Petition To Abolish Steam

ToxicAvenger

<div class="IPBDescription">Please sign and pass along</div> Because of all the problems with Steam, the lack of tech support by Steam designers, and Valve trying to force a format of gaming that will become a pay to play, please go to the following link, sign, and pass along to all HL and CS gamers!!!
<a href='http://www.petitiononline.com/Toxic1/petition.html' target='_blank'>http://www.petitiononline.com/Toxic1/petition.html</a>
<!--emo&:angry:--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/mad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='mad.gif'><!--endemo--> <!--emo&:angry:--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/mad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='mad.gif'><!--endemo--> <!--emo&:angry:--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/mad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='mad.gif'><!--endemo--> <!--emo&:angry:--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/mad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='mad.gif'><!--endemo--> <!--emo&::asrifle::--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/asrifle.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='asrifle.gif'><!--endemo--> STEAM

s_viper3

<!--QuoteBegin--Toxic Avenger {FU}+Oct 7 2003, 02:19 AM--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Toxic Avenger {FU} @ Oct 7 2003, 02:19 AM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--> Because of all the problems with Steam, the lack of tech support by Steam designers, and Valve trying to force a format of gaming that will become a pay to play, please go to the following link, sign, and pass along to all HL and CS gamers!!!
<a href='http://www.petitiononline.com/Toxic1/petition.html' target='_blank'>http://www.petitiononline.com/Toxic1/petition.html</a>
<!--emo&:angry:--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/mad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='mad.gif'><!--endemo--> <!--emo&:angry:--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/mad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='mad.gif'><!--endemo--> <!--emo&:angry:--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/mad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='mad.gif'><!--endemo--> <!--emo&:angry:--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/mad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='mad.gif'><!--endemo--> <!--emo&::asrifle::--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/asrifle.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='asrifle.gif'><!--endemo--> STEAM <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
Steam is in the "high maintenace" category. Even if they do get it working "perfectly" (which must be mathematically impossible), if they ever do a major change to it, this happens all over again. We have game programmers trying to write a sub-level OS for games. It has failed because of this. But don't think this will stop them. They are game programmers, and most game programmers have very poor business sense. They are driven by ego and hero worship, and will not abandon a project, because if they did, it would mean admitting it failed. Right now, Valve admits "it has problems", but will continue to say things like "it will get better", etc. forever, though it will never come close to a usable state like the old Won system was.

Mark my words, by this time next year, and after HL2 has been out for a while and never ending bug complaints come in in regards to people doing mod development swamp their servers, they will finally brush this multi-million dollar travesty down the tubes. Things like steam have been done before: Virtually all of them have failed. The only ones that succeeded (or at least function on a usable level) such as battlenet for Warcraft 3, come from the fact they didn't try to create a operating system foundation for their games. In the case of battlenet games, its just another multiplayer addon like IPX or directplay.

Valve went "too big too fast". The kind of system they are trying to develop is not possible by the commercial market, not for another 5 years at least. This kind of a risky venture needs to be a open-source creation, as the input and addition of many various skilled programmers would be required. The problem with Steam, is that the developers working on it <u>shouldn't be.</u> They are not experienced enough, thus they could not forsee bugs and errors, and now we pay the price. As is the way of modern-day programming, Steam will need to be updated on a regular basis to keep it working with new creations and bugfixes. But with every update brings a bug or two more. It is a problem that adds up, exponentially, until you have developers using "bandaids" on bugs, to wipe them under the carpet (like most Y2K solutions). The problem is, these bandaids eventually come back to bite the developers in many ways, including speed, memory usage, maintanability and upgradability, and not to mention backdoors and security holes that sometimes result. It was for this reason that the Netscape project was abaondoned recently. Deemed too "patched up and slow" to be ever fixed.

Given a year's time, steam will ultimately be no different than it is now. Everyone dreading the next "update", wondering what will go wrong next.

Besides, why would I want something Steampowered? That was 150 years ago. I want something nuclear or fusion powered now.