Slashdot Mirror
Steam Registration Servers Overloaded
duckle writes "The Inquirer reports that "The World has come crashing down around Half-Life 2 players today, as Steam's authentication servers in Europe have died.", and deemzzzz_k writes "It looks like even Valve wasn't quite prepared for Half Life 2's popularity. HL2 requires registration to unlock the game and although the Valve/Steam homepage claims that it fixed registration issues the servers are still overloaded. Registration is "delayed" and temporarily unlocking the game takes 20-30 minutes over a 1.5MB DSL line." This seems to primarily be an issue for folks who bought the game from a store; I purchased the game via Steam and was playing at 12:15 am PST on launch day.
I knew beforehand the tribulations involved with loading the game but I wasnt quite prepared for the amount of time it took to get my game running. Just for some perspective I'm running a Gigabyte P4 Titan at 3.0ghz 512 of ram and an ATI9600 256mb grfx card.
My system is fairly new and I have not experienced any problems in any of the new games Far Cry/Doom 3/UT24k/Tribes Vengence etc....
I opened the HL2 box to find 5cds... Why we can't get games on DVD in the most civilised place on this earth is totally beyond me.
-It took about 25 minutes to run through installing all the discs. The first one includes all the Steam(B.S!!) and Counter Strike Source.
-Getting to the irritation..... After the game was all installed and registered including steam which has found an unhappy Home in my SysTray(Dammmnit!!! I hate apps that feel they should be granted a place in my systray!!!) I thought I was all ready to enjoy the much anticipated HL2... Oh how wrong I was... I was in four another half an hour of FARKN STEAM. I tried double clicking on the shortcut to HL2 and Im greeted with an HL2 spash screen giving me about 6 options of things I can do from this point, the first one being PLAY HALF LIFE (ummmm why I bought the freakn game right) So I click that thinking that I would be launced into the game.... NO!!!! Steam decided to wake from its hibernation only to prompt me with "SERVERS ARE OVERLOADED, TRY AGAIN LATER" Well piseed as I am at this point I shut down the splash screen and try launcg the game from the Steam app in the SYS tray, now that got me to where I needed to be.... But wait I was in for another 30min of Steam verifying and actually UNLOCKING my game.... I cannot begin to explain to you how utterly annoyed I was. I mean why even bother designing a HL2 splash screen if it worthless and you have to go through steam anyway! Well the whole thing was a mess and an hour+ after openening the Box I was playing... And man its a beautiful game in every aspect, my only complaints are slow load times, and STEAM!!!!!!!!! I will never play/buy another game that has anything to do with STEAM or the annoyance and complications behind the process. The entire process just seemed entirely riduculous and unneeded.
Something people are missing.
Should Valve be REQUIRED to have enough servers/bandwidth to cover authentication for the release of a game for 1 week? Will consumers be willing to shell out another $5 to $10 to support this? Or should Valve do what the did, take lumps for a week, save a bit of money, both theirs and ours?
Realistically, the login/authentication issues should last only a few days. Valve is playing with a new business model. It will be rough, but they will learn and the next release should go smoother.
Congratulations - you just compared the criminal act of escaping slavery to the criminal act of stealing a video game.
Please go look up the meaning of "context" followed by the meaning of "moron". Apply the latter definition to yourself and the former to the post you originally replied to.
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