I'm honestly not sure why you have so many problems. What region are you in? I'm North-East US and over the past 4 years (since Orange Box was released) I've been almost 100% Steam for all my purchases. I've never a single time gotten that "unavailable" error. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm sure their servers go down as all servers do at some point, it just seems odd that some people seem to see it happen so often when it's never happened to some of us.

I have 183 Steam games, I've left it running virtually 24/7 for the past four years, and I've never had a game unavailable or experienced any performance issues from it. About the only problem I've ever had with it was when I was doing something else like watching streaming videos online and it start downloading game updates in the background that slowed down my connection, which I then had to click "pause" on to get it to stop until I was done with the other stuff I was doing.

I've also never had offline mode not work like has happened to some people. I live in the woods and my cable goes out a couple times a month. Steam has never failed to start in offline mode and let me access my non-online games.

I consider it a huge negative when games are not Steam games now. I vastly prefer when they are fully Steamworks games in fact so I know the integration will be tight and there will be no worrying about different versions and such. I completely understand why people with slow or metered internet connections can be frustrated by this, but online distribution is the way things are going (not just games) and I don't see that changing.

The extremely unobtrusive and minimal Steam DRM implemented with Skyrim (online activation only, then you only need to ever connect to Steam again for patching) to be difficult to find fault with. How would it be any different if you were connecting to proprietary Bethesda servers for those functions anyway? Steam probably has a much greater availability rate than any individual game company would manage running their own servers anyway.

You are incorrect here -- while the servers are supposedly seperate they are all tied to the same database and the hackers were able to access the entire database as is stated in their message ( very good security there !) :


So you might want to check your Credit card statement when it comes next month !!

I do enjoy it as a source of indie games and old games on sale. But....


I honestly don't understand the attraction of any of that. But, then, I don't do "social media" either, and have never really been the type to call/text people just to "chat."


And in return, you have no control over patching. Fallout 3, I still have all the loose patch installers. I can patch the game to any level I want/need. (This was especially important when patch 1.5? came out and broke almost all modding. Everyone needed to roll back their installs to 1.4 in order to play. Kind of hard to do that with auto-patch. And, since Steamworks games are all guaranteed to be on Steam, there's no reason to release stand-alone patch files. So rolling back to a previous patch is a bit harder - you have to have made a backup of your game install.)


Because it's silly to require "online" for a single player, 100% offline game? Only real purpose to requiring Steam is to prevent people from loaning / trading / reselling their copy. (It doesn't work as DRM, the pirates already beat that. Like they do with any system. Disc check would be more than enough to stop the "casual" pirates. The high-end ones won't be stopped by anything.)


Like I said.... I like Steam for the things it does well. But you couldn't pay me to link my other games to it, and give up any control over how & when I run / patch / install them.

Well they stated there was no evidence they took the cc info. Besides, do you know what encryption method they use? Can't remember the name of it, but it is one of the best out there, and it would take 90,000 years to break the encryption code. They rate encryption methods by how long it would take someone to crack it.

I've been an active RTS competitive player for years. I have been booted numerous times with "Steam servers are currently unavailable." I know it isn't just me because everyone else in the game lobby are gone / coming back after Steam is back up. Just look in the Steam Forums. And by the way, I'm not saying this happens every day, but it happens frequently.

And by the way, read the thread, I haven't been complaining about Steam.

Oh well, I think I didnt read it well enough. Sorry for the ill-informed post, then.

Anyways, Im not at risk, I dont use my credit card on the internet.

Apparently you've never heard of botnets. What might take 1 computer 90,000 years to crack would take 90,000 computer 1 year to crack. Or 1 million computers, only 1 month to crack.

1. Fair enough, but you can obviously see the attraction for others correct? While paying Skyrim, me and my friend were frequently shooting each other messages, such as, "where can I find my active effects," and check out my pics of my character. Some people have fun with this. Personally, I'm not into social networking either. I don't really consider chatting with my friends in a video game to be social networking, but whatever.

2. You can roll back to any patch you want to that was previously installed. I've done this before, but it has been a little while. You can also set the game to not automatically patch and you have 100% control over if and when it is patched in that case.

3. You don't have to be online to play Skyrim. You only have to be online ONE TIME to register it on Steam. After that, you could play offline for the next 100 years if you lived that long.

Yeah, because that is likely to happen -.-

Huh, then after the hackers somehow find 90,000 computers to hack my CC, they can all throw their hands up in disgust 1 year later as they realize it is almost maxed or has been changed. Ha!

Seriously though, for all practical purposes it isn't worth it to try to crack these numbers. It could be a TON of effort for them for nothing if you simply changed your number or if you don't have a lot of money available. The real risk is that they use your identity to get a credit card and then they max it out.

It might sound like a strange reason but Steam also provides one thing that is invaluable: Absolute leak protection. The only game that was linked to Steam that had leaked was Dues Ex and that was a preview copy for reviewers (Not the entire game).

All a developer has to do is encrypt the content on steam so the amount of effort in decrypting it is not worthwhile (Which will be "unscrambled" at the proper release date) and for retail versions leave an important file off the disk so the game will be worthless until it is "updated".

Edit: I would love for Skyrim to have the option for uploading a save to Steamworks. Not all the saves, of course, only a small number (Like 5). It would be awesome if you could port certain saves from one computer to another at will.

Notice how the xbox version was leaked like on the 7th. The PC version, however, didnt

The reason why most of the same problems still pop up in every game they release is probably cause of how big the world is. They put story, features, and gameplay above everything else. Then they probably start working on fixing some bugs, but they don't get to all of them in time before release. So they come up with the best solution at the time and then fix the game after release. This process saves them money and gets the game out to us in the fastest time possible while still having a playable game.

This is naivete of the highest order. I bet people in the countless crash threads in forums all over the nets would beg to differ.

Other than the recent hack down to credit card numbers, which has me finally paranoid and worried, I haven't had any problems with Steam. This intenet protection or activation to play is the present and future reality.

1) Steam doesn't update when in-game and will not minimize your current game.

2) Steam has no impact on game performance or framerate.

3) If your computer is having problems feeding the 20-25 MB Steam uses, you are probably well below the recommended specs.

4) I have never had any graphical issues in games related to the Steam, ever, nor have I ever heard of anyone having them.

Steam is meant for only multiplayer games: false. I have Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Oblivion, Skyrim, Dragon Age 1, Dragon Age 2, and both Mass Effect games on Steam.

Also, I'm not sure what issues with Skyrim and Steam you are referring too. Are you sure it's just not your machine? I play Skyrim via Steam and it's been absolutely perfect, zero problems at all.

Machine specs are an optional send off that arent automatically polled by playing a steam game.


If you bought Skyrim in a store and activated it on steam they have no credit card information on you.

That was the original gripe wasn't it "I bought this in a box now I have to deal with all the steam evilness."

There would be no Steam evilness if Bethesda used Impulse, which does not put things running in the background and which I in general find much less annoying.

Except most good encryption measures in the millions to billions of years. I believe theres a form of encryption that could not be cracked even with all the processing power in the world within a lifetime.

1. That is wrong you do have control over patching.

2. You require online for skyrim exactly once, when you install it, to activate the product and ensure it is a legitimate copy. any other time you can play offline.


It is amazing the amount of times people are just posting the exact same complaints ignoring the number of times people say what they are complaining about is a total fallacy.

1 steam does update in game

2 when steam updates in game it pulls my cpu to 75% usage

3 it uses 4 gig of ram when updateing

4 when updating my fps drops to 10

The best reason, it keeps your games up to date automatically, take Relic's Company of heroes for example, before Steam that game was terrible becuase the manual patching for that game was a living nightmare, but now that you can get it through Steam, it's no problem.

Auto update doesn't always work - my Skyrim was set to auto update, but the new patch did NOT load. I had to go and "Verify Cache files" to get the patch

Less than impresses with Steam