Rethinking Steam: My Battle.net experience

[EmpireOfCats]

I'm one of the people who so far as had little gripe with Steam -- a happy L4D player, no problems. However, my current experience with my attempt to play StarCraft 2 on Battle.Net is leading me to rethinking my position about games like Civ V that require online contact.

So I buy the game, and first am happy because the Mac and PC versions are on one DVD (that's a hint to Firaxis, by the way). Installs okay, downloads the patch okay, starts okay (of course, this is OS X), then asks me to register with Battle.Net; fine, endless legal pop-ups, and can I then finally play the game I've paid a serious amount of money for?

Nope. Because Battle.Net is down.

It doesn't tell you that, of course. It just gives you back the login window. You have to go online to figure that out. Anyway, I now have a (very pretty but) totally useless DVD and about 12 gbytes of a game on my hard drive that I can't do squat with, until some technician at Blizzard pulls his finger out and gets things working again. Just great.

Now I'm sure that somebody is going to tell me that Steam is a lot better, and, again, I have had zero issues with Steam so far. But I have to be honest and say that this experience has led me to admit that the No-Steam-crowd has a point: This is a bad, bad thing. I paid for the game, I want to play it alone, I should be able to play it.

So, I guess it is back to Civ IV for this evening.

 

[sk3pt]

For the millionth time ; you can play in 'offline mode' on Steam.

 

[Tylerryan79]

For the millionth time ; you can play in 'offline mode' on Steam.

Ya, so if your online one day playing civ, close the game, come back later to play, but steams down, you can play in offline mode!!! Oh wait you cant, unless you told steam to start in offline mode next time!! Remember its got to authenticate first before going into offline mode?

 

[sk3pt]

Ya, so if your online one day playing civ, close the game, come back later to play, but steams down, you can play in offline mode!!! Oh wait you cant, unless you told steam to start in offline mode next time!! Remember its got to authenticate first before going into offline mode?

That was fixed a long time ago... it works great now.

 

[2K Greg]

Ya, so if your online one day playing civ, close the game, come back later to play, but steams down, you can play in offline mode!!! Oh wait you cant, unless you told steam to start in offline mode next time!! Remember its got to authenticate first before going into offline mode?

That is not true at all. As long as you have authenticated once, you can go in to offline mode without advance warning. Just be sure you have Steam set to remember your password.

 

[Merovinge]

I'm one of the people who so far as had little gripe with Steam -- a happy L4D player, no problems. However, my current experience with my attempt to play StarCraft 2 on Battle.Net is leading me to rethinking my position about games like Civ V that require online contact.

So I buy the game, and first am happy because the Mac and PC versions are on one DVD (that's a hint to Firaxis, by the way). Installs okay, downloads the patch okay, starts okay (of course, this is OS X), then asks me to register with Battle.Net; fine, endless legal pop-ups, and can I then finally play the game I've paid a serious amount of money for?

Nope. Because Battle.Net is down.

It doesn't tell you that, of course. It just gives you back the login window. You have to go online to figure that out. Anyway, I now have a (very pretty but) totally useless DVD and about 12 gbytes of a game on my hard drive that I can't do squat with, until some technician at Blizzard pulls his finger out and gets things working again. Just great.

Now I'm sure that somebody is going to tell me that Steam is a lot better, and, again, I have had zero issues with Steam so far. But I have to be honest and say that this experience has led me to admit that the No-Steam-crowd has a point: This is a bad, bad thing. I paid for the game, I want to play it alone, I should be able to play it.

So, I guess it is back to Civ IV for this evening.

First of all, the specifics of how SC 2 was being done with Battle net are all available as part of that legal mumbo jumbo you skipped over.

Second, the down-time for Battle.net is historically very minimal, much less than most MMO's for example.

Third, as already mentioned, Civ 5 will not work like this.

Forth, what the heck is up with people and their self-entitlement these days. Your paying $60 (or roughly that in Euros) to have access to: A) 20ish hour campaign B) Maybe the best RTS that exists with free and unlimited future use of Blizzard servers and C) An incredible map editor/ability to play the awesome custom maps on blizzard servers, again for free.

If your problems in life are mainly that you cannot play the specific video game you want at any given time, I might offer taking some of that downtime and volunteering, or even bottling it up and heading out to Haiti or something.

 

[12agnar0k]

No tyler, your wrong, so long as you have Steam save your credentials it will also save the fact that you have already verified your account, you dont need to select "offline" mode, a lack of internet connection will allow you to choose to load in offline mode so long as you have saved your log in details, which is the case by default.

Edit:/ greg beat me too it.

Steam is better than battle.net, its the best form of DRM out there. It's the only DRM that provides the customer a positive service as apposed to only negatives, this is one reason why it is the ideal choice.

 

[ZimbuTheMonkey]

"Rethinking One Thing: My experience with a Completely Other Thing"

 

[mantis2007]

Steam is not Battle.net.

Besides, I've been playing Starcraft2 all week, no problems. The occasional 2-3 seconds of Battle.net downtime have not bothered me at all.

I'd much rather have to log in to an online service every time I play, that also gives a lot of benefits, rather than stick a disc in a drive every time I play.

EDIT: and of course, you only have to log into Steam one time in order to play Civ V. Then you can play offline forever if you want. Calm down people.

 

[mattcrwi]

If steam happened to be down when you install (which is what I think he was saying) then no you could not play ciV in offline mode. You have to register first and there is a slim chance that the service is down at that very moment in time. After that it doesn't matter if you have an internet connection.

 

[Provost Martin]

I paid for the game, I want to play it alone, I should be able to play it.

That's actually a valid point, and the only problem I have with software like Steam. However as many have pointed out you only need to validate once and then you're good to go. But Steam is still there whether you like it or not. Now personally I have no problem with that per se. I just wish there was a choice, that's all. For the sake of it.

 

[Tylerryan79]

Sorry about that, some jerk hit me in the head, and typed that reply.... he was good looking though!

 

[AZSportsFan]

That sucks that bnet2 had an issue for you, Empire. Frustrating, I'm sure. I haven't had any problems with it at all - nor with SC2 other than needing to set the framerate cap for the menus.

 

[Ricci]

For the millionth time ; you can play in 'offline mode' on Steam.

That's somehow catchy. You can play off-line as long as you have already activated the game online. If you need to install it and you can't connect to steam for whatever reason we can imagine then you are unable to play yet a single game, not even load the game in the computer!!!
Starcraft 2 is I believe truly worse in this respect, there is no LAN provided in the game. So if you want to play with a buddy who is sitting next to you, you will have to do it compulsively through some internet server in the United States (I presume).. really crappy. There is not even a direct IP connection (as civ always has) to play through some proxy at least.
Needless to say, these counter productive measures just empathize piracy and cracking, and the customer takes the worst of the situation.

 

[BeastofStrength]

I play BTS all the time on steam's offline mode. No problems.

 

[Merovinge]

Starcraft 2 is I believe truly worse in this respect, there is no LAN provided in the game. So if you want to play with a buddy who is sitting next to you, you will have to do it compulsively through some internet server in the United States (I presume).. really crappy. There is not even a direct IP connection (as civ always has) to play through some proxy at least.

Seriously what contrived situation is that where you are playing over LAN, are not planning on playing against other people, and dont have access to the internet? I cannot imagine "you and a buddy" sitting in a cave wanting to play 1v1 SC 2 against each other, but even if that was your only intention, they made it pretty clear you couldn't do so.

 

[Ricci]

Seriously what contrived situation is that where you are playing over LAN, are not planning on playing against other people, and dont have access to the internet? I cannot imagine "you and a buddy" sitting in a cave wanting to play 1v1 SC 2 against each other, but even if that was your only intention, they made it pretty clear you couldn't do so.

Your lack of imagination precedes your words.

 

[ZimbuTheMonkey]

Seriously what contrived situation is that where you are playing over LAN, are not planning on playing against other people, and dont have access to the internet? I cannot imagine "you and a buddy" sitting in a cave wanting to play 1v1 SC 2 against each other, but even if that was your only intention, they made it pretty clear you couldn't do so.

He never said he wasn't planning on playing with other people or didn't have access to the internet. He said he would like to play with his friend sitting right next to him.

ITT: People actually defending the decision to remove a 20 year old PC gaming feature.

 

[The_J]

Moderator Action: This thread has essentially nothing to do with Civ5 -> moved to computer talk.

 

[Dale]

Seriously what contrived situation is that where you are playing over LAN, are not planning on playing against other people, and dont have access to the internet? I cannot imagine "you and a buddy" sitting in a cave wanting to play 1v1 SC 2 against each other, but even if that was your only intention, they made it pretty clear you couldn't do so.

I play LAN games with some guys at work during downtime. The corporate firewall is very restrictive and blocks these sorts of connections. For SC2 without LAN that means we cannot play the game. We can play Civ with it's direct IP though.