Yet Another Steam WTF


  • Garbage Person

    Image Hosting by PhyreFile

     ... And why, exactly is that? I mean, I preloaded the damn thing and watched you update and decrypt it last night. It seems to me like I should be able to slack right the hell off and enjoy my day off from hell-work. At this rate I'm going to have to go outside and work on my fucking truck some more.

     

    Edit: Oh, look. I restarted Steam and it's decrypting again. It must have blown chunks last night. I guess a vague noncommital error message is better than correcting the apparently easily detectable state of "Hey, this game isn't decrypted!"



  •  I can beat that.  I had Mass Effect 2 installed and made Steam aware of it, to keep things convenient.  All was well until I installed the Overlord DLC, and Steam complained I had installed an illegal modification and broke my game.  As in, literally broke it, I had to re-install both the game and Steam without making it aware of it once more to be able to play again.


  • Garbage Person

     And now it's stuck indicating 100% completion on the decryption process (and 0% in the taskbar, because Valve doesn't know how to use the Win7 taskbar progress bar integration correctly), but still somehow in the process of decrypting... With no disk IO.

    Edit: And it "completed" when I closed the window with the progress bar in it. Apparently Steam HATES progress bar watchers.



  •  Seriously, Counter Strike? WTF!?



  • Go write a strongly worded letter to the techsupport.


  • Garbage Person

    @tchize said:

     Seriously, Counter Strike? WTF!?

    You aren't aware that if you steam-register a serial number for ANY old CD distribution of a Half-life based game, you receive every HL1 derivative, since Steam can't tell their serial numbers apart?

  • Garbage Person

    Image Hosting by PhyreFile

     Steam and I clearly have opposing definitions of the phrase "ready to play".

     

    This error apparently means "Your antivirus said no" - which is funny because I don't use any of the antiviruses that they list as a cause. What it REALLY means is "The VC Redist installer failed due to low disk space" - which is stupid because all the VC redist was going to do was say "oh look, already installed. Bye." Why is it so hard to report the actual fucking failure? Perhaps suggest uninstalling some of these games I haven't played in 30 million years?


  • Garbage Person

     Nope, still not done.

     

    Image Hosting by PhyreFile

    VERY HELPFUL! Lets try clicking this big blank button...

     

    Image Hosting by PhyreFile

    Oh. Well then. I guess Steam can't fucking figure out that it ran out of disk space while downloading or decrypting or updating or JESUS FUCK DOES IT EVEN BOTHER CHECKING EVER?

    I guess now I get to delete the cached content and start all over again.

     

    Yeah, guys. Modern hard drives are huge. This is NOT an excuse to fail silently and leave broken programs sitting everywhere.



  • Fucking hell, programatically, Steam really is a pile of shit, isn't it?

    Typical.

     

     



  • One of your favourite games is Duke Nukem Forever. YOUR ARGUMENT IS THEREFORE INVALID.



  • 1 friend online? Work on those social skills, bro.



  • @Weng said:

    You aren't aware that if you steam-register a serial number for ANY old CD distribution of a Half-life based game, you receive every HL1 derivative, since Steam can't tell their serial numbers apart?

    Well der, but it shouldn't be "ready to play." I mean, seriously? WTF!


  • Garbage Person

    @The_Assimilator said:

    One of your favourite games is Duke Nukem Forever. YOUR ARGUMENT IS THEREFORE INVALID.
    That's only up there because I keep trying to convince myself to finish it.



  •  While you wait, you could always benefit from their awesome deals.

    [img]http://img833.imageshack.us/img833/8913/0percentoff.png[/img]



  • @Weng said:

    Yeah, guys. Modern hard drives are huge. This is NOT an excuse to fail silently and leave broken programs sitting everywhere.

     

    I'm actually surprised that a tech savvy guy yourself didn't go through the list of common problems for vague error messages, like, is my internet working, do I have space on my hard disk, etc. It was one of the first things I check when Steam gave a tantrum (but now I don't any more, because I have a 2TB disk which will never, ever have too little space...!!!11).

     


  • Garbage Person

     Yeah. The problem is I shouldn't HAVE TO check. It should do that shit and fail-safe, not fail-broke-as-shit.



  • @dhromed said:

    Fucking hell, programatically, Steam really is a pile of shit, isn't it?

    Typical.


    "Old Steam" checked for that. I agree with something I've read on this forum one day... wasn't it by blakey? "Seems that Valve handed the development and maintenance of the new Steam to summer interns".



  • @pbean said:

     While you wait, you could always benefit from their awesome deals.


     

    0%!

    fuck yes, get in ma pocket, gaem!

     



  • @Weng said:

     Yeah. The problem is I shouldn't HAVE TO check. It should do that shit and fail-safe, not fail-broke-as-shit.

     

    You're talking about a software product here.

    Btw, I think Steam is totally awesome, as a platform. I've never actually had much problems with it, except for the very first versions (in about 2004 I think it was).

     



  • @pbean said:

    because I have a 2TB disk which will never, ever have too little space
     

    Never say never. It took me longer to fill my 80MB (yes, megabytes) HDD in the 1990s than to fill 2TB of space I have now. Deleting shit sucks.



  •  Once you get into the movies and series, all hope is lost.



  •  I hoped that by saying "never, ever", I would make abundantly clear that it was sarcasm. Unfortunately, the 2TB disk "only" has 200GB free. And then I have 24 hard disks lying around filled with a total of 12TB of data. Unfortunately, I know how fast hard disk space runs out these days. My Steam folder alone is 400GB.



  • @pbean said:

     I hoped that by saying "never, ever", I would make abundantly clear that it was sarcasm. Unfortunately, the 2TB disk "only" has 200GB free. And then I have 24 hard disks lying around filled with a total of 12TB of data. Unfortunately, I know how fast hard disk space runs out these days. My porn folder alone is 400GB.

    FTFY



  • @dohpaz42 said:

    @pbean said:

     I hoped that by saying "never, ever", I would make abundantly clear that it was sarcasm. Unfortunately, the 2TB disk "only" has 200GB free. And then I have 24 hard disks lying around filled with a total of 12TB of data. Unfortunately, I know how fast hard disk space runs out these days. My porn folder alone is 1400GB.

    FTFY


    FTFTFYFY



  • @bannedfromcoding said:

    @dohpaz42 said:
    @pbean said:

     I hoped that by saying "never, ever", I would make abundantly clear that it was sarcasm. Unfortunately, the 2TB disk "only" has 200GB free. And then I have 24 hard disks lying around filled with a total of 12TB of data. Unfortunately, I know how fast hard disk space runs out these days. My pr0n folder alone is 1400GB.

    FTFY


    FTFTFYFY
    FTFTFTFYFYFY

     



  • @El_Heffe said:

    @bannedfromcoding said:

    @dohpaz42 said:
    @pbean said:

     I hoped that by saying "never, ever", I would make abundantly clear that it was sarcasm. Unfortunately, the 2TB disk "only" has 200GB free. And then I have 24 hard disks lying around filled with a total of 12TB of data. Unfortunately, I know how fast hard disk space runs out these days. My pr0n folder alone is 1400GB.

    FTFY


    FTFTFYFY
    FTFTFTFYFYFY

     

     

    FTFTFTFTFYFYFYFY

     



  •  My pornography folder is 1500GB, but that wasn't part of the discussion. That hard disk is tucked away in my fileserver, where space isn't an issue. But Steam runs on my desktop computer, and I put a 2TB hard disk in there, figuring it would be enough for quite some years. If Steam already takes up 400GB now, then it will probably be full one year from now.



  • @pbean said:

    My Steam folder alone is 400GB.
     

    I don'g get that.

    You have many, many games?

    I mean, I know I have few games totalling a couple dozen GB, which is exceptional, but 400GB of games seems on  the far side of insane to me.



  • @immibis said:

    @El_Heffe said:

    @bannedfromcoding said:

    @dohpaz42 said:
    @pbean said:

     I hoped that by saying "never, ever", I would make abundantly clear that it was sarcasm. Unfortunately, the 2TB disk "only" has 200GB free. And then I have 24 hard disks lying around filled with a total of 12TB of data. Unfortunately, I know how fast hard disk space runs out these days. My pr0n folder alone is 1400GB.

    FTFY


    FTFTFYFY
    FTFTFTFYFYFY

     

     

    FTFTFTFTFYFYFYFY

     

                |
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               / \
    


  • @pbean said:

     My pornography folder is 1500GB, but that wasn't part of the discussion. That hard disk is tucked away in my fileserver, where space isn't an issue. But Steam runs on my desktop computer, and I put a 2TB hard disk in there, figuring it would be enough for quite some years. If Steam already takes up 400GB now, then it will probably be full one year from now.

    Why not just only install the Steam games you're actually playing? When you finish a game, do "Delete Local Content" and download another... you do know you can re-download games at any time, right?

    Edit: oh wait, lemme guess, you're a paranoid DRM kook who has to have ALL GAMES AVAILABLE ALL THE TIME in case Steam ceases to exist with no warning tomorrow.



  • @immibis said:

    @El_Heffe said:

    @bannedfromcoding said:

    @dohpaz42 said:
    @pbean said:

     I hoped that by saying "never, ever", I would make abundantly clear that it was sarcasm. Unfortunately, the 2TB disk "only" has 200GB free. And then I have 24 hard disks lying around filled with a total of 12TB of data. Unfortunately, I know how fast hard disk space runs out these days. My hr0sepr0n folder alone is 1400GB.

    FTFY


    FTFTFYFY
    FTFTFTFYFYFY

     

     

    FTFTFTFTFYFYFYFY

     

    FTFTFTFTFTFYFYFYFYFY.



  • @Spectre said:

    FTFTFTFTFTFYFYFYFYFY.

    Does this joke get funny ever or...?



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @pbean said:

     My pornography folder is 1500GB, but that wasn't part of the discussion. That hard disk is tucked away in my fileserver, where space isn't an issue. But Steam runs on my desktop computer, and I put a 2TB hard disk in there, figuring it would be enough for quite some years. If Steam already takes up 400GB now, then it will probably be full one year from now.

    Why not just only install the Steam games you're actually playing? When you finish a game, do "Delete Local Content" and download another... you do know you can re-download games at any time, right?

     

    Precisely what I do.  However, Steam and its games are on my SSD, so that makes sense.

     



  • @Weng said:

    @tchize said:

     Seriously, Counter Strike? WTF!?

    You aren't aware that if you steam-register a serial number for ANY old CD distribution of a Half-life based game, you receive every HL1 derivative, since Steam can't tell their serial numbers apart?
     

    Except Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, which is the single player (YES, seriously) version of Counter-Strike.

    I was wondering why, back in 2003 when I registered my copy of HL1 on Steam, I had CS, TFC, Opposing Force, Blus Shift, etc... added to my account. That explains why.

     



  • @powerlord said:

    I was wondering why, back in 2003 when I registered my copy of HL1 on Steam, I had CS, TFC, Opposing Force, Blus Shift, etc... added to my account. That explains why.

    I got all that stuff because I was part of the disastrous ATI HL2 deal, where ATI packed-in a coupon for a free copy of HL2 with their video cards something like 9 months before HL2's release date, then Valve ended up delaying the game an entire year (only because some hacker forced them to admit it wasn't ready), but they didn't bother telling ATI or ATI customers who now had this useless coupon (by the time HL2 actually came out, some people weren't even using the GPU the coupon came with anyway! It was 2 years old at that point!), so their way of "apology" was to give coupon holders basically their entire Valve library when HL2 was finally released. Good to know I would have gotten all those games anyway... fuck Valve.

    Then when HL2 *did* come out, the fucking activation didn't work for 3 solid days. I mean the game was worth the wait, but man, that has to have been the most WTF game release ever.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @Spectre said:
    FTFTFTFTFTFYFYFYFYFY.

    Does tThis joke gets funny evier or...?

    FTFY



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Then when HL2 *did* come out, the fucking activation didn't work for 3 solid days. I mean the game was worth the wait, but man, that has to have been the most WTF game release ever.

     

    Unless compared with any MMO release ever.  There like a cosmic rule that MMO launches have to buggy as all hell.

     



  • @powerlord said:

    Unless compared with any MMO release ever. There like a cosmic rule that MMO launches have to buggy as all hell.

    I love telling the WOW worshippers about "Captain Placeholder".

    But the worst ever was Tribes 2.



  • @dhromed said:

    @pbean said:

    My Steam folder alone is 400GB.
     

    I don'g get that.

    You have many, many games?

    I mean, I know I have few games totalling a couple dozen GB, which is exceptional, but 400GB of games seems on  the far side of insane to me.


    It would have agreed 10 years ago, but today? Some numbers from my steam folder:

    • BFBC2 9GB
    • Fallout 3 9GB

    • Borderlands 12GB

    • L4D2 17GB

    • GTA4+EfLC 32GB (that's what Steam claims it has to download; add 10% in practice)
    Add another 25 games of that size and you're there.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Why not just only install the Steam games you're actually playing? When
    you finish a game, do "Delete Local Content" and download another... you
    do know you can re-download games at any time, right?

    Edit: oh wait, lemme guess, you're a paranoid DRM kook who has to have ALL GAMES AVAILABLE ALL THE TIME in case Steam ceases to exist with no warning tomorrow.

    Or maybe he does not like waiting for a 10GB game to re-download? Just maybe?

    I know I don't, because I have only 2Mbit/s downstream. My PC does not run 24/7, so it can take several days to (re-)download a game. A pleasant exception was Mafia 2, because I bought that on DVD. Steam only had to download a few MB of patches after installation.

     



  • @fatbull said:

    Or maybe he does not like waiting for a 10GB game to re-download? Just maybe?

    Overnight it. You never have to play a video game "in an emergency!"

    @fatbull said:

    My PC does not run 24/7

    I identified your problem.

    That all said, it does piss me off that Steam can't use BITS to download games. The OS has the functionality FOR FREE, and the fucking client app refuses to actually use it-- so there's no way to download a Steam game and simultaneously enjoy a movie on Netflix, for example.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    That all said, it does piss me off that Steam can't use BITS to download games. The OS has the functionality FOR FREE, and the fucking client app refuses to actually use it-- so there's no way to download a Steam game and simultaneously enjoy a movie on Netflix, for example.

    On the other hand, Steam auto-pauses downloads when you start a Steam game (by default at least). Which makes sense (sort of) when you want to play a multi-player game, but is hugely irritating if you want to kill the remaining 1.5h of a download by playing some other game in single-player mode.

    Granted, it might be hard for Steam to detect whether a game needs network bandwidth for multi-player features (at least, without cooperation from the developers of said game), but it could at least try to display some notification that all downloads have been stopped. Steam already uses a huge array of pop-ups and overlays for all kind of crap, so why not this?



  • @blakeyrat said:

    You never have to play a video game "in an emergency!"

    $Buddy: Hey! Wanna play a round of $game?

    Me: Hell yeah! Oh, wait, um, no. I have to download it first. Will get back to you in two days.

    $Buddy: Oh, wait, um, no. I have to work then. Will get back to you next month.

    Me: So, how's the weather?

    @blakeyrat said:
    @fatbull said:
    My PC does not run 24/7
    I identified your problem.

    This is not going to change.

    But I have a small server/NAS which is running 24/7. I wish I could use that to download Steam apps.



  • @cvi said:

    On the other hand, Steam auto-pauses downloads when you start a Steam game (by default at least). Which makes sense (sort of) when you want to play a multi-player game, but is hugely irritating if you want to kill the remaining 1.5h of a download by playing some other game in single-player mode.

    Fortunately it doesn't prevent you from alt-tabbing back to Steam and restarting the download. But of course you have to remember to do it...

    Then again, if Steam used fucking BITS, it would be a complete non-issue.

    @fatbull said:

    But I have a small server/NAS which is running 24/7. I wish I could use that to download Steam apps.

    Install Steam on it. Run it from the network*.

    *) this probably doesn't work, but hell give it a try.



  • @pbean said:

     My pornography folder is 1500GB, but that wasn't part of the discussion. That hard disk is tucked away in my fileserver, where space isn't an issue. But Steam runs on my desktop computer, and I put a 2TB hard disk in there, figuring it would be enough for quite some years. If Steam already takes up 400GB now, then it will probably be full one year from now.

     Or you could turn on NTFS compression on the "steamapps" folder, and make it one and a half years. Or uninstall some games and make it last several more.


    Everything about Steam is WTF, though. For example:

    • Sometimes Steam won't let me exit and tells me I still have a game running, even though I don't, so I have to kill it...
    • ...which means it has a non-negligible chance of corrupting the ClientRegistry.blob file, causing Steam to be unable to start until you delete it and restart Steam so it can be recreated.
    • Downloads will randomly be "Suspended". Might be related to the first and next WTF's.
    • It can't download any game or tool while any other game or tool is running.
    • It will randomly tell me "This game is unavailable, please try again later." - even for games I've owned for over a year...

     



  • @dhromed said:

    @pbean said:

    My Steam folder alone is 400GB.
     

    I don'g get that.

    You have many, many games?

    I mean, I know I have few games totalling a couple dozen GB, which is exceptional, but 400GB of games seems on  the far side of insane to me.

     

    As fatbull noted, games aren't 2-4GB any more, some are ridiculously large. I think The Witcher is 25GB by itself, Modern Warfare, Dragon Age, Left for Dead, just examples of games each larger than 10GB. So it all adds up.

     

    @blakeyrat said:

    Why not just only install the Steam games you're actually playing? When you finish a game, do "Delete Local Content" and download another... you do know you can re-download games at any time, right?

     

    Well, you might only ever play one game at a time, but I tend to play several different games during the week. When I want to play Modern Warfare now, I want to be able to play it now, rather than having to wait an entire day to play it (and then I don't want to play it any more anyway). I rarely start playing a game, play until I finish it, and then be done with it. I sometimes stop halfway, play some other games, and then get back to me, because it just gets boring after a while. And your argument is invalid for multi player games anyway, because you can't finish them.

    @powerlord said:

    Precisely what I do.  However, Steam and its games are on my SSD, so that makes sense.
     

    Well I have only 1-2 games on my SSD, the ones I play often, using directory junctions. Steam itself and all other games are on my 2TB hard disk.

     


     



  • @pbean said:

    Well, you might only ever play one game at a time, but I tend to play several different games during the week.

    The word "games" is plural.

    The point is I know, KNOW, I'll never play Unreal 2 again. So I don't bother having Steam load it. Rinse and repeat for all the other games I know I won't ever play again.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Fortunately it doesn't prevent you from alt-tabbing back to Steam and restarting the download. But of course you have to remember to do it...

    True. The problem is that I usually remember when I check the progress after an hour or so. :-(

    @blakeyrat said:

    Then again, if Steam used fucking BITS, it would be a complete non-issue.

    Decided to take a short look at BITS - it seems somewhat clever. But the hardest part seems to be to determine what the available bandwidth is; in fact it'd probably fail for my home setup (gigabit LAN + old DSL router-modem-thing). BITS requires that the router (I guess?) supplies bandwidth information, otherwise it seems to look at the local interface only. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa363133.aspx).

    Still, I don't suppose BITS would make the situation much worse w.r.t. to bandwidth allocations...



  • @cvi said:

    Still, I don't suppose BITS would make the situation much worse w.r.t. to bandwidth allocations...

    It is true that BITS won't help a lot if another machine on your network sucks up a lot of bandwidth. But in my case that's a complete non-issue. And, look at it this way: there's no way BITS can make things worse.

    The only complication for Valve is that OS X sucks and doesn't have it. So their codebases would behave differently on the different OSes. But since the OS X version already sucks on toast, I doubt anybody would notice.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Why not just only install the Steam games you're actually playing? When you finish a game, do "Delete Local Content" and download another... you do know you can re-download games at any time, right?

    If you're living in a country where connections are fast and bandwidth is cheap, yes. If you're living in a country where 384kbps is considered "broadband", no. Yeah, I could pay an extortionate amount to upgrade the speed to 4mbps, but I like eating and not living under a bridge more than I like fast Internet.


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