Running Windows 7 64bit and I restart my computer only once a month, for Windows updates. Same with my Vista 32bit laptop, I never shut it down, I merely have it sleep, but never need to restart it except for the once a month windows updates.
If your Windows computer is having stability issues, you either have poor quality hardware or badly written drivers.
You might be a troll, but if not, you are certainly over reacting.
I run windows live messenger and pay attention to the install options which allow me to choose *not* to install things like the Bing Search bar.
Really, you should check your install options with any *free* package, any person who just presses next, next, next without reading what they are doing is simply a fool.
Yes, one could argue that it's evil to have such things ticked by default, but in Microsoft's defense, if you are upgrading messenger, it remembers your previously selected install options and will not by default ask you again to install Bing toolbars and stuff.
Anyone who knows Blizzard should know that they are notorious for long developement time, this is because Blizzard is about gameplay first, they are one of the few stuidios in the world that get away with no release dates except for saying "we'll release it when it's ready." and considering that every single one of their released games to date has been a blockbuster, the model seems to have worked well for them so far. They also stated at Blizzcon that Starcraft 2 was delayed so they could work more on the Battle.net platform.
Also, in regards to saying WoW is somehow hurting Blizzard, I don't see how. For starters, Blizzard only dreamed of getting maybe 500,000 subscribers, now they have over 10,000,000. Additionally, 3 months of WoW subscription is the same cost of a copy of Diablo 3 (I would guess), considering people are effectively paying for 4 games a year in WoW subscriptions, this is doing much better than Blizzards old 1 game released every 2 years policy. As for "ruining" the MMO market, that's debatable, however one can confidently say, they managed to bring MMO's to the mainstream, whereas before Blizzard, MMOs were pretty much limited to serious gamers, so in that regard, they have also created a lot of opportunity in more potential MMO customers for anyone making MMOs these days. Maybe some company was going to hit mainstream sooner or later, but Blizzard did it first.
Starcraft always had LAN support since release, but initially it was only IPX. It was the UDP (TCP/IP) LAN support which was added only some patches later.
For some time now, I have been getting more and more annoyed with the regularity of NoScript updates, especially as it would ALWAYS open the home page after every update, this is after the nuisance of me already having been asked to restart Firefox for the addon update.
Now it makes sense, they clearly artificially make this happen just for adrevenue. The addon probably doesn't even need that many updates.
Anyway, even though I know I can change the option to not go to the homepage after each update, I am tired of having to restart Firefox once a week for software which is for the most part adware. I barely use noscript, except on 1 site, I'll wait for someone else to make an addon which doesn't piss me off, or simply tolerate the minor annoyance of that one site.
As for the real world security benefits of noscript, they are questionable at best. If a website codes itself so it needs javascript, one would likely turn on noscript, and then the website could run malicious code.
I don't know how it works in the rest of the world, but in South Africa, the legal age for girls is 16 and 18 for guys, however, if your partner is less than 21 years old and you are more than 10 years older than your partner, then you need consent from a parent/legal guardian of theirs.
I think if you live in a rural, traditional, village, they are more lenient on the age, however, we are talking about what are effectively uneducated 3rd world citizens.
If you are/were playing that much per week, no wonder you think it's a grind. Are there any games you can "grind" that much and not find tedious after a few months?
It seems I don't play WoW enough for the grinding to get to me. For me WoW is a time filler, between other activities, and a way to socialize.
I found daily quests a lot less tedious than killing mobs to sell stuff on the Auction House, I get gold from the dailies which I use to buy the goods that other people don't seem to mind farming.
You don't put nearly enough weight into the fact that lack of consumables in Arenas is to reduce grind. Of course the Arena system itself requires you to play lots of games, but if you didn't like doing PvP, why would you be doing Arena? Now, if they allowed elixirs, then you would have to make sure you had a good supply, because if you didn't then you would be up against a team who was using them and you would not stand much of a chance. In order to keep up your supply you would be required to spend a considerable amount of your time grinding dailies or farming the mats yourself. So, if Elixirs were added, all people who like playing Arenas would be forced to do PvE grinding as well.
As it is now though, Arena players pretty much only have to spend all their time doing PvP, not much in the way of PvE grinding at all.
The potions and drums debuff mechanic has the same effect. It is clear that part of Blizzard's plan is to allow people to spend more of their WoW time doing dungeons and PvP, than grinding the mats and gold to "fund" their dungeon or PvP experience.
The old battleground ranking system was flawed so badly in terms of "rewarding" players for spending the most amount of time possible doing PvP. In order to get the highest rank, your only option was to play more than the next guy, who in turn is trying to play more than you. It's hardly surprising Blizzard threw out the system, as people ended up doing 10 - 16 hours a day in the hope to outdo the next player.
You seem to see WoW as purely a stats game, of course if all you are after is the best possible stats, then you are going to have to play a lot, as getting "the best" stats takes a LONG time.
I see stats as a means to an end, and I like to think Blizzard does the same. There will ALWAYS be better gear at some point, but getting better gear merely allows you to move onto harder dungeons.
By making people raid the lower end Dungeons first, they can't "skip to the next chapter", they will have to spend at least "some" time inside a Dungeon, taking in the stories and things that go with it. Eventually, you get all the decent gear from that dungeon and move onto the next one. WoW is about moving through a story with your friends, gear and stats is merely a means by which to turn to the next page.
And yes, for all those snarky critics, yes, WoW's business model is built around offering a subscription based service, so of course they will pace it such that it takes months instead of just days to get through it all. But you could spend every night playing and get through all the content 3 months before the next patch, or you could take it more easy and relaxed and never ever be able to get through all the content.
While WoW is wildly successful, it's not because Blizzard is good at being a money hungry company, it's because Blizzard makes great games. And Blizzard will only ever make great games, they know that if they do that right, then the money will simply follow.
I don't know what kind of a girlfriend/wife you have, but mine doesn't check my WoW characters in order to sleep with me. After all, as a casual only player, I would stand no chance against the guy who's raided 5 nights a week and gotten all the epics they can, man, with that much e-peen he must have no trouble scoring...
WoW is not all that repetitive, especially considering that the idea is to spend many months playing it between content updates.
There are LOTS of things Blizzard does to make WoW a lot less of a grind, big one being daily quests, if you don't know why daily quests prevent the grind, then you don't know WoW well enough to be commenting.
Blizzard also does lots of other things to prevent the grind: - Rested XP, while you are logged out, you earn "rest", when you log back in, you earn double XP per mob kill until your rest runs out. - When Blizzard introduced Arenas (a competive PvP system), they made it so that consumables such as potions or elixirs cannot be used at all. While this is partly due to balancing issues, it also means that people don't end up farming gold/mats for these potions, because while they can be a huge competitive advantage, they are also a huge money/materials sink when you are using a lot of them. - In their upcoming expansion, they are limiting the amount of consumables that can be used by players in certain conditions. For example, you will only be able to use 1 single potion for a boss fight, this will mean that people wont end up blowing lots of potions on a single boss fight. Another example being that you won't be affected by more than one set of Drums at a time, this is also good as right now the top raiding guilds had lots of their members abandon a profession and take up Leatherworking instead. And all this just to get the most possible "power" for their raid group. When you aren't levelling at the same time, getting a profession from 0 to max is exceptionally time and/or money intensive.
Personally, what I get most out of WoW is the social connection, I tend to use VoIP a lot with my family and friends who also play. WoW is just a place we hang out, it's like a sports bar or something. WoW for me is something I can do to pass the time between work, going out or sleeping. When I am at home and not playing WoW or sleeping, I do other things like read, watch TV, program.
Correction on point 2 which I misread initially: This would only serve to kill the supply of lower level materials, which could very well be in demand.
And to add to the post, Blizzard has already devoted a considerable amount of resources to dealing with botters in terms of actively hunting them down and banning them, as well as making significant code changes purely to make things more difficult for botters.
Glider was selling their product for real money and the sole intent of it's product was to cheat in WoW. If I were Blizzard, I would also be pissed if some other company made a profitable business at my expense.
You should stick to subject material you actually know.
> A) Glider isn't exactly hard to create. If that is true, why is it the only one that anybody seems to know about? > B) Makes Blizzard look like bullies..again. That is your opinion, in my opinion, Blizzard is protecting the sense of achievement for myself and all the other players who don't cheat. > C) Now there are several people who are going to create a clone. The code isn't released, yet, and this should be a lesson to anyone else who tries to make a profitable business out of cheats for other companies products. > D) It's impact on the game, emotional views aside, isn't really that great. As someone who doesn't seem to play the game (based on your comments further down), you are not qualified to make that opinion.
> 1) Don't let anyone mine/pick anything that there skill level makes gray to them. This is already the case, and has been for years, have you actually played WoW? > 2) put some random drift into movement. If you were even remotely interested in computer science, you would know this is a relatively simple problem for a program like Glider to overcome. > 3) limit the price you can sell something for on the AH to 10 times what a vendor would pay Price is dictated by the market, and with all market prices, it's affected by supply and demand, some items in the game are seriously rare, like a 1/1000 chance. Those items deserve to sell for a lot, they are hard to come by. Additionally, with daily quests, earning 100gold can be done in a matter of hours. > 4) don't allow the transfer of more then 100GP a time. Maybe a one time unlimited amount per month. Again, do you actually know anything about WoW? This would only serve to inconvenience legitimate players, and 100 is not a highly significant amount of gold.
Next time, please don't make a post unless you know what you are talking about.
How can you be so naive to think that everyone thinks and behaves in the same way. While I can fully appreciate you get no enjoyment out of PvE content, many other people get no enjoyment out of PvP content.
This is why Blizzard has made both options available. PvE appeals to different people to what PvP does. Blizzard tries to accommodate both kinds of players and it's not because one option is "better" than the other, it's just that different people want to do different things.
I am sorry, but I can't believe your story as you have written it, clearly you are omitting details somewhere. I have a Steam account and I have forgotten the password at least once, which was easily resolved by the automated password reset system. So, what's wrong with your email address?
Then you say you "couldn't get a response from anyone at Valve", are you saying they ignored your emails and never sent you anything at all, no further questions? Considering they deal with real money from people, I battle believe they would be able to have been going this long if they didn't have a competent support team.
You and I both know, that somewhere, somehow, you did something "silly", like lost your proof of purchase (I still have a PDF file with my account creation from when I installed Half-Life 2), or perhaps you didn't give them your real email address when you signed up? Or maybe your account was even banned, perhaps unfairly, but it's still very different from "they didn't respond to me".
Not sure how Steam works, but for WoW, my friend was able to send them a copy of his passport which they matched to the account owner's name and allowed him to get back his stolen account. So you didn't do something silly like use fictitious contact details?
Now, that all being said, it also bugged me a lot too when I installed Steam for Half-Life 2, and I only had a 56k modem at the time, but I have since used Steam for various other games, and while it's still a bit of a memory hog, I really appreciate the program.
So, technically, the software "could" be better, but the Steam network itself works fine in my experience.
Sorry for replying to my own post, but meant to add that I have "briefly" checked out uTorrent and it looks very good, especially in regards to it's memory footprint. However, as Azureus works so well for me, I really have no reason to change. I'm not even sure if uTorrent has all the Azureus options I use.
Actually, I use the latest version of Azureus with Classic Interface and I still find it the very best client out there for my needs.
All you need to do is change it back to "Classic" mode, here's how:
- Under the "Tools" menu, go to "Options" - Expand the "Interface" branch on the left - Select the "Start" item - Click the "Show" button next to "Display Azureus UI Chooser" - Select "Classic Interface" -... - Profit!
Of course Azureus is not without issues, it is "fairly" memory intensive, but my machine has 2gb ram and I have run it with 200+ torrents with no issue at all. Right now, have 10 active torrents and 60 torrents overall and it's using 75MB in the "Mem Usage" column of the Windows Task Manager.
The other minor issue is that it occasionally hogs my CPU for about 10 seconds at a time, happens maybe once every 45 minutes. This is enough to cause serious frame rate drop in my game or movie I may be watching, or both as I run a dual-screen set up. What I do is set it's priority to "below normal" in windows task manager and that way I never notice if it decides to do this.
Thing I like most about Azureus is that I set the TOS flag for outgoing packets to "LOWCOST" and with Windows XP's built in QoS Packet Scheduler enabled on my network cards, it doesn't affect other internet applications. This works well as I have a 7mb/s down and 700kb/s up speed on my ADSL. With WoW, before enabling this, I would inevitably get an extra 700ms of latency if I was running torrents. With QoS enabled, the latency doesn't change noticeably unless I start getting insanely high download speeds or something.
I view subscriptions for MMO games like a monthly fee to be part of a social sports club of sorts.
I pay a monthly fee for regular use of their facilities and I also get to interact with other similarly minded people who do the same. Sure, I could build my own tennis court at home at great expense. But I wouldn't interact with nearly as many people compared to the sports club and I would also have to worry about maintaining my own facilities which I really couldn't be bothered to organize. If I really felt I wasn't getting my money's worth from the sports club, I would simply stop paying and stop going.
MMO's provides a fun environment for me to hang out with my fiends, some of which are in different countries, at minimal expense.
Please don't compare an MMO game subscription with the cost of an automobile, for one you spend possibly months worth of your your full salary, for the other you spend a minute amount of your disposable income. More often than not, a "simple" night out with a girlfriend costs more than the monthly subscription for these games.
Tell him to set up power saving correctly. Although my computer needs to stay connected to the mains for suspend to ram to work. It's to most intensive purposes "turned off". Takes 7 seconds (at most) to go to sleep and a few seconds wake up and I never have a problem.
On my Home machine, the only time I reboot Windows is in the event of a software update (once a month). Otherwise, I have my power options set up that I just use suspend to RAM when I am out the house or sleeping. It takes 4 seconds to go to sleep and 3 seconds to wake up.
I work in a 24 hour customer support environment, and as shift times change often and there are 4 different shifts per day, the computers stay on all the time and almost never restart, except for perhaps windows updates. However, they are aways logged off by the user at the end of their shift.
Anyone who frequently needs to restart their Windows machine today is either running rubbish software/drivers on it, or has sub-standard hardware.
On Windows, OS updates is the only thing requires restarts, or should (it really bugs me when a Quicktime update says it needs to restart Windows for only God knows what reason). Although Linux may not need full system restarts for software updates (I don't know), I find Windows more than reliable enough for my needs.
Vuze is optional, not sure how you choose not to install it from a fresh install but recently my Azureus offered me the update to version 3 but made very clear that Vuze would NOT be included. Azureus is still damn good, used to run it on an old PII 300MHz with 128MB of ram and windows 2000. Would start up slow, but torrented fine. Haven't tried uTorrent, but frankly I find Azureus so good and right now I run a Core 2 Duo with 2gb RAM so don't ever feel anything it does anyway.
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Running Windows 7 64bit and I restart my computer only once a month, for Windows updates. Same with my Vista 32bit laptop, I never shut it down, I merely have it sleep, but never need to restart it except for the once a month windows updates.
If your Windows computer is having stability issues, you either have poor quality hardware or badly written drivers.
You might be a troll, but if not, you are certainly over reacting.
I run windows live messenger and pay attention to the install options which allow me to choose *not* to install things like the Bing Search bar.
Really, you should check your install options with any *free* package, any person who just presses next, next, next without reading what they are doing is simply a fool.
Yes, one could argue that it's evil to have such things ticked by default, but in Microsoft's defense, if you are upgrading messenger, it remembers your previously selected install options and will not by default ask you again to install Bing toolbars and stuff.
Anyone who knows Blizzard should know that they are notorious for long developement time, this is because Blizzard is about gameplay first, they are one of the few stuidios in the world that get away with no release dates except for saying "we'll release it when it's ready." and considering that every single one of their released games to date has been a blockbuster, the model seems to have worked well for them so far. They also stated at Blizzcon that Starcraft 2 was delayed so they could work more on the Battle.net platform.
Also, in regards to saying WoW is somehow hurting Blizzard, I don't see how. For starters, Blizzard only dreamed of getting maybe 500,000 subscribers, now they have over 10,000,000. Additionally, 3 months of WoW subscription is the same cost of a copy of Diablo 3 (I would guess), considering people are effectively paying for 4 games a year in WoW subscriptions, this is doing much better than Blizzards old 1 game released every 2 years policy. As for "ruining" the MMO market, that's debatable, however one can confidently say, they managed to bring MMO's to the mainstream, whereas before Blizzard, MMOs were pretty much limited to serious gamers, so in that regard, they have also created a lot of opportunity in more potential MMO customers for anyone making MMOs these days. Maybe some company was going to hit mainstream sooner or later, but Blizzard did it first.
Blizzard never uses the word "banned", they say things like "Permanent Suspension" or "Account Closure".
And yeah, I know people who have had 1 of their 2 WoW accounts banned on a battle.net account, but the other account is completely unaffected.
Starcraft always had LAN support since release, but initially it was only IPX. It was the UDP (TCP/IP) LAN support which was added only some patches later.
For some time now, I have been getting more and more annoyed with the regularity of NoScript updates, especially as it would ALWAYS open the home page after every update, this is after the nuisance of me already having been asked to restart Firefox for the addon update.
Now it makes sense, they clearly artificially make this happen just for adrevenue. The addon probably doesn't even need that many updates.
Anyway, even though I know I can change the option to not go to the homepage after each update, I am tired of having to restart Firefox once a week for software which is for the most part adware. I barely use noscript, except on 1 site, I'll wait for someone else to make an addon which doesn't piss me off, or simply tolerate the minor annoyance of that one site.
As for the real world security benefits of noscript, they are questionable at best. If a website codes itself so it needs javascript, one would likely turn on noscript, and then the website could run malicious code.
I don't know how it works in the rest of the world, but in South Africa, the legal age for girls is 16 and 18 for guys, however, if your partner is less than 21 years old and you are more than 10 years older than your partner, then you need consent from a parent/legal guardian of theirs.
I think if you live in a rural, traditional, village, they are more lenient on the age, however, we are talking about what are effectively uneducated 3rd world citizens.
No doubt Battle.net 2.0 will allow players to bind a Blizzard Authenticator to their accounts.
...in a dungeon I've run twenty times that week.
If you are/were playing that much per week, no wonder you think it's a grind. Are there any games you can "grind" that much and not find tedious after a few months?
It seems I don't play WoW enough for the grinding to get to me. For me WoW is a time filler, between other activities, and a way to socialize.
I found daily quests a lot less tedious than killing mobs to sell stuff on the Auction House, I get gold from the dailies which I use to buy the goods that other people don't seem to mind farming.
You don't put nearly enough weight into the fact that lack of consumables in Arenas is to reduce grind. Of course the Arena system itself requires you to play lots of games, but if you didn't like doing PvP, why would you be doing Arena? Now, if they allowed elixirs, then you would have to make sure you had a good supply, because if you didn't then you would be up against a team who was using them and you would not stand much of a chance. In order to keep up your supply you would be required to spend a considerable amount of your time grinding dailies or farming the mats yourself. So, if Elixirs were added, all people who like playing Arenas would be forced to do PvE grinding as well.
As it is now though, Arena players pretty much only have to spend all their time doing PvP, not much in the way of PvE grinding at all.
The potions and drums debuff mechanic has the same effect. It is clear that part of Blizzard's plan is to allow people to spend more of their WoW time doing dungeons and PvP, than grinding the mats and gold to "fund" their dungeon or PvP experience.
The old battleground ranking system was flawed so badly in terms of "rewarding" players for spending the most amount of time possible doing PvP. In order to get the highest rank, your only option was to play more than the next guy, who in turn is trying to play more than you. It's hardly surprising Blizzard threw out the system, as people ended up doing 10 - 16 hours a day in the hope to outdo the next player.
You seem to see WoW as purely a stats game, of course if all you are after is the best possible stats, then you are going to have to play a lot, as getting "the best" stats takes a LONG time.
I see stats as a means to an end, and I like to think Blizzard does the same. There will ALWAYS be better gear at some point, but getting better gear merely allows you to move onto harder dungeons.
By making people raid the lower end Dungeons first, they can't "skip to the next chapter", they will have to spend at least "some" time inside a Dungeon, taking in the stories and things that go with it. Eventually, you get all the decent gear from that dungeon and move onto the next one. WoW is about moving through a story with your friends, gear and stats is merely a means by which to turn to the next page.
And yes, for all those snarky critics, yes, WoW's business model is built around offering a subscription based service, so of course they will pace it such that it takes months instead of just days to get through it all. But you could spend every night playing and get through all the content 3 months before the next patch, or you could take it more easy and relaxed and never ever be able to get through all the content.
While WoW is wildly successful, it's not because Blizzard is good at being a money hungry company, it's because Blizzard makes great games. And Blizzard will only ever make great games, they know that if they do that right, then the money will simply follow.
I don't know what kind of a girlfriend/wife you have, but mine doesn't check my WoW characters in order to sleep with me. After all, as a casual only player, I would stand no chance against the guy who's raided 5 nights a week and gotten all the epics they can, man, with that much e-peen he must have no trouble scoring...
WoW is not all that repetitive, especially considering that the idea is to spend many months playing it between content updates.
There are LOTS of things Blizzard does to make WoW a lot less of a grind, big one being daily quests, if you don't know why daily quests prevent the grind, then you don't know WoW well enough to be commenting.
Blizzard also does lots of other things to prevent the grind:
- Rested XP, while you are logged out, you earn "rest", when you log back in, you earn double XP per mob kill until your rest runs out.
- When Blizzard introduced Arenas (a competive PvP system), they made it so that consumables such as potions or elixirs cannot be used at all. While this is partly due to balancing issues, it also means that people don't end up farming gold/mats for these potions, because while they can be a huge competitive advantage, they are also a huge money/materials sink when you are using a lot of them.
- In their upcoming expansion, they are limiting the amount of consumables that can be used by players in certain conditions. For example, you will only be able to use 1 single potion for a boss fight, this will mean that people wont end up blowing lots of potions on a single boss fight. Another example being that you won't be affected by more than one set of Drums at a time, this is also good as right now the top raiding guilds had lots of their members abandon a profession and take up Leatherworking instead. And all this just to get the most possible "power" for their raid group. When you aren't levelling at the same time, getting a profession from 0 to max is exceptionally time and/or money intensive.
Personally, what I get most out of WoW is the social connection, I tend to use VoIP a lot with my family and friends who also play. WoW is just a place we hang out, it's like a sports bar or something. WoW for me is something I can do to pass the time between work, going out or sleeping. When I am at home and not playing WoW or sleeping, I do other things like read, watch TV, program.
/embarrassed
Correction on point 2 which I misread initially:
This would only serve to kill the supply of lower level materials, which could very well be in demand.
And to add to the post, Blizzard has already devoted a considerable amount of resources to dealing with botters in terms of actively hunting them down and banning them, as well as making significant code changes purely to make things more difficult for botters.
Glider was selling their product for real money and the sole intent of it's product was to cheat in WoW. If I were Blizzard, I would also be pissed if some other company made a profitable business at my expense.
You should stick to subject material you actually know.
> A) Glider isn't exactly hard to create.
If that is true, why is it the only one that anybody seems to know about?
> B) Makes Blizzard look like bullies..again.
That is your opinion, in my opinion, Blizzard is protecting the sense of achievement for myself and all the other players who don't cheat.
> C) Now there are several people who are going to create a clone.
The code isn't released, yet, and this should be a lesson to anyone else who tries to make a profitable business out of cheats for other companies products.
> D) It's impact on the game, emotional views aside, isn't really that great.
As someone who doesn't seem to play the game (based on your comments further down), you are not qualified to make that opinion.
> 1) Don't let anyone mine/pick anything that there skill level makes gray to them.
This is already the case, and has been for years, have you actually played WoW?
> 2) put some random drift into movement.
If you were even remotely interested in computer science, you would know this is a relatively simple problem for a program like Glider to overcome.
> 3) limit the price you can sell something for on the AH to 10 times what a vendor would pay
Price is dictated by the market, and with all market prices, it's affected by supply and demand, some items in the game are seriously rare, like a 1/1000 chance. Those items deserve to sell for a lot, they are hard to come by. Additionally, with daily quests, earning 100gold can be done in a matter of hours.
> 4) don't allow the transfer of more then 100GP a time. Maybe a one time unlimited amount per month.
Again, do you actually know anything about WoW? This would only serve to inconvenience legitimate players, and 100 is not a highly significant amount of gold.
Next time, please don't make a post unless you know what you are talking about.
Let me correct that for you:
"The game is only fun, FOR ME, in pvp."
How can you be so naive to think that everyone thinks and behaves in the same way. While I can fully appreciate you get no enjoyment out of PvE content, many other people get no enjoyment out of PvP content.
This is why Blizzard has made both options available. PvE appeals to different people to what PvP does. Blizzard tries to accommodate both kinds of players and it's not because one option is "better" than the other, it's just that different people want to do different things.
I am sorry, but I can't believe your story as you have written it, clearly you are omitting details somewhere. I have a Steam account and I have forgotten the password at least once, which was easily resolved by the automated password reset system. So, what's wrong with your email address?
Then you say you "couldn't get a response from anyone at Valve", are you saying they ignored your emails and never sent you anything at all, no further questions? Considering they deal with real money from people, I battle believe they would be able to have been going this long if they didn't have a competent support team.
You and I both know, that somewhere, somehow, you did something "silly", like lost your proof of purchase (I still have a PDF file with my account creation from when I installed Half-Life 2), or perhaps you didn't give them your real email address when you signed up? Or maybe your account was even banned, perhaps unfairly, but it's still very different from "they didn't respond to me".
Not sure how Steam works, but for WoW, my friend was able to send them a copy of his passport which they matched to the account owner's name and allowed him to get back his stolen account. So you didn't do something silly like use fictitious contact details?
Now, that all being said, it also bugged me a lot too when I installed Steam for Half-Life 2, and I only had a 56k modem at the time, but I have since used Steam for various other games, and while it's still a bit of a memory hog, I really appreciate the program.
So, technically, the software "could" be better, but the Steam network itself works fine in my experience.
Sorry for replying to my own post, but meant to add that I have "briefly" checked out uTorrent and it looks very good, especially in regards to it's memory footprint. However, as Azureus works so well for me, I really have no reason to change. I'm not even sure if uTorrent has all the Azureus options I use.
The latest version of Azureus for me, looks the same as it always did, read my post above for details: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=524758&cid=23096916
Actually, I use the latest version of Azureus with Classic Interface and I still find it the very best client out there for my needs.
...
All you need to do is change it back to "Classic" mode, here's how:
- Under the "Tools" menu, go to "Options"
- Expand the "Interface" branch on the left
- Select the "Start" item
- Click the "Show" button next to "Display Azureus UI Chooser"
- Select "Classic Interface"
-
- Profit!
Of course Azureus is not without issues, it is "fairly" memory intensive, but my machine has 2gb ram and I have run it with 200+ torrents with no issue at all. Right now, have 10 active torrents and 60 torrents overall and it's using 75MB in the "Mem Usage" column of the Windows Task Manager.
The other minor issue is that it occasionally hogs my CPU for about 10 seconds at a time, happens maybe once every 45 minutes. This is enough to cause serious frame rate drop in my game or movie I may be watching, or both as I run a dual-screen set up. What I do is set it's priority to "below normal" in windows task manager and that way I never notice if it decides to do this.
Thing I like most about Azureus is that I set the TOS flag for outgoing packets to "LOWCOST" and with Windows XP's built in QoS Packet Scheduler enabled on my network cards, it doesn't affect other internet applications. This works well as I have a 7mb/s down and 700kb/s up speed on my ADSL. With WoW, before enabling this, I would inevitably get an extra 700ms of latency if I was running torrents. With QoS enabled, the latency doesn't change noticeably unless I start getting insanely high download speeds or something.
I view subscriptions for MMO games like a monthly fee to be part of a social sports club of sorts.
I pay a monthly fee for regular use of their facilities and I also get to interact with other similarly minded people who do the same. Sure, I could build my own tennis court at home at great expense. But I wouldn't interact with nearly as many people compared to the sports club and I would also have to worry about maintaining my own facilities which I really couldn't be bothered to organize. If I really felt I wasn't getting my money's worth from the sports club, I would simply stop paying and stop going.
MMO's provides a fun environment for me to hang out with my fiends, some of which are in different countries, at minimal expense.
Please don't compare an MMO game subscription with the cost of an automobile, for one you spend possibly months worth of your your full salary, for the other you spend a minute amount of your disposable income. More often than not, a "simple" night out with a girlfriend costs more than the monthly subscription for these games.
Tell him to set up power saving correctly. Although my computer needs to stay connected to the mains for suspend to ram to work. It's to most intensive purposes "turned off". Takes 7 seconds (at most) to go to sleep and a few seconds wake up and I never have a problem.
On my Home machine, the only time I reboot Windows is in the event of a software update (once a month). Otherwise, I have my power options set up that I just use suspend to RAM when I am out the house or sleeping. It takes 4 seconds to go to sleep and 3 seconds to wake up.
I work in a 24 hour customer support environment, and as shift times change often and there are 4 different shifts per day, the computers stay on all the time and almost never restart, except for perhaps windows updates. However, they are aways logged off by the user at the end of their shift.
Anyone who frequently needs to restart their Windows machine today is either running rubbish software/drivers on it, or has sub-standard hardware.
On Windows, OS updates is the only thing requires restarts, or should (it really bugs me when a Quicktime update says it needs to restart Windows for only God knows what reason). Although Linux may not need full system restarts for software updates (I don't know), I find Windows more than reliable enough for my needs.
So, did he come up with this theory after much dreaming?
Seriously folks, *obviously* all the people wanting Heroes resulted in a sort of Denial of Service effect!
Vuze is optional, not sure how you choose not to install it from a fresh install but recently my Azureus offered me the update to version 3 but made very clear that Vuze would NOT be included. Azureus is still damn good, used to run it on an old PII 300MHz with 128MB of ram and windows 2000. Would start up slow, but torrented fine. Haven't tried uTorrent, but frankly I find Azureus so good and right now I run a Core 2 Duo with 2gb RAM so don't ever feel anything it does anyway.
You forgot to mention that it costs a minimum of about $70 per month and you get 3gb cap, after which is costs about $10 per gig.