Since when is Valve...

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Ishada

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So when the first half life came out I played it religiously. Every difficulty, every mod, every expansion...

After being removed from the franchise for a few years now I just bought HL2. I'm really surprised at the way valve presets itself now. Since when did this company become THE MOST crazy facist Video game development company on the planet? Was piracy really that bad with the first game? No it wasn't. I've played tons of different PC games in my time, from tons of companies/developers. I've never in my life seen anything like this. The way steam works, and the lack of power I have over a game I just paid my own cash for is astounding. The idea that I can't even play a single player game I just bought without going through steam is inexcusable. I can't play my own game for 2 hours while it updates. This is not some MMO. This is not some monthly fee online only game. This is a company overreaching its bounds and a player base just bending over and taking it.

I'm going to try my hardest to return this game, and get my money back. I know the game has been out for a couple years now, but I'm really dissapointed at how the players have apparantly not stood up for their rights. If people had refused to agree to their facist terms they would have no choice but to obey the same unwritten rules as the rest of the development companies out there.
 
Why should it matter when I purchased a SINGLE PLAYER game?
 
OP you are an idiot.
steam is the best thing to ever happen to the gaming industry.
steam makes it easier to obtain and download games even when you have lost your cd. im sorry if you have dial up but i cant help you there. also i highly doubt you can exchange the game, because your cd key is tied to your steam account. if you dont like it then dont play it; its that simple, we here love valves games and the way steam works. dont come here and rant about how you dont like it.
 
I agree about Steam. It's a great concept, but I can't change my account name without buying a new copy, and I can't "give away" my games when I'm done with them if they register on steam (which is why I havn't bought anything off there).
 
Steam is there to control you, and to control piracy. Name me one other company that takes away your rights as a gamer in the same way?
 
No, not Microsoft. At least not it's gaming development arm. When I bought Age of empires 3 it didnt require me to do any of the ridiculous and paranoid things valve required. All I had to do was install it and play. Not everyone is a gamer with a T1, some of us just want to enjoy the product we pay for without having to constantly go to extremes to prove we actually own what we bought.
 
I bought Dark Messiah of Might and Magic at 6pm, and it was ready to play at 10pm. Steam is a great way of sending content to users very quickly. If you have trouble with it, then it's usually on your end. Dial up users do get screwed a bit, and should really be able to install the game from the DVD (but can't apparently), but VALVe isn't losing a lot of their player base by making steam Broadband only.

Once you've downloaded the game, Ishada, you can go into Offline mode, and play to your hearts content. However, updates are there for a reason - to remove as many bugs as possible. And there were a load on hl2's release which were pretty much show-stoppers.
 
Ishada said:
No, not Microsoft. At least not it's gaming development arm. When I bought Age of empires 3 it didnt require me to do any of the ridiculous and paranoid things valve required. All I had to do was install it and play. Not everyone is a gamer with a T1, some of us just want to enjoy the product we pay for without having to constantly go to extremes to prove we actually own what we bought.
Click to expand...

Well your One in a Million, I think there are over a Million Steam useres, and more then 90% of them don't have Dial up.
Have you thought of upgrading your internet?
 
It really is a great service. The anti-piracy aspect was just after when they decided to use it to sell games too. But mainly you get auto-updates, go to any PC and download your game to play while logged into your account, anti-cheat, friends. Steam went to open beta with what game? CS 1.4 beta...

Obviously they switched their aim from single player game off a cd to multiplayer and internet access. But that's just what most of the players wanted. They followed the trend. Before, everyone was always trying to find the newest CS patch, waiting in lines at download sites, trying to play with their friends (no xfire then). Largely playing multiplayer mods etc. That's were this system excels.

-it says internet required on the box
-you can play in offline mode
-just 3% of Valve's customers have dial-up (56K)
 
Steam = great for consumer convenience while buying games, bad for consumer convenience when playing games.

I would like Steam a lot more (or at least I wouldn't find it as insulting) if you didn't have to run it to play HL2 singleplayer, or simply if Offline mode always worked. As it is, I doubt it has made a dent in piracy and it puts a significant crimp in the gaming experience. Getting games cheaply, legally, direct to your PC is of course great. I don't know how you can argue, however, that a 2 hour+ install process (for HL2) and a singleplayer game which can become unusable every time there's a fault in the phone line or at the exchange, is good for PC gaming. With PC users being made to jump through such hoops by this kind of thing, and by the stupid unrealistic emphasis on developing for unreleased hardware (separate issue), it's no wonder that people plump for consoles.
 
Offline mode has never worked for me. The option has always been grayed out since I got HL2 in February 2005.

I just hope Ep 2 isn't Orange Box/Steam only -- I want it on disk form >.>
 
I don't wanna come down hard on you, but you say you played Half-Life "religiously." Obviously not, or perhaps your memory's glossed over, because you've forgot a couple keening aspects of what you had to go through with old Half-Life. Lemme say three words that should spark most peoples' memory (and draw a cringe):

SIERRA AUTO-UPDATE

Yeah, you remember that? You remember having to wait two hours with THAT thing, and then realizing that it installed the wrong patch, or the patch didn't take at all for some reason, so you ended up having to spend MORE time waiting in some Fileplanet line to get Half-Life 1.1.0.x? Making sure you got the right patch, because otherwise you'd lose even more time? Most of the time you ended up saying, "Screw it" and downloading the full install and just reinstalling your game because it took less time.

And then you want to get into a game (I know you said you want to do the singleplayer, but this bears mention) and stupid WON.net is being a bitch. Well there goes that. Time to use an external program like Gamespy 3D or Kali to connect to a server.

And then you've got cheats on top of it all. So you have to get another program for THAT. Install punkbuster or some other stupid thing that could potentially have conflicts with your game. BF2142 incident, anyone?

Steam's integrated ALL of that. If you're bitching about two lousy hours to play Half-Life, then frankly you don't deserve it. I'm not kidding. I waited two hours to get my shit UNLOCKED the day Half-Life 2 came out. I bought the game at around 9 in the morning PST and I waited until I could unlock it. And that was just to unlock it! So what're you crying about? Steam's patching your game for you, fixing some things, making it all better automatically and you're like, "waaaah, two hours." Leave it on then and go outside.

I swear man. I hope to God I was never such a whiner when I had dialup. I remember waiting 3 hours to download a 60mb demo of Quake 3 ffs. People bitching these days...
 
There have also been patches introduced through Steam which broke HL2 - screwing up save games, the animation, whatever - until Valve could come out with another patch to rectify it. Why the big praise for autopatching?

Seriously, I've never had a need for it, and until it was mentioned as a feature for Steam I honestly don't remember anyone complaining about having to manually patch their games either (apart from when patches are huge, which is still an issue, Steam or not). With all the games I've owned I've never even considered it an issue. You just google '"Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing" official patch', or just check the developer's official site, and there it is. If, however, you search and there's lots of hits with people screaming 'IT BROKE MY SAVES!!' then you have the option not to download. Better for all involved.
 
TBH I never had a "problem" with it either; if I noticed some TFC servers were red in Kali I knew there was a different version out. Go to a file site, grab the patch.

But, Steam is very convenient in that I don't have to "worry" about patching. It takes it out of my hands. And it also ensures that the newest patches get to me as fast as they're uploaded, rather than as fast as I can find a good mirror with little to no line. Or worse, having say only Australian mirrors or German mirrors with the patch, and then I gotta wait for FP or some other closer-to-home site to get off their lazy ass and get the patch. It's never a real incident, but...there you go. I enjoy that aspect of "I don't have to touch this; the instant I boot up Steam anything I need will start downloading."
 
That statistic about 3 % Steam users being dial up users doesn't quite make sense. Think about it. If somone has dial-up, they'll find Steam very annoying and obtrusive. So guess what? They'll remove Steam, and thus won't be part of the survey. Those 3% are just the people who decided to 'stick with it' and keep Steam, which wouldn't be very many of them.
 
If they remove Steam, then they're no longer Steam users, and therefore not part of the statistic.
 
Then only 3% of dialup users aren't giant babies whose time is so precious to them they can't leave a download on.

YOU'RE GONNA HAVE TO PATCH ANYWAY, DORKS!
 
Offline mode as always worked for me (it's a life-saver for dial-upers!) except the Steam community beta seems to have broken it for me! CURSE YOU BETA RELEASES!
 
I remember getting HL2 back in February 2005. Sure, I didn't have a clue what Steam was and why my game took 2 hours to update but afterwards I was enjoying a brilliant game with...NO-FUSS!
 
IMO the only thing that should be changed with Steam is that you should have the option to NOT update a game after you install it via CD/DVD. Obviously this would only apply to single player games as in a multiplayer game everyone needs the same content. Seems pretty trivial to do and would make life much easier for dialup users.
 
How about reading the requirements of a game before buying it next time, shall we?
 
The most important aspect here, is that updating and going through everything Steam makes you do, is WORTH IT TO PLAY HALF LIFE 2.
 
Shippi said:
You can choose not to update games in steam. Right click the game, Properties > Updates > Do not automatically update this game :)
Click to expand...

WRONG

if you have it installed it wont automatically update when there is an update,but if you want to play; you must update it. seriously ppl updates are worth waiting for. ive never had a problem with steam nor any update for games. shit happens though,you may be the unlucky person with the incompatible hardware or just wont work with some driver you have. so stop complaining BUGS ARE IN EVERY PIECE OF SOFTWARE!....well except viruses hahah
 
giant384 said:
WRONG
Click to expand...
Ok Lex Luthor, I don't get how she is wrong. She never said anything about playing with an out of date version. Just answering the guys question about not auto-updating.
 
giant384 said:
BUGS ARE IN EVERY PIECE OF SOFTWARE!....well except viruses hahah
Click to expand...
I once had a trojan which was quite hard to get rid of. One time it actually somehow crashed and errored out, and I found out what file I had to delete in safe mode from the '*whatever*.exe has encountered an error and needs to close' pop-up. True story.
 
That's some crazy shit... Just remember that any huge developer will not offer you a free version without some kind of catch for their benefit. And I can tell you that Valve would NEVER give their product away without an official SN, or privately. :/
 
Asus said:
Ok Lex Luthor, I don't get how she is wrong. She never said anything about playing with an out of date version. Just answering the guys question about not auto-updating.
Click to expand...

umm im pretty sure she was answering about updating after you install the game from the cd/dvd did you even read the post??
 
/studies the thread carefully...
Van_Halen said:
That's some crazy shit... Just remember that any huge developer will not offer you a free version without some kind of catch for their benefit. And I can tell you that Valve would NEVER give their product away without an official SN, or privately. :/
Click to expand...
...THIS post is the odd one out! ;) I claim my ?5
 
Asus said:
Ok Lex Luthor, I don't get how she is wrong. She never said anything about playing with an out of date version. Just answering the guys question about not auto-updating.
Click to expand...

That is such a bullshit response is how, the point is not how to stop it from updating, but to do that AND play the game A better way to not auto update is to keep your modem unhooked and ignore HL2, which is not a good thing
 
Darkside55 said:
I don't wanna come down hard on you, but you say you played Half-Life "religiously." Obviously not, or perhaps your memory's glossed over, because you've forgot a couple keening aspects of what you had to go through with old Half-Life. Lemme say three words that should spark most peoples' memory (and draw a cringe):

SIERRA AUTO-UPDATE

Yeah, you remember that? You remember having to wait two hours with THAT thing, and then realizing that it installed the wrong patch, or the patch didn't take at all for some reason, so you ended up having to spend MORE time waiting in some Fileplanet line to get Half-Life 1.1.0.x? Making sure you got the right patch, because otherwise you'd lose even more time? Most of the time you ended up saying, "Screw it" and downloading the full install and just reinstalling your game because it took less time.

And then you want to get into a game (I know you said you want to do the singleplayer, but this bears mention) and stupid WON.net is being a bitch. Well there goes that. Time to use an external program like Gamespy 3D or Kali to connect to a server.

And then you've got cheats on top of it all. So you have to get another program for THAT. Install punkbuster or some other stupid thing that could potentially have conflicts with your game. BF2142 incident, anyone?

Steam's integrated ALL of that. If you're bitching about two lousy hours to play Half-Life, then frankly you don't deserve it. I'm not kidding. I waited two hours to get my shit UNLOCKED the day Half-Life 2 came out. I bought the game at around 9 in the morning PST and I waited until I could unlock it. And that was just to unlock it! So what're you crying about? Steam's patching your game for you, fixing some things, making it all better automatically and you're like, "waaaah, two hours." Leave it on then and go outside.

I swear man. I hope to God I was never such a whiner when I had dialup. I remember waiting 3 hours to download a 60mb demo of Quake 3 ffs. People bitching these days...
Click to expand...

Did you have to let it run is the point
 
No single player game should really have to have an auto update, its not even really convenient, but the patches it has downloaded have yet to make my saves not work so it is not bothering me that much with it
 
Please don't triple...post. Use the edit button.

I was just wondering why he didn't calmly clarify how the update works. Rather than...'WRONG'. Conduct, not content. ;)
 
Ishada said:
So when the first half life came out I played it religiously. Every difficulty, every mod, every expansion...
I'm really surprised at the way valve presets itself now. Since when did this company become THE MOST crazy facist Video game development company on the planet?
Click to expand...
Oh, rEAlly?
 
Cheomesh said:
Offline mode has never worked for me. The option has always been grayed out since I got HL2 in February 2005.

I just hope Ep 2 isn't Orange Box/Steam only -- I want it on disk form >.>
Click to expand...

Check your settings, Valve has only recently released the official Offline Mode.
 
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