Steam rant

[chemical_art]

For the first time in months I got a sci-fi kick going.

I played some AI wars today, dual 10's on a 30 planet snake map (so far so good 1 hour in).

Now I'm drunk and want to play gratuitous space battles. I load it up. What do I get?

"The game is currently unavailable. Please try again another time."

REALLY! I went ballistic to this. This is another example of ammunition to pirate games. I pay for a game (albeit at a discount day) and now I can't play it when I fancy!

I admit, I'm going to look to pirate it. I want to play it NOW! I'm ticked.

At least I never had this crap with stardock, where I bought AI war and other games. Even with gamestop's tomfoolery they would do this...yet.

[keith.lamothe]

Generally when I've seen that message (mostly in other people's reports, hasn't happened to me in like a year) it's some problem with the install or another config problem rather than the game actually being unavailable in the sense that there's something overloaded with Valve's service.

Edit: not that it makes it any less infuriating   And particularly during a big sale there's sometimes actual overload on trying to download the game.  Being told that they had time to take my money but not time to give me my game doesn't go over too well.  But it's been a long time since that's happened; I think they've really beefed up their infrastructure for serving some regions (like mine), though other regions still have that problem more often.

All this is one reason I tend not to buy stuff on steam for prices in excess of what I would consider a fair "rental" price.  Looking at it that way tends to help.

[chemical_art]

I don't know. In the time I had to make a salad (less then 5 minutes) the hack was installed, and in another 5 it was installed. The game even remembered my saves and blueprints (although I didn't!)

What was annoying was that my other select games on steam work, but I just wasn't the mood to play them. The one game I wanted didn't work, despite having all the files needed on it, wouldn't cooperate.

I often prepostion that if a game wants to not be pirated it needs to be only trivally more difficult to use then the pirated version. This fiasco has soured my view of steam, making me not even my want to buy the games on the cheap. Why buy games if I can't use them when I want, when pirating does?

As I said previous, stardock does not do this. An internet connection is not needed to play their games. I suppose I'll pay a little more to buy and play the games when I want, rather then waiting of sales and/or the servers to cooperate.

EDIT:

Following your advice, I decided to uninstall and reinstall the game. My guess was that the game was updated. I am now bristling less against steam, but still am. The client gave no indication of what is wrong. The client says uninstalling and reinstalling wouldn't help much. If the client simply would have updated the game I wouldn't have gone through the lengthly process and could have been happy.

Nonetheless, it did work.

[Mánagarmr]

I always find that if Steam has a hickup and says a game is unavailable, deleting the "install.vdf" in the game folder (steam/steamapps/common/%gamename%) solves the problem. If it doesn't, running the game from its own starting file in the same folder usually works. Restarting Steam also work fairly often.

It's an inconvenience, yes, but hardly one that happens often enough to go all "RAWR I BE PIRATING FROM NOW ON!". Every service, everywhere and every game has issues. Some more than others. It's the result of human nature or greed. Sloppy coding due to time constraints or honest to god mistakes since we're not perfect. Learning to have some understanding for issues is a big part of not going insane over computers.

That said, I absolutely despise draconian DRM solutions that punish the honest customer.

[keith.lamothe]

There are definitely some frustrations with the steam client.  I don't tend to run into them very often (as in, like once every 6 months it genuinely gets in my way for about 10 minutes), so I consider it a decent tradeoff between positive and negative.  If someone else hits more of that, and feels otherwise, I understand

Thankfully all our stuff is just based on the license key, so if steam just clams up and you've got that key you're good with another copy, worst to worst.

[Coppermantis]

Yeah, Arcen's games are the only ones I own on steam that I can play when not connected to the internet.

[Mánagarmr]

Yeah, Arcen's games are the only ones I own on steam that I can play when not connected to the internet.

Really? I think out of my 30-40 games there are only a handful I can't play in Offline mode. Online versus games being the natural ones (such as Team Fortress). That has to be rather odd if you cannot play ANY games offline. :S (Not to mention why you'd want to go offline at all, unless you lack internet connection atm)

[keith.lamothe]

(Not to mention why you'd want to go offline at all, unless you lack internet connection atm)

So I can play one steam game on my machine while my wife plays another steam game on another machine, without needing separate accounts.  She now has a separate account so we can do multiplayer games together (at the price we tend to get things at, two copies isn't very much), but singleplayer things we really didn't want to buy twice for one household.

[Mánagarmr]

Ah, that makes sense of course.

[BobTheJanitor]

singleplayer things we really didn't want to buy twice for one household.

That's funny that you mention that. Mine and my gf's computers sit 5 feet from each other, and it's fairly common for us to purchase a game twice. I never really thought about it before now, but I guess it is a little odd to do that for a single player game that both of us may only play through once and possibly not even at the same time. I guess I've just grown too used to Steam to the point that not only does it not bother me, but I don't even consider that it should bother me. Most of these games are bought on sale for pocket change, though, so that might be a large part of it.

As far as the teeth grinding 'not available at this time' error message, I agree that it's terribly aggravating. Really I think it's more of a case of bad GUI design, rather than bad service. That's just Steam's generic way of saying 'it don't work!' If they hadn't worded it in such a poor manner, it probably wouldn't be so bad. But I have the same reaction to it. Not available!? Screw you buddy, it's on my hard drive, I know it's available, I can see it right there! Let me play it! Usually when I run into it, just trying to start the game again will fix it; if it's persistent, restarting Steam will do it.

And it's not necessarily a Steam problem, it could be a game problem. And getting cantankerous games to follow directions is part of the life of a PC gamer. So I try to take that view on it, instead of raging. It helps me stay relaxed about it (sometimes).

[Coppermantis]

Yeah, Arcen's games are the only ones I own on steam that I can play when not connected to the internet.

Really? I think out of my 30-40 games there are only a handful I can't play in Offline mode. Online versus games being the natural ones (such as Team Fortress). That has to be rather odd if you cannot play ANY games offline. :S (Not to mention why you'd want to go offline at all, unless you lack internet connection atm)

If I'm away from internet connection for any reason (At a friend's house without Wifi, for instance.) Steam refuses to launch. Thus, I am locked out of a lot of my games, AI War/Tidalis being the only ones I originally have on Steam that I can play if this happens.

[BobTheJanitor]

If I'm away from internet connection for any reason (At a friend's house without Wifi, for instance.) Steam refuses to launch. Thus, I am locked out of a lot of my games, AI War/Tidalis being the only ones I originally have on Steam that I can play if this happens.

Steam's offline mode paradoxically requires you to be online to activate it. Once online and working normally, set Steam to offline mode and you should be fine. It's a wonky solution that never works perfectly, but it is there. That's one of the things that has needed improvement since the service started.

[keith.lamothe]

As far as the teeth grinding 'not available at this time' error message, I agree that it's terribly aggravating. Really I think it's more of a case of bad GUI design, rather than bad service. That's just Steam's generic way of saying 'it don't work!'

I would find it infinitely more helpful if it simply said "That dog won't hunt!"

[Mánagarmr]

If I'm away from internet connection for any reason (At a friend's house without Wifi, for instance.) Steam refuses to launch. Thus, I am locked out of a lot of my games, AI War/Tidalis being the only ones I originally have on Steam that I can play if this happens.

Steam's offline mode paradoxically requires you to be online to activate it. Once online and working normally, set Steam to offline mode and you should be fine. It's a wonky solution that never works perfectly, but it is there. That's one of the things that has needed improvement since the service started.

That's a fairly dumb design I thought you got a message that Steam couldn't be reached and you'd like to go offline instead. Heck, I even remember it doing that way back.  But maybe I'm imagening stuff.

[BobTheJanitor]

That's a fairly dumb design I thought you got a message that Steam couldn't be reached and you'd like to go offline instead. Heck, I even remember it doing that way back.  But maybe I'm imagening stuff.

I've never actually had cause to use it, but that's what I understand. I don't know why they do it that way. Logically you'd think it could authenticate itself as a valid game when you buy/download it, when you're guaranteed to be online. But I don't know the hidden depths of their DRM system. I've never had a game stop on me due to a connection drop mid-game, except for one of the Penny Arcade adventures, which was very odd. Otherwise it can go and come back with no trouble. It seems like if you really want to use offline mode, the best way would be to use it permanently and only go online periodically to check for updates, then set it back offline again.