Friends Public Beta

[CSN NewsBot]

Remember the good old days where the Friends Network was a rollercoaster of smooth sailing and network outages? Well, thankfully the Valve crew has been hard at work at rebuilding the Friends Network. Their efforts are just now starting to see the light of day once more! (Pause for fanfare)



Currently in BETA stages, the reworked Friends Network is offering basic functionality for use across multiple Steam games. If you're interested in working with the BETA and wish to lend a helping hand to report bugs and offer suggestions, then add the following to your Steam command line.

steam.exe -clientbeta steam3friends -beta steam3friends

Wondering what's in store for the Friends Network once the BETA bugs are ironed out? Community member Varsity had a chance to interview John Cook (the main man behind the Friends Network) about the future of the Friends. Those who participate should strongly consider voicing their bug reports on the Friends Network Wiki in order to make the final version as stable as possible.

[Zips]

I've been happily using it for the past few hours now. It's been quite stable and I've only run into one or two very minor quirks. It's looking very nice so far.

[washuplushie]

yes!!! this is really important. i hope they get it working well to a point where it only goes down once a week (or less) for maintenance and that's it.

[tonjohn]

Haven't noticed any problems yet

[asianrage]

Very stable as of right now.

[snkcube]

So far so good...

[Simplex]

Zips, mind your html!

[Ryosuke T]

unforunately i don't have any use of it now =( but still good job. at least the friend sys is working.

[Zips]

Simplex wrote..

Zips, mind your html!

Sonofa... I don't think I've ever forgot to put a / in the before.



I fail at the Internets.

[HACKER HELL STORM]

my friends network has always worked, its called "xfire".

[[Mage]wildwest]

Xfire works perfect for ALOT of games. Why cant they fix 'friends' to work w/ a hanfull?

[baconman]

friends will work for all steam games...

[Whisper.]

At least Valve are nice enough to call it a beta this time.



BTW you cannot get into zBlock secured CS:Source servers currently with the Beta Client, you will get an "Disconnect: Kicked by Console : Illegal Alias In Use." error message.

[Tuxedo_Penguin]

What I want to know is why the in-game voicechat sucks so bad. If ventrillo can operate just fine on the same bandwidth as a game server and sound great, but in game voice sounds like ass, there has to be room for improvement.

[Zips]

Tuxedo_Penguin wrote..

What I want to know is why the in-game voicechat sucks so bad. If ventrillo can operate just fine on the same bandwidth as a game server and sound great, but in game voice sounds like ass, there has to be room for improvement.

It's not the bandwidth used, but the codec.