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Steam Hit By 'No Connection' Error Worldwide
jones_supa writes "Steam users worldwide are getting more than they expected this Christmas, courtesy of Valve. Increasingly annoyed reports are piling up on a Steam Community thread about an ominous 'No Connection' error. Depending on your luck, this means you can either start the client in offline mode and play only single-player games with anything related to the Steamworks cloud features disabled, or you cannot start Steam at all and consequently access anything in your library. However, store related functionality seems unaffected, in case this blunder made you feel like purchasing some more games you may or may not be able to play these holidays." Update: 12/25 17:45 GMT by T : The connection problems were fixed; did you hit the loading errors before they were resolved?
"We were hit with a large amount of completely unexpected network activity during the morning of the 25th of December. In association with the local police we are currently investigating a hacker called Mr S. Claus and will post an update shortly."
Seems working for me.
What exactly is ominous about a "no connection" error? Is it followed by a second message - "the killer is in your house" or some such thing?
#DeleteChrome
Steam has a very consistent schedule of getting updates on Tuesday, many of which take the network down. I would not be surprised if this was the case. I've learned to avoid any games that require a Steam connection on Tuesdays. (Usually ones that are tracking achievements that affect the game or using steam cloud I would guess.)
Cheap games and a company that gets their servers back up in less than half an hour on Christmas day? Oh the agony.
It clearly wasn't global, if you check their stats page you can see the numbers takes a dip, but doesn't go to zero (which is what happens during global outages). Looks like ~1.4 million people were affected, which is significant but nowhere near worldwide. The news story is making a mountain out of almost nothing (sounds like the submitter has a major anti-Steam axe to grind). I, for one, had zero problem playing games even though Steam started with "no connection" this morning.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
GoG.com 's been having a great sale, and is all DRM free, in case anyone's missed it so far...
I have spent the last 4 weeks at work in a remote location with limited internet access. I set Steam to Offline Mode before I left. About a week in, when when I clicked on "Start in offline mode" as it asks at every startup, it said it couldn't connect, and that was the end of that. Three weeks with none of my games on Steam playable. Makes me wonder why I bother buying anything.
Going to be back in town (hotel) for a night before heading out again, hopefully I can get it back into "offline mode" for January. *sigh* Would suck if it is still out, and I can't get into offline mode before I go away again.
Valve is a business, they will do what it takes to keep the revenue coming in.
Right up until they fail, which could happen tomorrow or in 20 years.
They promised to release patches to free Steam games when they go under, but that's a bullshit promise, because if they do that before a buyout they don't get bought out and they go under and no one ever hires them again, if they do it during a buyout it may be illegal, and if they do it after a buyout it's also illegal (not their stuff to sell.) If they do it on the way to bankruptcy or during bankruptcy it's certainly illegal (Same grounds.) You're not getting those patches, ever. You don't own those games, period. And they are more than likely to become so much digital noise in the future.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"