Not doing Steam right?

[keef99]

Please excuse the cross-post. I didn't see this forum until after I had posted this elsewhere.

I must totally be doing this Steam thing wrong. I have never used a game that requires Steam so I honestly don't have any preconceived notions about how it should work. I just know that I bought the game on Thursday (special edition no less!) and here it is Sunday and I'm still watching the Steam download screen dribbling along a 5 or 10 kb/s, with more than 4 gigs to go.

Steam has no customer service that I can discern. Emails to their designated address receive an automated "Thanks for writing! We will respond (some day) by email."

I disabled my firewall to see if that would help. Forwarded ports. Enabled p2p. Disabled p2p. Nothing seems to work. Since I have recently downloaded 16 gigs of the World of Warcraft expansion edition, I know that I should be able to receive information a heckuva lot faster than what Steam is delivering.

Anyone have any thoughts on whatever it is I'm doing wrong?

 

[BrainEater5000]

Try adjusting the server you download from in Settings->"Downloads+Cloud". Select a different server from the download region and it may help with your problem.

 

[keef99]

Thanks, I will try that. My local server is Dallas but perhaps there's a better rate elsewhere.

 

[keef99]

For whatever it's worth, I still cannot play this game. I feel like I'm caught in a nightmare!

Purchased Thursday on way home from work. Apparently installed through Steam from disk, which took the whole evening. Played 15 minutes before crashing around midnight. In 20 years of gaming, never had an install like that.

Friday night, home for the weekend, clicked on Civ5 icon to start game, Steam starts to download another file, which appears to be a 4 gig entire download of the game. Have not played one minute the whole weekend. The download proceeds in fits and starts, sometimes as "fast" as 25kb/s but more often than not at 0. Tried moving my download hub from Dallas to Houston and got a Pause that I was not able to get out of until I switched back to Dallas. Sent an email to Steam Saturday morning, since they apparently do not have any kind of live customer service. Got an automated response ("Thanks for writing!") back. Send another email Sunday morning, got another automated response back. (Don't they realize gamers who work play on weekends?) Am currently going sequentially through posts on Steam's Civ5 forum, trying every solution for every problem listed.

Should probably just uninstall Steam, uninstall Civ 5, and restart the whole process again.

 

[Furiey]

I would uninstall Civ but leave Steam and make sure that you reinstall from the disc rather than over steam. As you have the disc you shouldn't have to download the lot over steam, although there will be a Civ patch from steam once it is installed.

 

[keef99]

One further sign that maybe I'm not crazy:

On the Steam forums, I went back up one level where Sid Meier's Civ 5 is listed alphabetically along with all the other games available through Steam. There are many dozens listed, usually with 20 or 30 threads each and a few hundred postings. But after just one weekend of availability, Civ 5 has 1,392 threads and 12,833 postings. Wow.

Oh, I have been verifying the integrity of the game cache, per one suggestion on the Steam boards. That process was just stopped by Windows' Data Execution Prevention security feature, which dumped me out of Steam altogether.

 

[The_J]

Try it again with admin rights and report back please.