I am having serious problems with Steam and cannot play Portal or Dawn of War II

[Randel]

Okay, this appears to be a somewhat common problem. I bought the retail versions of both Portal (not the orange box) and Dawn of War II (I didn't know that Dawn of War II requires steam to work and did not see valve or steam listed anywhere on the box).

Anyway, steam apparently needs to download a whole bunch of updates before it can do anything and unfortunatly I'm one of those few people in the world who uses dialup. My dialup is actually pretty good, but Steam doesn't save its progress and occasionally shuts off at 20% or something and then just closes itself instead of having the decency of giving me an error message or a chance to resume when I have a better connection.


So, my question is: Has anyone else had problems with Steam and have any suggestions on how to solve it? If there was some way to just download all those updates using a normal download manager (or a torrent) then I'm pretty sure my problems would be solved.

My current 'solution' is to just never buy another PC game again ever on the off chance that Steam managed to jam itself into the program and make it impossible to play the games that I bought at the store and have a CD sitting in my disk drive right now. I'm just glad that I didn't try downloading a game with steam off their online store because that seems like it would just be a huge waste of money since their program apparently can't download anything.

[Vazzaroth]

If possible, try to leave it on overnight. Steam is doing a sale right now, and I think there's alot of people Downloading they're new games. I kept getting the "Steam servers are too busy to handle your request" when I tried to DL a mod yesterday. Trying to download at non-peak hours will help.

Failing that, or if it persists, you can have someone with a faster connection download steam then put it on a flash drive or other media.

While I am now a huge Steam fan, I do admit that its a horrible solution for the minority of people with dial-up still. When I started using it it was a pain in the ass to patch counterstrike:source for like a week.

[KBF]

Yeah, bottom line is that Steam is having a huge, huge sale right now and download times will be way, way faster when it ends on Jan 3rd.



Also you might want to consider not being one of the few people with dialup. Now please, no one else post saying this.

[Shas aia Toriia]

Also you might want to consider not being one of the few people with dialup. :smalltongue:

[RS14]

Okay, this appears to be a somewhat common problem. I bought the retail versions of both Portal (not the orange box) and Dawn of War II (I didn't know that Dawn of War II requires steam to work and did not see valve or steam listed anywhere on the box).

My current 'solution' is to just never buy another PC game again ever on the off chance that Steam managed to jam itself into the program and make it impossible to play the games that I bought at the store and have a CD sitting in my disk drive right now. I'm just glad that I didn't try downloading a game with steam off their online store because that seems like it would just be a huge waste of money since their program apparently can't download anything.

Return them then. If they weren't marked as requiring Steam, you've got a solid complaint. The store will refuse; threaten to sue in small claims court (requires acceptance of unreasonable terms before use; as you do not accept those terms, which were not mentioned at the point of sale, your software is utterly unfit for its intended purpose.) If they still refuse, sue them. Admittedly, it will cost about the same as just eating the loss. But who would you rather have your $50: the courts or the jerks who sold you this unusable product?



Also you might want to consider not being one of the few people with dialup. Now please, no one else post saying this.

There are places, particularly in the rural US, where you simply can't get DSL or cable services. There are some satellite internet services, but they tend to be quite expensive.

[Randel]

Update:

Success! I got my laptop and an 8 GB thumbdrive and got all the updates and stuff for Portal using my local libraries wi-fi access. I was able to play Portal and beat it!

Rather nice experience.

I should be able to get Dawn of War II working soon, just a matter of downloading it (apparently everyone is having trouble using the install disk due to poor handling of third-party software and stuff. Yeah, steam is a real pain in the butt if you don't have super-fast internet that can magically send gigabytes into your computer extra fast).


But really, this is a pain. I'm not going to complain too much since hopefully with enough juggling of thumbdrives I'll be able to play the game I spent a ton of money on (my high end desktop has dialup, and my laptop I can hook up to the high-speed wi-fi doesn't have the ram to play the game... and the DvD rom drive on it broke).

After looking though all the support forums with people complaining about this same thing, alot of them say that it seems actually much easier and less of a hassle to just download pirated copies of Steam games instead of buying them (not to mention alot cheaper... you know, aside from jail and all). I mean... dang... I can actually hear my little shoulder-devil practicing his 'evil is good' song.


Anyway, I've got the situation under control now. Thank you all for the help.

[Jamin]

Return them then. If they weren't marked as requiring Steam, you've got a solid complaint. The store will refuse; threaten to sue in small claims court (requires acceptance of unreasonable terms before use; as you do not accept those terms, which were not mentioned at the point of sale, your software is utterly unfit for its intended purpose.) If they still refuse, sue them. Admittedly, it will cost about the same as just eating the loss. But who would you rather have your $50: the courts or the jerks who sold you this unusable product?


No don't sue you will be the loser of time and money.

[Trixie]

Yes, suing is the last option you want to pick. Threatening legal action and/or going to consumer protection organization might help, too.


And by the way, I sort of remember a few people here convincing me less than a week ago how great Steam is :smallamused:

[Demented]

And by the way, I sort of remember a few people here convincing me less than a week ago how great Steam is :smallamused:
Doesn't sound like they really convinced you. :p

But it IS! When you have something better than dial-up. Or an allergy to cloud computing/application service providers. Or an affinity for giving out your name and password to anyone with a username that somewhat resembles someone operating in an official capacity. (P.S. SteamService11223 wants your steam name and password to verify the thingamabob integrity of your account, except with every third word misspelled. He sounds totally legit.)

In other words, it's great, except when it's not great. Sigh.

It would just be so much easier if you could just fit everything into a 'great' basket and a 'not-great' basket... Then again, it would also be easier if everywhere in the world had free broadband access.

[Smight]

Should have used Impulse, thay at least dont discriminate with thair prices basen on where you live.

Strike that they only sell DOW 1