarifying what q1 was referring to. You used a LOT of acronyms in those sentences, and never fully wrote out any of them. Sure, some of use know what you're talking about, but not all.(...)

Ok, now I got the message :) and btw narby, aztec & inferno are great maps imo (unfortunately I had no chance to test drive airstrip so far). and btw nighthawk, I always appreciate the deep-thoughtedness of your posts.

thegentlesoftness wrote..

thanks to cmdrflesh with for the straight dope.(...)

You're welcome in every case, but *uhm* I kinda dunno what exactly "straight dope" means... ?

[bartlisa]

There seem to be a few posts saying "its only a beta" and Steam is but miss the point that the CS and TF updates aren't!



They are ready to play right now but to get them you have pull them out of boiling water with your bare hands. Everyone wants the updates, they allow you to play games. No one wants a new way to copy files. Downloading a file is decades old, tested technology, even restartable downloads. Steam throws all that away and adds what? another chat client? another server browser?



From steampowered.com this thing runs permanently updating stuff in the background. The chances that it is stuff you want, for free, is nill, so why run it? Microsoft would wet their pants at the thought of controlling your PC like this. Then theres the possibility for mandatory adverts and mandatory demo downloads - of games you don't care about.



An old coder joke is the Law of software evolopment - every program evoles until it has email. Watch this space.

[Optix]

Well...im of the oppinion that Steam sucks ass and that i hope it never comes back and that 1.6 (the really version[not beta]) comes in .exe well...im gone !



-Optix-

[Patrick_Bateman69]

Something specific about Steam has been scaring me every time I read it somewhere.



After all the problems and once the update has been downloaded, a user has the game. They see the 1.6 servers, and they attempt to Join a game. At this phase, I'm hearing about tons of delays and problems at this stage.



After the update is downloaded and the server IP known, why is there a delay when the user clicks Join?



Obviously, *something* is happening between the Steam client and Valve when the Join button is clicked. Obviously, the Join button simply shell out and execute cstrike.exe -server <ip> etc. But it's not.



This should be very worrisome. What the hell does Steam need to do with the Steam servers in order to join a game? Nothing, but something is going on there. What?



I really should get the update myself and start some packet analysis and figure it out.

[-:Nighthawk:-]

Thanks CmdrFlesh, it's always nice to know I'm not posting in vain. :)



Now, onto bartlisa's post...



Um, Steam, CS1.6, and TFC are ALL in beta right now.



I doubt TFC will change much from how they've got it. CS1.6beta, however, is expected to continue to change over the course of the beta test. For one, we don't expect the Galil to stay as good and cheap as it is. Who knows what other balance/bug situations they may have to work out with CS itself, but the point is that both of those games are betas.



Steam doesn't run permanently. You can exit it at any time. Currently, it doesn't include an option to not run at startup, so you can just close it whenever you like. However, if you know what you're doing with your computer, you can always just disable the startup entry, and you're good to go. Point of all this is that, your "they're controlling your computer" ideas are stupid and untrue.



Oh well, enough fighting against the forces of ignorance for now. :)