Went to play CS last night to kill some time (and people I guess). It said my client was out of date. Hmmm. Must have released an update. Cool. I let it search for the update. It came back with "Your client is out of date, but there are no updates available". Hmmm. So, I hit the forums. Turns out, Sierra is doing away with WON. The service that connects the billions of Half Life/MOD players together with servers. I didn't see anything about this on Sierra's pages. In the forum though, many people are having the same issue. The concensus is, you have to download Steam and play through that. Many people don't like Steam and are suggesting Game Spy. Well, I hate Game Spy, so I load Steam. Steam makes me create an account name/pass. It then grabs my Half Life CD key and says "This key will now ONLY work with this name/pass. Don't screw it up". Then is copies my whole Half Life/CS/TFC/Day of Defeat/etc over to a modified Steam modified area. It asked if I wanted it to delete all the original files. I said no thanks. So, I lost 1.6GB of disk space to Steam so far. Then, I said I wanted to play CS. Wanted to see how many servers are on Steam as WON had 50k+ servers at any given time. The first thing Steam does is update my CS to 1.6. Well. I didn't want to update to 1.6. I was perfectly happy playing 1.5 as were many, if not most of the CS players out there. 1.6 added stuff that people didn't think much of. So, I guess what I wanted doesn't matter.
In summary, Sierra/Valve did something that so far, I'm not happy about. I'm all disgruntled and angsted up and stuff. I'm content with no change as I get older maybe. Actually, I liked making my own desicions and not having things forced on me. But, oh well, I'm just the customer. What do I matter?
I'll keep you informed. See if my upsettedness is premature. That is, assuming anyone else cares.
If it helps Steam is getting bad press from around the industry. People think its way too invasive and generally treats customers like criminals.
“Every record been destroyed or falsified, books rewritten, pictures repainted, statues, street building renamed, every date altered. The process is continuing day by day. History stops. Nothing exists except endless present in which the Party is right.”
So far, it seems to be. Scanned my system for games it supports. Maybe I didn't want them to know about what I have loaded. Maybe being a new user, I didn't know it locked the CD key down and it just locked my borrowed friends CD key to my user ID. etc. I like how it sets up the server list, favorites list, keeps track of friends via buddy list looking thing. But, I don't like how it has to refresh the entire server list every time you start. WON would keep the list until you told it to refresh. When you are dealing with 10k+ servers and it scans 100 servers/3 seconds. . . . adds up to a long time to wait for the server you like to play to show up. I've added some to my favorites list. . . will be interesting to see if they are still there, or if they don't show up till the server list is refreshed. The games graphics looked boogered up some too. Not broken. . . just not like before and I might not like it. They added some new stuff to buy and TOTALLY screwed up the buy menus. I kept hitting the same key strokes to buy the same weapons I've been buying for years. Kept getting dumb things I didn't want. Will have to relearn the weapon menus. Minor things due to the 1.6 update that I'll get over/use to. But still. I didn't want it. It was forced on me.
And not sure it will help that Steam is getting bad press. Unless that changes something somehow. Cause right now, I still have to use it. I hate dumb software companies. They have the best, most played game EVER. Now. . . how can we piss off the customer base RIGHT before the new version of all our stuff is about to be released. . . .
And steam suuuuuuuuuuucks. All the happy, good, usefull tools don't work. It doesn't store your favorites. It doesn't store the history of servers you've played on, etc. It MUST redownload the entire server list every time you start it. But best of all. . . . there is no anti-cheat code. I played on 10 servers and was about to give up. If the teams weren't stacked beyond comprehension, there was an aimbot/wallhacker destroying a team. CS is virtually unplayable through Steam. I did find a server on the 11th try. But, not like I'll find it again as I never feel like waiting for all 10k+ (no idea how many there are as I haven't let it run all the way) to download.
