Be Excellent To Each Other

But is it just me, or in the NINE years it has been around, has the web-based content within the Steam application itself always been SLOW AS ALL FUCK?

I mean, I just put up with it. "That's Steam." If I load my profile, or a friend's profile, or a game page on the store or whatever, it takes fucking ages to load. Is that just me?

My Library is quick of course, because that's based offline. Basically any of the other tabs within Steam are horrendous and always have been. I'm talking about Community, News and Store specifically.

It's not me - "my profile" and the Beteo group pages take around a second to load.

Yes, Steam has always been slow, doesn't seem to matter what type of PC you have or how fast your connection is.

Aye it's slow as fuck for me also.

But then so is my 360 when it boots up and it's connected to the internet.

They are probably both just taking time sending all your personal information to The Bilderberg Illuminati so that they can control your mind. And sell you Lynx.

I get really really fast downloads from Steam. Often upwards of 1mb/s, which is about as fast as anything ever downloads. Browsing the different tabs is pretty quick too.

In related news, Gabe Newell recently gave a presentation to some economics students, where it was suggested that they're going to start doing affiliate commission. If they go ahead with it, my income will probably roughly double overnight. Fingers crossed!

I get stupidly quick downloads, but stupidly slow web pages.

Doesnt really bother me.

Allegedly... and I say this as I've never been bothered enough to give it a try, but if you go into Internet Options in Control Panel, then the Connections tab, the LAN settings and untick 'Automatically detect settings', Steam browsing becomes a fair bit faster. I've heard enough recommendations to suggest to me it does at least make *some* difference.

yup, hate slowness of the whole interface too... mac version is worse btw

Steam is ace. There'd be no Chaos Engine without it.

It's so slow, it's almost as if it is.... steam powered.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAahaAHAhaAHaHahahahaAHahahaAh!!!!!!

That's more anti cornish propagande perpetrated by the ruthlessevil english establishment.

I thought it might have been me or the fact that I don't really use Steam that much.. but it seems not.

M

It's pretty much just like using a normal web browser for me, not quite as snappy as Firefox or Chrome, but not a million miles off.

Yeah just had a little click around on various things, sometimes there's a pause of maybe one or two seconds, but that's it.

Yeah just had another click around NEWS, COMMUNITY and STORE and then on various random links, two seconds max, but usually pretty much instantaneous.

Oh yeah, to clarify, my bandwidth maxes out on downloads. I'm talking about their web-based content.

Yeah, it's ridiculously slow to load what is basically just their own website in a frame. Indeed, in checking it out a second ago, it not only failed completely to load the main banner graphic on the homepage but froze completely when I tried to browse a list of demos which is pretty shoddy. I've never checked the store from the app though and just browse/buy everything from their website.

Have you just got crap PCs, or something?

Compared to you? Probably.. Yes.

It has nothing to do with the PC, it's a known thing that Steam's web based content is slow as fuck, after some Googling around. Unsurprisingly though, your mega PC has found a way around it! Is it that USB3 cable plugged directly into Gaben's urethra?

Well there must be something that's causing it to run like crap for some folks and not for others, is what I'm getting at

I think WTB has me on ignore.

For some people and not others, as evidenced by this thread.



My motherboard doesn't support USB3, being as it's four years old

It was easier to ignore you temporarily, for argument-strengthening reasons.

The keyboard on my laptop lights up. That means it's fast right?

You're such a twat.

Woohoo...I've made 35 pence on Steam Marketplace in a couple of hours. Going to have to rethink my pricing policy.

Loving some of the indie titles. Most notably Limbo which I've played through three times.

On the last play through I played it in Anaglyph 3D considering it's black and white. Was tremendous fun for the cost of the glasses (about fifty pee from Ebay).

There's some amazing Indie titles on Steam, such as To The Moon, Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Dear Esther (to name but three off the top of my head).

And yes, Steam is slow for me too!

Follow me on twitter for near-daily updates on how much of a total cunt I regard Steam to be. Presently I'm using to for FM2013 and killing the process as soon as the FM window appears. I've set it to offline mode, to stop the wretched thing self-updating or anything else it might use to keep me waiting fifteen fucking minutes to play the game I want a quick go of and now every time i launch the game, after the regulation minute sat there doing absolutely fuck all, I get a nag dialogue telling me I can't talk to my friends if I don't let it go online.

Steam can basically eat shit and die. So can SI for giving me no other option.

Amazing scenes. I've never found Steam to be anything other than fantastic. It was a bit of a cunt when offline mode stopped working whilst I was without internet for a few weeks when we moved into the new flat, but other than that I've always loved it.

What's happening with it for you GY? Is it just FM2013 needing a lot of updates or something?

Steam is great, but it is a bit slow and clunky, and it is fucking annoying when it forces an update when all you want to do is play your game. I can see where GY is coming from, but I only buy PC games through Steam these days, as it is so bloody convenient.

The updates can be slow and annoying yes.

A couple of days back my lady bought me a game and I went to log in and ended up waiting about ten minutes just to get into Steam to download it.

Mind you that was on my laptop and it's not exactly cutting edge (core 2 duo).

I'd love to sit and complain about it but I just can't. For all of its small annoyances it is very good overall. I love the sales on there as it allows me to spend a week stocking up on games, then the rest of the year to play them.

The best part though is how easy it is to keep your games safe (which is a worry as you don't get any media and I'm on a terribly slow internet connection). Basically all you do is just install Steam back to where it was before (in the event of a reinstall that I had no choice on a few weeks ago due to changing mobos) and it immediately finds all of your games so you don't have to download them again.

Now Origin? Jesus wept I ended up having to re-download BF3 which is well over 20gb *fumes*

Steam has also recently allowed you to spread your games over multiple drives which is completely ace. It was the only gripe I really had because I don't like running massive hard drives due to failure. I run several 500gb drives (eggs and baskets and all that).

I can't praise Steam enough, particularly since as Microsoft have incrementally fucked the 360's interface over the years, Steam has remained slick and streamlined and a great place to manage games from.

I've been a member of it pretty much since the start in 2003, and it's never fucked up once.

No, nothing NEEDS updating, if it already runs. What happened was after buying every FM since the first one for my Atari ST Sports Interactive decided in 2008 that I needed to have my user experience ruined with copy protection. Several million customers, myself included, asked them not to do it and said it would fucke verything up. Come launch day, I and many others who had taken the day off work couldn't get their legit copies verified by the shitty online licencing shit, so we had to take the pirate's word for it that the game was any good. To resolve this in future, SI decided they'd make the game be a Steam only game, even if you go out and buy it in a box.

The problems this brings are several. Firstly, I now have to have Steam installed on my computer when I don't want or need it. Steam takes ages to boot, pisses and moans if you've selected a mode it would prefer you not to and hangs more than any other software I use on this machine, none of which ever seems to hang. Now, I play football manager with some extra software, namely FMScout and FMRTE... both of which only work with the update of FM that existed when their last version was released. This never used to be a problem, updates to FM were telegraphed by SI for a good fortnight before they hit so there would only be small periods where the software (which is now paid software) wasn't compatible. Now, being on steam, SI fire updates at FM with stupid regularity, patching every last little thing on an ongoing basis. Fine if you don't use editors, ruinous if you do. Now, the solution one might think would be to disable automatic updates of FM but certainly with last year's version (I've not had this year's long) Steam would ignore my specific instruction not to update. I sent in complaints and asked on their forums (separate account needed, another bullshit arseache) and got no solution back from anyone. Steam themselves ignored me. They also don't respond on twitter.

That's not to mention that sometimes Steam itself will insist on updating before it lets you run a game off it, which is inexcusable. Software you've paid for should run by itself on any given machine. I don't need, want or use steam but I'm forced to by SI. After last year I swore I'd never pay for FM again while it was on Steam, as they wasted hours of my time but inevitably this is the first year no warez version has been found to work. Reluctantly, I've paid again... and again I'm sat here waiting ages for Steam to launch before FM will launch, just so I can kill the Steam process as soon as it does. It's a momumental fuck you to the loyal end user.

Steam might be alright for other games, but I don't care. I don't want other games. If they ignore my complaints, dictate what I do with my own machine and so on, they can kiss my arse. I'll use whatever other means I can.

Why don't you just tell Steam to boot at startup so that it/your games will always be up to date already?

Let the guy vent.

:|

Because I don't want it to update or update my game. And it would slow down my boot process each time I boot, whether I intend to use the game or not.

Well you can tell it not to update the game, although the client will still need to update from time to time.

Oh for fuck's sake, Lewie. I've already said I don't want it to and that setting FM to not update hasn't worked in the past and that trying to get Steam to acknowledge me over the issue has been fruitless. Rad the damn post. In fact some times I boot up for a quick half hour game and don't get on the thing at all.

Without wishing to rub your nose in it GY, though I appreciate that's more or less exactly what I am doing, I have never had anything like the problems you describe and I've got over 275 games in my Steam library. Okay, so I haven't played all of them, in fact I doubt I've even played half of them, but still. Occasionally it needs to update the client, but it does this in seconds usually, and I hardly have the world's fastest broadband at home. I doubt having Steam launch at startup or running in the background would have any appreciable difference on the performance of your PC - certainly it seems to have no real-world negative impact on any PC I've ever run it on.

It's just a bit of a sad fact of life that PC games developers now insist on incorporating anti-piracy measures. Steam seems to be the most user-friendly and least invasive of all the popular DRM methods out there at the moment too. Everything else you've mentioned seems to be an issue you'd need to take up with SI - they're the ones who've opted to make the game Steam only and they're the ones rolling out updates for it every 5 minutes.

Edit: of course, if you did leave Steam to boot at launch and update in the background, it wouldn't need to perform updates every time you tried to launch FM.

I think whats being missed (and attempting to stop GY going mad again) is that he's doing this 'not updating' for a specific reason.

He's playing the game with a number of special add ons so every time the system goes 'oh this needs an update' and does this to the game its broken for him for a long period of time while he goes and either undoes what the system had just done , or goes and re-downloads and re-applies the other things he's using.

The two answers to this seem to be 'dont use the add on stuff then' - however he wants to and its his game so why not or set it up so it doesnt automatically break (which he's tried numerous times but it keeps happening).

If it was a game I wanted to play and it went to the extent that this game seems to be going to annoy me i'd be pirating it - i bet a pirated copy wouldn't give any of these problems and I could do what i wanted with it.

And while we're on the steam love / hate thing - Steam doesnt like Windows 8 very much

I have a laptop which is not that high powered but good enough for some basic steam games and yet most games when installed via steam need me to go in and fiddle with things to get them working (or just give up).

Street Fighter IV Arcade edition for example installs incompatible GFWL stuff that breaks it , so i had to go in , strip out some files , patch others , and then manually go and install the latest GFWL stuff to my machine and then re-download it to get it to work.

Fallout 3 currently doesnt run , I bought it when it was cheap before Xmas (i think about £2) , it installs but crashes on statup , reading up about it i needed to go in , patch another file , edit an ini file to take out settings for different CPU's and the last set of instructions are to clear it off and try again after changing the version of .NET framework which i have installed - at this stage I just left it - i might go back in or may just ignore it.

I do know what i'm doing with a PC but you look at some of this stuff and think this is why people play games on consoles - you put the game in and play - you dont need to go and fiddle and break other things to just play a basic game - some of the arguments for this seem to be that i should not assume that an 'older' game should simply work on my new laptop but why not ? , and where does it tell me at the start that this is not compatible unless you want to go in and start hacking at stuff to get it to work !

(This is not a request for help - I'm perfectly capable of using Google and getting the games working or firing up VM / Parallels / Bootcamp on my Mac and playing the games on there - but these seem to be fairly typical problems with trying to play games on PC and are often skipped over when we have the regular PC vs console debates)

Oh, very much

I tend not to pirate much at all these days (ironically largely down to Steam's sales), but with something like this I'd pirate the fuck out of it. You wouldn't need Steam at all then.

Unfortunately, GY also suggests that he's not been able to find a dodgy copy of this one anywhere so far.

Could he not, say, make the game files read only or remove permissions to write over thm?
(Really, I dont know whether this wold cause a safe fail or prevent the game from running because why would I ever need to)

But you're trying to play relatively old games on a brand new operating system, which is positively asking for trouble.

As a gamer there's no way I'd even entertain the possibility of moving to Windows 8 yet, even if I loved it pieces (rather than wishing I could nuke the entire bastard OS from orbit, just to be sure).

I stuck on XP for years rather than risk problems with Vista, I only made the move forward when Windows 7 was well established.

An operating system is a platform to run other things on, why move to a wobbly new untested platform when you want to play years old games on it?

I'm not saying some people don't have problems playing games on their PC, because they clearly do, but the examples you've given there zaphod were 100% avoidable if you hadn't jumped head-first into using a brand new OS.

I love you.

I don't, because it does. I've had a play with this and other bootup software, Steam's the one that slows it up significantly.

The other day I had a free half-hour and wanted to rattle off a couple of matches. Steam of course had to be run before I could run my game... and took fifteen minutes to update itself. My internet is running like a ruddy dream at the moment, 6.56mbps with shite all ping.

I suppose Steam is like this bedroom tax business - the best solution anyone has had so far to solve a variety of issues, but with a small number of people being utterly fucked over by it. I'd just like my Guardian interview, that's all.