Sunday, December 21, 2008

What I HATE about Steam.

While I love Steam for the great service it provides to gamers there are a few things that I hate about it.

Here are some of them (Will update later as I think of them)
  • Games won't download/update while you are in-game - Say you just bought S.T.A.L.K.E.R. cause it was on sale for $3.74 (like I just did :P), it's 5gb so it's a fair download. You think "Hey this is gonna take 3hrs to download" (according to the steam estimated time) so you decide you'll play some Half-Life 2 (keeping in mind this game is singleplayer only!) After playing Half-Life 2 for a few hours you conclude "Surely S.T.A.L.K.E.R. must be downloaded by now!" so you quit Half-Life 2 all ready to play and what the - lo and behold Steam has decided that it would pause your download because you were in-game! A singleplayer game!!! This applies to LAN games too of course, even if I was on a net game I wouldn't mind Steam just limiting the download to 10kb/s less than max or so to stop me maxing my connection and having a smooth gameplay experience.
  • Games Updating in the Launch Window Restart When You Close it - If you try to launch a game, and it starts updating, if you close that window, instead of updating in the background, it starts over in the background. This means all the time and bandwidth used goes to waste. It should continue updating from what it had already downloaded. (Josh pointed this one out) 
  • If you copy GCFs over Steam will complain you don't have enough space when that's irrelevant - If you have Steam open and you have 10gb free and you copy over someones 7gb of Team Fortress 2 gcfs then Steam will not automatically pickup that you have it, you have to go to Team Fortress 2 in the Store and click "Install". Steam will then complain you don't have 7gb free space even though that's irrelevant as you already have the files and refuse to go any further, it should check to see if you actually have the GCFs already or not before it complains at you.

No comments: