No problem, we can go off of my extensive experience. It works 100% as intended.

Anyway everybodys mind is made up. No ones going to say anything bad about steam if its on their fav game. Its sad I have been reading some post from people who just except that steam is steam, sometimes it wont work, some times the servers are busy, sometimes you have to keep trying to play your game if it wont let you. Yet still they are ok with it. You should not have to except these things to play your game, online game maybe, but single player no. You should not have to except that on launch day steam servers may get clogged and busy prohibiting you from playing your game. People seem to trivialize how steam can sometimes be the barrier to you playing your game. As long as it works most of the time great.

Offline mode fixes all of those problems for single player games (which is what the thread is about). Steam being straight-up down is a problem for multiplayer games that I am admittedly not satisfied with. It should never happen in my opinion or happen much less often than it does.

To be honest, Steam has gotten the biggest loyalty from me simply from the sales they have. I have purchased and played literally dozens of full priced games for under $15 that I probably would have never purchased or played if it wasn't for Steam.

Umm... what problems exactly are being attributed to Steam? I've been on this forum since launch and I think you're the first person I've seen complain about Steam causing game problems.

I despised Steam until I got Steam. Now I think it's the best way to purchase games. In fact, opening a retail DVD package and seeing a "Steam Key" inside makes me smile. I was angry with EA forced Battlefield 3 players to use Origin. They denied Steam the ability to sell the game. Origin Beta (which is what they've released) is HORRID. Origin caused massive problems on launch day for BF3.

Steam on the other hand, so far as I've seen, has caused zero problems with Skyrim. The bugs people are having issues with involve Drivers and Skyrim itself. Not Steam.

Well the op ask why Beth slapped steam on skyrim to that I will say for sales and distribution the drm is just an added plus, i guess in there eyes selling a million or 2 games threw steam i figure they keep more of the profits as opposed to selling a million boxes, but I dont know that for a fact, just common sense says buying a game in bit form is cheaper for the publisher then in box form, not cheaper for the consumer. Also the OP admits to having steam probs that some think will be fix if he goes in offline mode, I hope so.

Why do people find the need to attack a person just because they have a difference of opinion?

I don't understand this point. I am able to go into my skyrim directory and double click TESV.EXE without any interaction with steam. I'm still randomly crashing though.

The only problems I have with Steam is that I am forced to use it. Its not a choice. Downloading takes all my bandwidth on the network and even boots my brother out of WOW on his computer. Some patches are absurdy big like making me redownload a game instead of a smaller patch. I like the games so I put up with it.

The amount of gamers still on dial up has become insignificant. It is to the point that developers/publishers consider them as a non issue. Sorry, but that is how it is now days, being a gamer and being on Dial up is not a good combination anymore, the industry has moved on and no longer wants to support people on dial up.

The requirements state connectivity for Steam activation, it is the consumers responsibility to understand the requirements. If they don't know what Steam is, then it is their responsibility to find out. It doesn't take much searching to find out that a broadband connection is recommend for Steam.

Also, the publisher wanted a form of DRM, so they chose a DRM that can potentially add value for the customer, it may not be of any value to you, and that is your opinion, but it does add value to others in their opinion, and gamesas sees that value as well for both themselves and to their customers.

I was also on these forums the first two days and there was quite a few steam threads the problems were not that it was causing problems in the game it was that they could not get into the game at all because of steam.

You despise origin which is basically the same thing as steam, remember it’s in its infancy give it a chance. Thats the thing that dont make sense to me is that some steam users are all for steam but put everything else like origin down. To me this seems hollow.

it has worked 100% of the time for many years for me, even on very popular games launch days, I had no problem. Steam has never, since it got released, prevented me from playing my games, ever, and I don't know of anybody else that has had problems being able to play their games.

I am calling you a liar, i hope this dont get me warned, im sorry but thats impossible. I am not flamming I just dont beleive you.

How is it impossible?

To people blathering about piracy being bad. Piracy is here because companies think everyone wants to pay an absurd amount for a game/movie/content, then deal with all the FBI logo's warnings ect. I could buy a blue ray, be forced to watch 10 minutes of bloody trailers(without being able to skip) then 2 mins of Copyright warnings. This sort of stuff promotes piracy. Even more so when games come out that are hard to install due to idiotic DRM. (Like Online Requirement) Maybe when Companies actually start offering "Demos" for their games, and not making such crappy games. Piracy will go down. Till then, People will keep doing it, esp with how expensive games and other stuff are now. Even more so with this recession.


To be on the record. I did buy Skyrim. I thought it was [censored] that I needed Steam for a physical disks...To the seedy part of the internet I go.

reply to WyattXavier
You are telling me never once have you tryed to open a game and got sorry bla bla is unavailible, please try again later?

Tell me this if steams so great why does it try dl it self when you have the dvd in your drive trying to install it? Why has this been happening on other games for a long time? Why has this not been fix? Is the the care they put into this system? Sure you can research a work around but we shouldnt have too, how old is steam this should have been fix ages ago. These are facts.

Nope, never happened. I know some years ago Steam servers were down and I couldn't log in and I had to go into Offline mode to play the game, but that was it.

I know for many games the CD/DvD is nothing more then the Steam client software, and then you have to download the game, don't blame Steam for that, that is the publishers decision there. Though I believe Skyrim has the encrypted Steam files on there according to others I know from another forum stating they installed the game from DvD and then had to wait for a small download, something like 200 MB

But the same applies to me.
I have a lot of games on steam (50+) and all of them worked without problems so far.

I had the thing with 'steam servers are busy' ONCE. When tf2 went free to play.

At 38 years old, I am buried in game boxes. I have multiple ceiling high bookshelves filled with games dating back to my Atari 800. This means I am a big fan of digital delivery of my games. I don't want any more collector's edition behemoths in my house. I remain interested in digital collector's editions. These metrics make me an optimum sales target.

Because of this I was one of the bleeding edge early adopters of digital delivery. Direct2Drive, Impulse, Steam, I've used em all.

One of my first experiences with Steam was the following:

Having dealt mostly with D2D (we'll get back to that in a minute), I had gotten one of my first Steam games, my memory fails but it may have been an Orange box Half-life Episode. It downloaded, activated-- everything was fine. A couple of days later I lost Internet. High-speed Internet not so good back then. Welp? Good time to play my Steam game. Except I can't because it's trying to hook up to Steam. I notice an Offline option in the Steam menu so I click it. It tells me that I need to go online, connect to Steam, so I can change Steam to offline mode. Needless to say, I remember being frustrated with Steam and this will remain in my memory. I've tested offline mode more recently and it seems they've gotten the kinks worked out but my initial experience will remain in my memory.

From that day on, I began doing business with D2D-- I've spent thousands with them and here's why:

I love that a D2D game is unlocked once. Once it's unlocked it's equivalent to a retail copy. This means it patches like a retail copy, it acts like a retail copy, and it mods like a retail copy. The only time it ever needs to be reactivated is if it needs to be reinstalled. I enjoy the ability to go the dev website, not sweat which patch, just download the top one (retail) and patch my game. When I wish to mod my game, I have the ability to follow the crowd because mods will work with my D2D copy as is. I've lost count how many times, I've seen the same question, "How do I mod my game-- I'm using the Steam version" followed by patient gamers providing the same special instructions. This dichotomy of experience remains in my memory.

I have some Steam games that have patches that 1. come out later than the retail patch. The complaints on the Steam forums regarding this have been colorful, to say the least. I observed this while enjoying my D2D unlocked retail games. I've also read about certain games, because they are Steam releases, require inefficient patching mechanisms-- sometimes having to download an entire pre-patched copy of the game rather than a much smaller patch. If memory serves, one of them was Witcher 2. I observed this while enjoying my D2D unlocked retail copy. The Steam patch for that game also came out days after the retail version. I remember the colorful remarks on the forums. I remember feeling bad for the Steam customers-- after all, they paid the same money that I did. That feeling will remain in my memory.

The week before Skyrim released, Steampowered.com got hacked and my personal information and encrypted credit card details are now in the hands of degenerates. Am I worried? Not so much, I canceled that card. It does show how a centralized system can be worrisome. This experience will remain in my memory.

Enough of this wall of text-- let's fast forward to current events because last Friday, even though I bought Skyrim from D2D, I was forced to use Steam like everyone else including folks that had a retail copy. On the day of release, when 230,000 other folks tried to unlock their copy, I received a message that I was unable to unlock my copy and the system was unavailable. So I wasn't able to play the game yet I was still out my $. This latest experience with digital delivery was also a first for me after all these years as a digital delivery customer. I couldn't unlock my game to play it. I'm a reasonable bloke and found something else to do. When I came back to my computer a number of hours later, it unlocked fine and I was able to play just fine. But this latest experience will remain in my memory.

In closing, I don't like having to run one application in order to unlock the ability to run another. Not if that application resides in memory, defaulting to hooking into my game for it's social genome. Not while I have options, at least. Of course, as most of us know, for Skyrim, I don't actually have to run it through Steam so I don't. But for an amount of time I thought it did. And I was anxious because of all the other Steam feelings that I recall from memory. And that latest feeling... will remain in my memory.

Cheers,

Chan

Yes, that happened to me as well (The Servers being busy for Steam/skyrim). Made me have to bypass steam entirely to enjoy my game.

Yeah this... I have had no issues with steam at all. Ever. The only thing I don't like about it is that it's just another program running in the backround, but I have a rather poor processor, so otherwise I wouldn't mind at all. Other than that I love it.

lol, no it isn't. Piracy is here because people want things for free, that is all it is, everything else you said is nothing more then justification that pirates use to lie to everyone else and to themselves. It doesn't matter how good the game is or if it has DRM or not, it will still get pirated. In fact the higher the sales are for a game, the amount the game got pirated is high as well. Crappy games don't get pirated nearly as much as the excellent games, and Non DRM games get even more pirated then DRM games do. Witcher 2 was DRM free from GoG exclusively on day 1, yet it only sold 35,000 DRM free copies from GoG, and it is a highly rated game.

Also due to inflation, PC games have actually gone down in price. If the prices of games have increased due to inflation just like everything else in the world has, games would cost nearly $90 right now.

Chandler, you are not christian weston chandler, are you?


Anyways, the thing with the 'retail patches' does not matter for skyrim because it is a steamworks game. There are no 'retail patches' for skyrim.

Steampowered.com are just the forums, and I doubt you somehow gave the forums your credit card info. If you did, you might consider putting your credit card everywhere if you dont want it at risk.

Servers were down because so many people were downloading games, this is exceptional.


Everything else is reasonable and true, and make for valid reasons for why you dont like steam.
On piracy, the guy above me got it right. "saving the industry", "the devs dont deserve my money", "because of drm"? [censored], free games. Thats the reason.

I don't understand how this is possible. I have played numerous steam games and steam goes down quite regularly. It usually only stays down for 3. to 15 minutes, but it does go down. This doesn't usually effect single player games unless you are trying to get in during the window, because it won't boot you once your in.

Nevertheless, this is irrelevant to Skyrim. Simply set Steam to offline mode and you never have to worry about not being able to play due to Steam offline issues or patches, ever.

I don't play Multi-player at all. So yeah, I can understand not being able to play a multi-player game if the servers are down, but this is true for even non steam multi player games when their servers are down, thats just nature of the beast.

Up front, as you can see from my previous posts, I am a champion of Steam. I love almost everything about it, but being booted from games due to Steam being down is not the same as non-steam multiplayer games. If your multiplayer game is on Steam, you lose connection if EITHER Steam or the games servers go down. Either one! It is a gigantic pain and Steam needs to do better with their redundancy IMO.

Only if it makes me seem more successful and better looking. Never mind the autism. Alas, my first name is Chandler, not my sur.


Sounds like you and I are saying the same thing. I spoke to that in my post. No matter how you purchased Skyrim, you must use Steam. However I put in another way. My choice has been removed and that's worrisome. On the flipside, D2D, classy as ever, gave me a discount from 59.95 to 53.95 for ordering through them rather than Steam. In addition, since I'm a gamefly customer, I received a 15% discount on top of that. I fear when these options are entirely removed, discounts will be a thing of the past.


Actually it wasn't just the forums. It was the forums and the steam web store. That is why they have the CC info. I knew this not because I assumed but because Gabe Newell sent me an e-mail telling me so.


No doubt. It's my understanding that that 230,000 number broke the digital delivery record by a wide margin. However, my experience remains. I've now experienced the digital equivalent of waiting in line on Black Friday at a large retail store. In essence, I've come full circle.

This isn't unique to Steam though. If you put your credit card number ANYWHERE online you risk it being compromised. Also, you do not have to have to enter your credit card to use Steam. And to set the record straight, there is no record that unencrypted CC numbers were stolen and no evidence whatsoever that even one credit card number has been compromised.