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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.
Most of you are lucky you never had to recover a password off of the Steam network. A friend of mine purchased the game online, and since then he uninstalled CS to focus on his studies. Now he can't recover his password!
If he uses the 'lost password' procedure in Steam he gets an Operation Incomplete error, and so far he hasn't managed to get a single human person to assist him at Steampowered. I was never a big fan of activation, but this cinches it.
I bought the game from a store yesterday. It only took 20 minutes to install off the 5 CDs, you would think they could make it on DVD. And whats with not giving us jewl cases for a $55 game? Cheap paper sleves are for Drivers, not AAA title games.
[/rant].
Where was I? Before it would let me play it forced me to create a steam account, something I've boycotted since Counter Strike 1.3 and has a lot to do with why I stopped playing CS. Never-the-less I created an account and waited as it tried to unlock my game. It told me that it was unable to register me, but it would let me know as soon as it was able to. I guess at this point I was "in line to register". Then it actually allowed me to play! I tried it again after disabling my network connection and it told me that it could not verify my CD key and that I could only play while I was online. I'm kinda pissed about that and hope they get that fixed soon. If the cable goes out and I cant play HL2 I'm going to be very very bored, I might even have to go outside
From my first 20 minutes playing reaction I've got to say this game is so much more open-ended then Doom3, and though I'm a huge id fan I've got to hand it to valve, this looks like its going to be just as fun to play as HL1. I could spend an hour just throwing television sets out windows at the police on the ground.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Doesn't Valve make 3-4x what they would on sales over Steam rather than people buying the game in stores?
Valve knew HL2 what be very popular. I'm sure there thinking went something like "Why NOT make are own online distribution software, require everyone to have it and sell all are games that way?".
I may be way off base, but I'm guessing once the rest of the developers see all the money Valve is rolling in after this, they will quickly follow suit. If not licence Steam for themselves, or even sell games through Valves steam network (it's already on millions of computers now anyways).
Left 4 Dead Gaming Group - http://www.l4dgg.com
Nope. They had Steam already planned out as a distribution and copy protection measure, and had a working version well before the source wandered off. If it was done as you suggest, then the guys at Valve are clairvoyant because they knew it was going to happen, and stupid because they let it happen anyways.
I do blame Valve because they lied to the paying users. Early on when Steam was announced, a lot of people were concerned about privacy issues and things like this preventing paying users from playing. Valve put out press releases (some not too long ago) promising that all such concerns had been addressed and that the bugs were worked out of Steam. They assured us that there would be no problems once HL2 hit the shelves. After all this, I'm wondering whether the the promises behind the privacy concerns were really addressed either.
For the first time since Ultima 9, we've got a retail product where the only way to play it is to hunt down a crack because the copy protection is so screwed up.
Valve is trying to protect their product, yes, but they've also created massive headaches and delays for those trying to install it, pissing off many fans. If Valve had not made the anti-piracy measures so bad, they would be making more money. This is just ENCOURAGING piracy! Why buy the game and go through all of this shit when you can download a cracked version and play? Valve will feel this one in the morning. I know I would've gotten Half-Life 2 if they didn't include all this crap.
Grrr... No one on slashdot seems to realize that one of the primary points of steam is NOT to stop piracy. The idea of being able to verify all the files on someone's computer adresses the much larger issue of CHEATING. Cheating in multiplayer games has been a huge issue with Half-Life and I think more than anything else valve wanted to make sure all the game files are un-edited to prevent cheatng by hacking the game.
So if the larger issue is cheating, why not allow people to play single player without steam and only require steam for multiplayer?
Or is valved frightened that people are going to cheat at single player and finish the game??
Steam is at least as much about piracy as cheating. As a result Valve has clearly stated that they are willing to inconvenience a lot of their customers so that a few will buy instead of pirate. I'm glad my midterms preclude me from installing HL2 until next week.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Heck, why are you so intent on hurting yourself? Punish Valve. Get a game off P2P, play it, have fun, but don't pay Valve a cent. Why this pretended uprightness? When you want to punish Nestle for their baby formula scams, you can't buy Nestle products or they would get your money, and stealing their products would harm the retailer. But with content products like games you can have your cake and eat it too. Pirate the game - this way the developer/publisher is harmed and you have your fun.
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