Civ 5 No longer Works

Bought two copies of Civ 5 when it first came out, one for me and one for my son. We play mulitplayer on our LAN net work (currently play Civ4 BTS) against other in the household and the AI players. As the game costed $50 each, we bought only two to try it. It sounded like there were some improvements. A big one was the way cities gain land area. It is possible in Civ 5 for one city to cover an entire island, instead of needing 2-3, as in Civ4 and BTS. We followed all the installation procedures and registered the game via STEAM, etc. Not do to any fault of the game, first my hard drive (Drive C; the root drive wth Windows XP on it) failed. That's right FAILED! In case you might be wondering...so? So...I bought a new hard drive and re-installed Windows. Unfortunately, I had to go to Windows 7 (no big deal, I just couldn't find anyone selling a new (legititmet) Windows XP Professional). My original Windows XP disk that came with the computer would not install, disc was bad. It came, legal with the computer; was not a hijack. Windows, unfortunately has one big problem (actually, there are many, but this one became a "dooms day" for my game). In order for installed software to run, it must be installed through Windows (needs to be loaded into theWindows registry). My new Windows did not know the game was on the computer (on a different drive). Thus, the game would not run. No big deal, just reinstall the game. Couldn't do that because during the game install, it saw the game files on the computer. Had to uninstall the game first. Unfortunately Windows (7 Professional, in this case) being 'stupid', didn't know the game was there and could not uninstall the game. Next option...simply delete all the old Civ5 game and program files. Easy enought to do. Then take out my "totally legal, costed $50 plus tax at Best Buy in Santa clara, Ca; registered; non hijacked Civ5 Cd/DVD and reinstall the game. The reinstall process started working fine, right up to where I was directed to "hell" (STEAM). If you don't register, you can't install the game and the installation process stops and exits. When I followed the installation process, like any law abiding citizen, I was informed by STEAM that I already had the one allowed installation. No I didn't. In short, I got NO help from STEAM, NO help from 2K (called them personally; STEAM gives no phone numbers). Everyone says, just install the game. HOW? Windows couldn't do it (as explained earlier). BOOM...I'm out $50 after only getting to play with game about 2-weeks. Having my hard drive fail, is not anyone's fault, but not being able to get help IS! I offered to mail either STEAM or 2K my entire game in exchange for a new one (I'm not interested in pirating; own 3 BTS(installed on 3 computers), 3 Civ4 games and 2 Civ5 games). Both said they couldn't or wouldn't help. Continued to play around with the game (single player) on my son's computer (his computer had it's own legalling bought and registered game disc, not a pirate copy or stolen copy, bought at the same time and the same store). Was getting used to the new games nuisances (wished it had some things the old game had, more civilization choices being one of them) and was getting ready to fork up another $50 to get another entire game so my son and I could play together. Then disaster struck! Something crashed on his computer, locking the computer up. Once the problem was fixed, we found the game would not longer work (it had become corrupted). Worse yet, it could not be uninstalled correctly (the Windows registry lost it or had become corrupted; virus or something?). We finally got it uninstalled, but, because we could not notify STEAM properly during the uninstallion process, it was not cleared off their site. We could not notify STEAM because he (my son) forgot his STEAM account name and password. We never played nor did we want to play any games over STEAM (or on the internet). We have real jobs and real lives, better things to do than sit on a computer playing online games for hours until completion. In fact we never finished a multiplayer game (started about 4 games before the problems) we played on our LAN network, because we could not find where the saved games were. No need to worry about that now. In short, we now have two worthless $50 a piece game disks. STEAM has no contact numbers. They only ciontact you by email. After two weeks of communicating with them, answering the same useless questions with no useful solutions, it became very, very, very clear...they could care less. In there eyes I was a game thief. A pretty "stupid one at that". The only thief I ever heard of that paid full price for the item they were accused (in a round about way) of stealing.


All we would like is the use of our game disc again. I would be happy to talk to someone on the phone to get it done. Email is useless, as our work hours and days do not readily give us time or opportunities to spend hours emailing back and forth questions and answers that could have been done within an hour by phone. We would be MORE THAN HAPPY (George Carling had an entire comedy skit on"More than Happy") to mail the original game disc to the proper people (STEAM or 2K) for new copies (LEGAL copies) in return, so that we might be able to reinstall the games on the two computers and play it once again. We now have a third computer that more than meets the requirements for the game, so, if we liked the game, we'd probably buy another copy for that computer. Then my son, wife and I could play. But, FIRST, we must get the first two games back up and running. Until them, I CANNOT and WILL NOT recommend this game to anyone! Trust me, it is not the game itself, but the poor (that is rating it higher than it should be) service that stands behind it. If STEAM had a phone number, we probably could have had both games fixed by now. When the computers crashed, we also lost all of our ADOBE Photo software. This stuff was more expensive and more important to us than the game, as we write for a newspaper and cover a lot of auto racing events. ADOBE had a phone support help number and they got the program back up and running on both computers in less than a day.In fact, they took the time to go onto my computer (via my desk topwith my permission) and get everything fixed. STEAM...it was over a month, and nothing but bogus email jibberish, until I just gave up.

Before you give out your little whiner comments, or too bad sob stories, please take a lttle time and effort, if you have had this problem or know how to correct this problem, plese let us know. I would hope that someone from 2K (or even STEAM) would read this and try to assist us. You can contact me through this site, at which time, I will connect you with my regular email address and a phone number. Many of you purchased the game, like we did, and have been able to enjoy it (we haven't). If you want to have a better understanding of how we feel, take out your hard drive, with Windows on it (before you uninstall the game) and smash the hard drive with a hammer. Then replace your hard drive, re-install Windows and join our club. All your other software will be reloaded (if you legally purchased it and have the install discs), but the Civ5 game WILL NOT. STEAM is the culprit, flat and simple, as they are the ones with the "anti-piracy" routines to ensure that you cannot install the game more than once. I have no problem with this. Just give us a phone number to cover/help us when we have computer issures, like we've had.


Bottom line...we'd like to try the game again, but we are not paying $50 (acutally $100) plus tax for two more games, as we already have two that we paid for (legally) at Best Buy in Santa Clara, Ca (look it up, there is one on Steven's Creek Blvd; Steven's Creek and Winchester Blvd; near Hwy 17/880) The game was good when I bought it. Maybe, when (if it ever does) the game drops in price to $20-25, I'll buy two more copies and try agian.

Food for thought...The latest BTS games can be purchased at WallMart, Target and other department stores (Best Buy, Frys, etc) for about $29. It can be loaded in as many computers as you want (we, being either honest or stupid, bought three copies..one for each computer we have), has no anti-piracy to it, never has a problem installing, loading or running. Most important...no one is out there pirating it. Why? Yes, it is an older game version (but very good, none the less, with a fairly large following). It is not pirated because it doesn't cost an "arm and a leg" (as does Civ5). Like movies. When movies costed upwards of $100 or more to buy, the copy pirate companies thrived. Now the movies cost between $10 or less (for older movies) to $29 for brand new movies. There is little or no reason to pirate a movie, and the anti-copy protection pirate companies no longer are as important as they once were (there may not be any). The movies are affordable. Copy protection costs money, which is dropped on the shoulders of the consumer. Thank goodness they don't put copy protection on a Big Mac, or they would cost you $10 each.

Constructive help would be greatly appreciated, especially if it gets our game up and going again. Definately like the way cities expanded in Civ5, a major improvement over Civ4 and BTS.

"Have a nice day!" George Carlon did a skit on that, too. as he said "Maybe I've had 162 nice days in a row and I'm ready for a crappy one". "Why should he hog all the nice ones". Well, we had two "Crappy days" (when our games crashed and became non-usable) and we are ready for a "Nice Day" (as far as the games go).

thanks for reading
hope you can help
hope you like the George Carlin 'take offs'. We were real Carlin fans and he will be missed.

Return the disks back to the store.

U do still have the receipts right?

I save my receipts these days cuz of many new games for just in case.

It's difficult to read what you mean, a shorter summarised version would be better with paragraphs.

If you access steam on your new computer, the game is possibly already in your steam library, you just have to download it from steam (this is slower than from disk unfortunately).

Your son will have to retrieve his password though. There is probably a "lost my password" option on login to steam.

I can't see how this problem can't be fixed, steam don't steal peoples games. Did you try to reinstall the game through steam? Once you registered it with steam that game belongs to your account. You can download it on any computer you like, you just log in to play it.

Seems to me that the problem is not 2 useless, but paid for disks, but that you and your son forgot your Steam passwords.

I had a hard disk go on my last computer, and swapped to a new one, logged into Steam, and downloaded the game, no problem. This is how it is supposed to work, and, believe me, it does.

What you need to do is to go into the Steam password retrieval process, then, when you have your accounts active again, download the game from Steam, at zero cost.

Steam do not expect you to forget passwords, as they are more a bank for games than anything else. Would you forget your bank password details? Same thing. Would you expect your bank to check up on you if you said you'd forgotten your password? Then it's reasonable to assume Steam will.

Moderator Action: Moved to tech support.

And what Brichals said.

The_Quasar said:

Seems to me that the problem is not 2 useless, but paid for disks, but that you and your son forgot your Steam passwords.

I had a hard disk go on my last computer, and swapped to a new one, logged into Steam, and downloaded the game, no problem. This is how it is supposed to work, and, believe me, it does.

What you need to do is to go into the Steam password retrieval process, then, when you have your accounts active again, download the game from Steam, at zero cost.

Steam do not expect you to forget passwords, as they are more a bank for games than anything else. Would you forget your bank password details? Same thing. Would you expect your bank to check up on you if you said you'd forgotten your password? Then it's reasonable to assume Steam will.

Click to expand...

This is true. When you activate the game, you permanently connect your code to the Steam Account you create. The code and identity become as one entity. If you reinstall the game, and create a new identity and password to activate it, it will not work, because the code has already been used on the account you created whern installing the game for the first time.

1. I didn't lose my password
2. The store (2 hour from my house; not a normal everyday trip) would not take the game back. We had it for a week on one computer before the drive crashed. We had the other copy on the other computer for about a week longer before the problems arose there.
3. My son did retrieve his password, but got the same run around I got from STEAM.
4. Steam had no sjuggestions, could not clear the account or anything.
5. 2K would not take the discs back and re-issue new ones. This would have completely solved the problem. 2K said we had to go through STEAM. STEAM would not clear the account or exchange the disks. Instead they tried to have us run a bunch of mirror programs, none of which worked. This was a 3-4 week process of emails and redundent communications.
6. The original message was long. This was to prevent the "quick repsonse" messages of "quick fixes" by insuring that all the details were there. You can spend hour and days going back and forth
7. It appears that the moderator has forwarded this to technical sujpport. Hopefully, something will come out of it.

I appreciate that at least two folks and the moderator are trying to help.

Thanks

ssw825 said:

7. It appears that the moderator has forwarded this to technical sujpport. Hopefully, something will come out of it.

Click to expand...

It just means i changed the forum for this topic, it does not change anything els.

ssw825 said:

3. My son did retrieve his password, but got the same run around I got from STEAM.

Click to expand...

I dug now again through the wall of text in the first post, but i can't see what run around that was.


Since this whole thing is not clear, i'd now want to ask the basic questions to make it clear:
- You've installed on your new PC Steam, right?
- Are you able to log into Steam?
- If yes, what option do you get there for Civ5?