Slashdot Mirror
Half-Life 2 Preloading from Steam
Nos. writes "For those of us using Valve Software's Steam platform, we can now begin 'preloading' Half-Life 2. The article explains that this will download an encrypted version of the game that you can unlock when you purchase it. They only say that purchase options will be available soon."
I stopped playing CS when Valve force-fed their DRM, buggy, memory-intensive heaping pile of poo they call "steam" onto their userbase.
With Doom 3 who needs them!
I dunno what everyone's worried about. I mean, it says encryption...not like, product key and verification crap. If Valve was actually worried about it, then they would have put some 128-bit, maybe even 256-bit single-key encryption in there, stuff which would never feasibly be broken. Now of course, that assumes the scheme only has one working key, which if they did do it like a product key thing, wouldn't work.
::shrug:: Practically unbreakable. I don't know if that's feasible under steam either, but my point is that all it takes is some easily found strong encryption (gnupg stuff, even) to make this practically uncrackable until the game is released.
But, at least, if I was valve...encrypt a seperate copy for each player, with an id to identify which key valve needs to give that player when they buy the game.
I wouldn't exactly call it a slashdotting.
h tml
If you look at their status page,
http://www.steampowered.com/status/status.
you will see that they have plenty of bandwidth available. The 'available' bandwidth is actually pretty accurate from what I've seen. They can pump out more than they're doing right now.
It asked you to try again long before it came onto slashdot.
They are intentionally throttling the number of downloaders for it because there is no great rush to make sure everyone has it right now (it won't be coming out for a few weeks at the very least, many retailers are speculating Nov. 1st, but I wouldn't hold much weight in their dates). They are throttling them because they don't want to degrade the quality of service for games already released on Steam (HL series of games).
Try again in a few days, and you'll be no worse off.
Two words
"Steam Authentication"
I misplaced my Half-Life CD case when I needed to freshly install WinXP. I used a key gen to get the game to work. WON's server wouldn't authenticate my bogus key. I was left not playing for about two weeks when I finally found my CD case and put in a legit serial number.
I don't think that Valve is going to use a more lax authentication regimen for HL-2, especially after the "source theft" that happened last year.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Valve is far far far from intelligent. The WON patches, source code leak, a release date that is overdue one year, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, content servers that authenticate, run the main website, and deliver content, and the Half-Life 2 plot leak (rumor) all point toward a company that has trouble keeping both of its brain cells in working order. It's far from a smart company. It's a very, very, very lucky company, who was fortunate enough to hit a goldmine of a game. A goldmine only kept alive with the mods that users produce.
Favorites list (don't remember if original CS allowed this. I used to write down the IP of a good server to play there)
Using Half-Life's in-game server management did allow you to toggle a server as a favorite and even allowed you to browse favorites only. The only problem was that it seemed buggy as hell and would frequently "forget" your favorites from another session (which can really piss you off), but it was there.
With Steam, all that business is managed automatically. It's heaven. As for buggy or memory intensive, I encountered one bug so far (input lag playing havoc with my keyboard) and that lasted only a few days.
Steam had way to many problems on release. It was no where near ready for release and shouldn't have been implemented. I didn't use steam for a long time (pissed off at Valve for buying out (ruining) HL mods), but I know plenty of CS players who were left without playing their precious game for days at a time because problems with content delivery and detection. If you know some young CS players, you know it can be more addiction than heroin for them. It pissed the shit out of them. I can remember hearing, "Steam sucks" every five minutes. At the moment Steam seems to have settled down and most of the bugs are worked out, but there are still problems. A month (or two) ago I was locked out for a week because Steam forgot to remove/update a file. While the system might seem to a nice way to update a game I still prefer just downloading updates off mirrors like the old days. Unfortunately as more games go to Steam (especially since Valve took down WON), less and less use their own sites and mirrors for downloading their mods.