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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 ordered online through Steam last night and it took about 30 minutes to unlock. I had already pre-downloaded.
On a slightly unrelated note: what's with the mid-game/mid-level load times? Are they just slow for me, or does anyone else feel like they may as well be downloading the game textures from Steam as you play?
The facts have a liberal bias. --The Daily Show
No, the source code wasn't stolen from inside, someone hacked into their computers and copied it out. See the Final Hours of Half Life 2.
An internet connection is not required as you play. Once you signup and register you can have steam start in offline mode, unplug yourself from the wall and you're done.
Just an FYI in case you're without internet some day.
-- taking over the world, we are.
The CD is required to play if you install with the CD.
At least on my machine.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
What if I don't have the Internet? What if I want to play on a lan that doesn't have Internet access?
I guess you'll learn to read the System Requirements next time:
Minimum System Configuration
* 1.2 GHz Processor
* 256MB RAM
* DirectX 7 capable graphics card
* Windows 2000/XP/ME/98
* Mouse
* Keyboard
* Internet Connection
I understand that people who purchased the game via the brick and mortar stores kinda got the raw end of the deal, but I was very satisfied with the way buying this game worked.
Half Life 2 (c) Valve *READNFO*
Half-Life 2 (c) Valve *EMPORiO FIX*
Half-Life 2 (c) Valve *OFFLINE ACTIVATION PATCH*
Half-Life 2 (c) Valve *EMPORiO FIX* *REPACK*
Half-Life 2 (c) Valve *ONLINE PLAY METHOD*
The above suggests that some time between the 16th and 17th of this month you could, in actual fact, have been playing it
-- If I were a fish, I'd be wet
There's a reason why I'm posting here instead of playing that game.
My own experiences were more like:
Insert disc1. wait...3 minutes
Insert disc2. wait...3 minutes
Insert disc3. wait...3 minutes
Insert disc4. wait...3 minutes
Insert disc5. wait...3 minutes
Fill in blanks for steam. wait... 5 minutes.
"Unable to find Master AuthenticationServer"
Retry.
"Connection Reset by Peer."
Swear. Retry.
[repeat any of 5 random error messages]
Swear. Repeat.
Email to Sierra Tech support. Email bounces.
OK. Try VUGames Tech support. web email form disabled -- it's there, you just can't type anything into it.
OK. Try emailing directly. Email bounces.
Swear. Swear some more. Give up and go out.
Next day. Try again. Ok it accepts my registration, but authentication servers are too busy to activate me for real, so it sort of puts me on probation and lets me play. Still waiting for Steam to recognize me as a legit user.