Civ 5/Steam:Offline Mode Question

Net neutrality has nothing to day with Steam
Steam is a net based business. It consumes a large amount of bandwidth. It adds significant pressure to network congestion. It is a service that fits the profile of a bandwidth hog. Lack of Net Neutrality could allow ISP's to throttle traffic to and from Steam servers. It does relate.
 
Steam is a net based business. It consumes a large amount of bandwidth. It adds significant pressure to network congestion. It is a service that fits the profile of a bandwidth hog. Lack of Net Neutrality could allow ISP's to throttle traffic to and from Steam servers. It does relate.

"It consumes a large amount of bandwidth. It adds significant pressure to network congestion." Are you serious? You don't know what you are talking about? :rolleyes:

Beside the initial download of the game and the occasional patch, Steam doesn't use anymore bandwidth than the average instant messenger software. It also has a web browser built in the client to access the the steam store, community site and your profile page if you chose to use it instead of your favorite browser.

Steam has nothing to do with cloud gaming services like Onlive or Gaikai.
 
I'm pretty sure that would be illegal
 
Steam is a net based business. It consumes a large amount of bandwidth. It adds significant pressure to network congestion. It is a service that fits the profile of a bandwidth hog. Lack of Net Neutrality could allow ISP's to throttle traffic to and from Steam servers. It does relate.

Are you serious? You don't know what you are talking about? :rolleyes:

Beside the initial download of the game and the occasional patch, Steam doesn't use anymore bandwidth than the average instant messenger software.
Your tone reads like flame bait. I'll not take that bait.

There are over 25 million user accounts on Steam. At this moment there are nearly 1.9 million of them using Steams servers right now. In the last 48 hours, they peaked at over 2.3 million. Direct To Drive lists Civ4 BTS at a download size of 1.7 GB in size. The latest BTS patch was 165 mb. Steam users report that the client patches range from 30-70+ mb each (mulitply that by 25 million users). Steam lists 14 client patches already this year.

How many games has the average Steam user downloaded? How many times have they reinstalled their games? Reinstalled the client? How many millions of save games have 25 million users uploaded and downloaded off the cloud? How many client updates have been installed, and re-installed? How many total game patches have been downloaded?

We don't know those numbers. I've briefly looked for some. I think it a fair assumption that they equate to a whole lot of bandwidth consumption. Then there are the MP game servers. There are the video trailers. And more.

Steams Content Server Stats lists a peak of 124,000 Mbit in the last 48 hours.
Over 77,000 Mbit of bandwidth being used right now.


Also understand, that network congestion also happens locally. If I've got a bunch of Steamers and streamers on my local or regional node, the bandwidth pipe that serves my home will be affected. If my ISP wants to, it can look at what sort of traffic is clogging up the pipe and then slow down the biggest bandwidth consumer and users. Steams bandwidth consumption is a viable sub-topic within Net Neutrality and Network Congestion discussions. And it is reasonable to discuss the possibilty that an ISP would target Steam as a bandwidth heavy service to be throttled.
 
Just bought the game a week ago.. Didn't have time to start playing before now (though tested it for an hour after buying it, which worked fine)..

Now the steam client just tells me "Game is currently unavailable", and that's it.. I've searched their forums, and they suggest doing all kinds of :):):):). None of it made any difference. Pisses me off that I can't play a game I've bought and own because some online :):):):) refuses me to. They don't have the guts to tell me whats actually wrong either. Not telling me if it's a server side or client side or network issue. They also suggest it may be for a whole lots of reasons that they should easily be able to give specific error messages for..

Looking for a way to start the crap without touching steam, but haven't found any way yet. Don't want a trainer, or a way to illegally hack steam, just a way to start my game.
 
If makes me laugh. Connected to the internet. Yes - absolutely. Try doing that on a transatlantic flight. No-one would even want to play Civ 5 on a laptop during 8 hours of downtime like that would they? Can't imagine it.

Now I've understood the convoluted process to go through to make sure I can do this for a single player local-computer game then I will not be in the same position again. Nice if something had warned me about that beforehand. I had played it once whil connected to internet and all was well. After all I should have realised that clicking on 'Start in Offline Mode' when you start Steam before you have done this special Offline process would actually try to connect online first.

Intuitive! Ha ha ha!!!!
 
I wasn't happy with Steam being required for Civ V either, but have to live with it.

Steam is extremely iffy where I am, and often refuses to work, so any game that requires Steam to run is not going to be a very pleasant experience.

I bought a box copy of Civ V and tried to install it, Steam had all sorts of problems trying to update and then hanging, or just telling me that I had no internet connection when I was definitely on the internet. Finally managed to get to log into Steam after a day or two of trying all sorts of things to make it work, and what does Steam do? It completely ignores my DVD copy of Civ and then downloads the entire 4.7GB program over the internet. Thankfully it should be able to run offline, so that I don't have to rely on being able to log into Steam every time I want to play Civ, cause Steam doesn't work for me easily 70-80% of the time.

I have nothing against Steam per se, but I do wish that they would actually start addressing issues with their service and all. It's a wonderful concept and I would support it wholeheartedly, if only they would actually listen to their customers once in a while.
 
I've been a steam user for a few years, not by choice, but by necessity. If I want to play certain games I'm held hostage and have to to it their way.While I'm sure there are many satisfied steam customers, there are probably just as many unhappy ones. Just google "steam sucks" or other appropriate terms to see what issues you could face.
The first problem I had some back was with Civ 4 Colonization which I bought from the steam website. Steam would keep trying update and after a long while it would give me an error message saying the server was busy and to try again later. Eventually I gave up and downloaded a pirated version and was able to play that.
This time, I bought the cd in a store and can't play it because I don't have access to my old email account anymore.
I did what they said on their website.. write my user name and the support ticket number on the cd key, take a picture of it it and email it to them. Still no response to that.
I guess I should thank them for saving me money in the future since I will never buy another game that is associated with steam or any other that can control when I can play or not.

Happy gaming.
 
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