Why Steam is bad for you

[Fistalis]

Meh I don't like steam so i don't use it. The idea that anyone here is going to talk someone into/out of using steam is just silly though. People who don't like steams system have decided they aren't gonna use it, and people who do use it are stuck with it forever if they want access to their games. /end thread?

 

[Xiao Xiong]

If people are complaining about Steam ...The problem is Steam.

There's millions of people using steam and out of all those millions of course there are a few people that run into some kind of problem. Are there more or less problems than when people try and manually install games off of a DVD with an unlock key? My guess is less. Much less.

For most people most of the time steam is a huge time saver.

 

[Setzertrancer]

Steam annoys the hell out of me as well. Despite popular beleif not everyone has unlimited internet. I am a poor and a student in a shared household so I am forced to have nothing for internet but 8gb a month. I normally run out of this after 3 weeks. So when I scraped up enough money for the game. I was extremely lucky to be near a free wifi-hotspot I could use to get the game set up and steam installed.

But then I got home and found I had be logged in just to play single player. Isn't is enough that I registered it online and proved that it was legitimate. Screw steam, I think this is just going to turn more people away from PC gaming.

 

[Xiao Xiong]

But then I got home and found I had be logged in just to play single player.

You don't. Log in at your WIFI hotspot or whatever (or home if you can afford to be connected for 30 seconds) and do this:

-- Make sure Civ is currently up to date

-- Tell steam NOT to update civ (right click on civ5, properties, updates, do not update)

-- Put steam in OFFLINE mode (steam -> go offline)

After that it won't update your game anymore and it won't require you to be online. When you DO want it to update your game undo those two things, get the update, and then set it back that way again.

 

[Setzertrancer]

Thank you Xiao, I always wondered what the point of it asking if I want to play offline was if it didn't work. Hopefully it will work after I make the change you suggested. Do you know if this works with Starcraft 2, because it has the same problem, except I run SC2 through Battle.net.

I'll still keep Civ 5 running until I'm forced to turn my computer off and see if it works afterwards.

I just notice thes acheivement system, that looks fun. When my internet quota resets I look forward to going for them.

Another thing I didn't mention is that my Laptop struggle to runs the game, due to overheating, even on low graphics. I could simply install it on my Desktop, but no I'll have to wait until I have internet back, because I can't bring my desktop to the hotspot.

 

[Xiao Xiong]

Do this to install it on your desktop, will require at least a minimal internet connection, but will avoid downloading the game, works for any steam game or all your steam games:

1. Install steam on the desktop if it's not already there

2. Stop steam

3. Delete the "steamapps" folder in your steam directory on the desktop

4. Copy the "steamapps" folder from your laptop to your desktop

5. Start steam, go online

Steam will look like it's downloading the game for awhile but then it'll suddenly notice that it actually already has the all the files and not download anything.

You can keep syncing your steamapps folder over from your laptop to the desktop to avoid using any significant bandwidth on your desktop where it's expensive, and do all the downloadings of updates and such at the hotspot.

This trick also helps you avoid downloading the game twice for anyone who has two computers at home.

 

[bernlin2000]

I've never had any problems with steam in the 6 years that I've used it. Don't call people zealots just because they have the sense to realize that steam is the best DRM software available, and without good DRM we'd all be complaining about our Xbox360 not running Civilization 5 correctly (*shudder*).

 

[zonk]

What you are saying here is this is too hard for you: Right click on game, properties, updates, do not update. You are saying you mod your games heavily and you cannot figure that out? Give me a break.

I'm saying that if you happen to be having ISP issues - Steam makes it a frakkin nightmare, if not downright impossible, to get out from under its thumb.

To do anything with Steam's settings, you have to be online.

Is that clear enough?

 

[aukrest]

IMO Steam is just an unwanted hassle.

 

[dannythefool]

IMO it's a much less unwanted hassle than Civ IV's copy protection.

SafeDisc installs its own Windows device driver to the user's computer, named secdrv.sys. In addition to enabling the copy protection, it grants ring 0 access to the running application. This is a potential security risk, since trojans and other malware could use the driver to obtain administrator access to the machine, even if the programs are running under a limited account.

A more serious issue is that (beside the default configuration on Windows XP), most installers don't set the security configuration appropriately, allowing every user to let the driver configuration point at an arbitrarily chosen executable which (at the next reboot) is started with administrator privileges.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SafeDisc

 

[CivFanMUC]

To do anything with Steam's settings, you have to be online.

Is that clear enough?

Steam-Fanbois expect you (when you stop playing before you go to bed) to know that your ISP will be broken the next day.
They expect you to have visionary abilities, and switch Steam to offline-mode when you stop playing at night.

 

[duxup]

I'm saying that if you happen to be having ISP issues - Steam makes it a frakkin nightmare, if not downright impossible, to get out from under its thumb.

To do anything with Steam's settings, you have to be online.

Is that clear enough?

You mean like playing the game offline? or other things?

 

[Senethro]

Steam-Fanbois expect you (when you stop playing before you go to bed) to know that your ISP will be broken the next day.
They expect you to have visionary abilities, and switch Steam to offline-mode when you stop playing at night.

You don't need visionary abilities, you just need to keep your user/pass saved. Not hard.

 

[CivFanMUC]

You don't need visionary abilities, you just need to keep your user/pass saved. Not hard.

So it is possible to switch Steam into offline mode without having to be online, only if I save user/pass within the launcher?

 

[Senethro]

So it is possible to switch Steam into offline mode without having to be online, only if I save user/pass within the launcher?

Theres a few other caveats like needing to have been online once (i.e. during installation), needing to have the Steam client and game up to date, or at least unaware that there is an update available (which probably won't be a problem if you're constantly offline, but if you're mixing it up then if you don't download available updates when you can, then you may run into problems), but pretty much.

 

[duxup]

So it is possible to switch Steam into offline mode without having to be online, only if I save user/pass within the launcher?

Yes. Just don't logout of the client. You can close Steam and shutdown your PC without logging out. As long as your username and password are saved in there when you can't get to Steam online the Steam client will authenticate locally and you can get in via offline mode.

If you logout of steam the client will want to connect to steam on the internet to authenticate and then you can't get into offline mode.

 

[deanej]

For anyone at risk of thinking this guy is reasonable, he wants a disc check so he can run the entire game in a sandbox (a virtual computer within a computer). He is so security minded that he believes anti-virus software cannot be trusted. I'm amazed he ever connects to the internet, even to repeat endlessly how Steam is bad and we're signing over our firstborn to them.

Steam does now work with Sandboxie, but I'm against having a third party program whose only purpose (on my system) is to certify that a game can run. There's no technical reason for this. People will cite integration, but no API actually requires that an application be running. No DRM is the ONLY good option in my book; disc check is the least bad of the having DRM option. It's time for the game industry to learn what the music industry had to learn the hard way: DRM is bad for the consumer, and it doesn't work against piracy. And for anyone who thinks that a pirate is going to say "I can't get a pirated copy until a few days after release so I'm going to buy it", I hate to say it, but you're completely crazy.

As for AV, what I said was that most solutions are essentially bloatware (which is the consensus among people who actually know something about security, unlike you). I'm a happy user of Microsoft Security Essentials, which is one of the few AV solutions that isn't a performance hog to some degree (NOD32 is the other one I know of; even Avast and AVG make your computer take a noticeable performance hit). Or are you going to call Steve Gibson (the person who discovered spyware and the original author of AdAware before he sold it to Lavasoft), who was unable to recommend AV software until Microsoft Security Essentials came out due to cost/bloat, a crackpot?

I would really appreciate it if you would stop misrepresenting my claims.

PS: a sandbox and a virtual machine are two completely different things. Do your research next time before posting.

 

[Senethro]

Steam does now work with Sandboxie, but I'm against having a third party program whose only purpose (on my system) is to certify that a game can run. There's no technical reason for this. People will cite integration, but no API actually requires that an application be running. No DRM is the ONLY good option in my book; disc check is the least bad of the having DRM option. It's time for the game industry to learn what the music industry had to learn the hard way: DRM is bad for the consumer, and it doesn't work against piracy. And for anyone who thinks that a pirate is going to say "I can't get a pirated copy until a few days after release so I'm going to buy it", I hate to say it, but you're completely crazy.

As for AV, what I said was that most solutions are essentially bloatware (which is the consensus among people who actually know something about security, unlike you). I'm a happy user of Microsoft Security Essentials, which is one of the few AV solutions that isn't a performance hog to some degree (NOD32 is the other one I know of; even Avast and AVG make your computer take a noticeable performance hit). Or are you going to call Steve Gibson (the person who discovered spyware and the original author of AdAware before he sold it to Lavasoft), who was unable to recommend AV software until Microsoft Security Essentials came out due to cost/bloat, a crackpot?

I would really appreciate it if you would stop misrepresenting my claims.

PS: a sandbox and a virtual machine are two completely different things. Do your research next time before posting.

Yeah, I know you've said all that before. Thanks for telling us all in full again. Keep on keeping on and I'm sure you'll still be hanging around here in a month all sour grapes because you can't play the game.

 

[Xiao Xiong]

To do anything with Steam's settings, you have to be online.

Is that clear enough?

Sure it's clear, it's also clearly wrong. Read my posts above. You do not have to be online. All you're missing is a willingness to spend maybe 5 minutes to figure out how to do what you want with steam.

 

[Fistalis]

Sure it's clear, it's also clearly wrong. Read my posts above. You do not have to be online. All you're missing is a willingness to spend maybe 5 minutes to figure out how to do what you want with steam.

Which is kind of the point.. people bought CIV 5 to play with it and figure out what they wanted with it.. not spend time fiddling with a 3rd party program in order to be able to play with civ V