Does Anyone Truly Buy Valve's Excuse
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Anime Encyclopedia Join Date: 2002-08-08 Member: 1111Members, Constellation
Anime Encyclopedia Join Date: 2002-08-08 Member: 1111Members, Constellation
in Discussions
<div class="IPBDescription">For the current Steam update? (DDoS)</div> Just wondering if anyone truly believed Valve's reasoning for everyone not being able to connect to Steam for quite some time this morning.
Here's a snippet from the news:
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->This morning at about 8:30 PST, Steam was hit by a distributed denial of service attack. For about two and a half hours, Steam and its games were unavailable to users. We have since fixed the problem, and player numbers have returned to a normal state.
Steam's content servers are still busy with yesterday's update, but for the most part Steam users have been able to get up and running without problems.
The new email validation feature has been causing some users confusion. Our network problems have caused the validation emails to be delivered too slowly -- if you are waiting to receive your automated email response from Steam, please give it some time. We're sorry if this is causing inconvenience; the delivery speed will be improved soon.
Let us know if you're experiencing any other problems.
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It's a little too convinient, if you will, that these attacks suddenly occured right when the patch is released.
That's not to say that I rule out the possibility of a DDoS attack, just that I believe the truth is closer to Valve either A.) Stuffing up the patch slightly (Less likely) or B.) Not providing enough content servers (A reasonable possibility. Too many cooks, not enough brough.)
Indeed, it seems that a DDoS attack is just Valve saving face on a file delivery system that is simply riddled with problems.
I was once a very high nay-sayer on the Steam system. However I have since turned my ways around. It's a good program, but not without it's developmental, file distribution and marketing woes. Apparently the 'best' way to go about installing Steam is to get the full install file. Which is fine for those of us on broadband, but what about those poor sods still stuck with 56k? (Don't try the "Well they should just upgrade to broadband" card either. Many countries provide unrealistic access to the internet) On top of that Steam has been specifically geared towards high-end, broadband users. Literally closing the door on a high percentage of the Half-life community...
On top of that, even if you own a top of the line rig and broadband Steam is still slow to open (At least for me) and there are just some ludicrous minor problems with it (I was gettings 90000kbps updates on all the mods. Yeah. Go figure)
Sigh, perhaps I'm rambling... but I believe my point was something along the lines of 'The blind leading the blind'. Valve put this thing out there... The fans had to fall in line... and now we're all just trying to get along with the damn thing and every so often somebody will come along and make sure we don't bump into a wall...
That's not to say they didn't just turn us into the direction of another wall...
Valve really are making themselves the sarcasm martyr these days...
DISCLAIMER: That wasn't a shot at Valve. Merely an opinion I feel we all share quite a bit of the time with Steam. God bless that little green ****....
Here's a snippet from the news:
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->This morning at about 8:30 PST, Steam was hit by a distributed denial of service attack. For about two and a half hours, Steam and its games were unavailable to users. We have since fixed the problem, and player numbers have returned to a normal state.
Steam's content servers are still busy with yesterday's update, but for the most part Steam users have been able to get up and running without problems.
The new email validation feature has been causing some users confusion. Our network problems have caused the validation emails to be delivered too slowly -- if you are waiting to receive your automated email response from Steam, please give it some time. We're sorry if this is causing inconvenience; the delivery speed will be improved soon.
Let us know if you're experiencing any other problems.
<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
It's a little too convinient, if you will, that these attacks suddenly occured right when the patch is released.
That's not to say that I rule out the possibility of a DDoS attack, just that I believe the truth is closer to Valve either A.) Stuffing up the patch slightly (Less likely) or B.) Not providing enough content servers (A reasonable possibility. Too many cooks, not enough brough.)
Indeed, it seems that a DDoS attack is just Valve saving face on a file delivery system that is simply riddled with problems.
I was once a very high nay-sayer on the Steam system. However I have since turned my ways around. It's a good program, but not without it's developmental, file distribution and marketing woes. Apparently the 'best' way to go about installing Steam is to get the full install file. Which is fine for those of us on broadband, but what about those poor sods still stuck with 56k? (Don't try the "Well they should just upgrade to broadband" card either. Many countries provide unrealistic access to the internet) On top of that Steam has been specifically geared towards high-end, broadband users. Literally closing the door on a high percentage of the Half-life community...
On top of that, even if you own a top of the line rig and broadband Steam is still slow to open (At least for me) and there are just some ludicrous minor problems with it (I was gettings 90000kbps updates on all the mods. Yeah. Go figure)
Sigh, perhaps I'm rambling... but I believe my point was something along the lines of 'The blind leading the blind'. Valve put this thing out there... The fans had to fall in line... and now we're all just trying to get along with the damn thing and every so often somebody will come along and make sure we don't bump into a wall...
That's not to say they didn't just turn us into the direction of another wall...
Valve really are making themselves the sarcasm martyr these days...
DISCLAIMER: That wasn't a shot at Valve. Merely an opinion I feel we all share quite a bit of the time with Steam. God bless that little green ****....
Comments
If I was a script kiddy looking to wreak havoc I would DDos valve when it had to update steam, becuase the network will already be saturated with all you broadbanders trying to update steam.
[edit]
hi marik!
[/edit]
Again.
EDIT: **** Marike... Got Post Count?
If it was a mess up with Steam, then Valve would have effectively done a DDoS attack on themselves.
My answer is I don't know and I don't care what it was, I just hope that this doesn't happen next time they release an update. All I am is an end user who wants to play the game he put money down for. I don't mind installing patches or using Steam when it works (Like it is now, thank you whoever made it happen!), all I want is something that works well.
Also, I don't really care, it's not the end of the world if I can't play games on Steam for a couple of hours or a day, and Steam is working fine now, that is all that matters, who cares whether they really had a DDoS attack or not.
the initial steam public release took over half of them offline
That's not to say that I rule out the possibility of a DDoS attack, just that I believe the truth is closer to Valve either A.) Stuffing up the patch slightly (Less likely) or B.) Not providing enough content servers (A reasonable possibility. Too many cooks, not enough brough.)
I was once a very high nay-sayer on the Steam system. However I have since turned my ways around. It's a good program, but not without it's developmental, file distribution and marketing woes. Apparently the 'best' way to go about installing Steam is to get the full install file. Which is fine for those of us on broadband, but what about those poor sods still stuck with 56k? (Don't try the "Well they should just upgrade to broadband" card either. Many countries provide unrealistic access to the internet) On top of that Steam has been specifically geared towards high-end, broadband users. Literally closing the door on a high percentage of the Half-life community...
[SNIP] <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
It's "broth".
I must've been extremely lucky, I got the 500k steam installer to work fine on 56k.
As for the possibility that valve is lying... What's in it for them?
--Scythe--
However, because they probably already tightend up their security measures [b/c of the HL2 leak so long ago] it was probably some bungle in code that caused a overflow of info - like Marik said. BTW Marik, why is your post count at such a low number? Did it loop over back to 0 and started counting up again? <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Maintaining the integrity of Steam because the downtime was an external problem rather than an internal one.
I for one believe them; there have been 460,000 unique replies to the HL2 survey... it only takes one whiney little halfwit with a chip on his shoulder to DDoS the servers, and when you've got a crop of half a million it's pretty easy to find a lemon. And as previously mentioned, mid-update is the best possible time to make this kind of attack.
[edit]It's also interesting to look at the results of the aforementioned survey. There are only about 13,000 people using a 56k or slower - that's not even 3% of the total user base. Even if the 38,000 people who did not specify their network connection speed *all* use 56k (statistically unlikely), that's a total of 11% of Steam's user base.
We all know that at some point, you need to upgrade your system. AvP was one of the first games out that required a 3D accelerator -- people complained, but now it's pretty much understood that you have to have some sort of high-end video card to play cutting-edge games. It's understood that you need a fast computer, a lot of hard drive space (3GB for UT2k3, IIRC), lots of RAM, etc. In my opinion, recommending a broadband connection is the next logical step. Gaming is moving online; gamers are going to have to suck it up and follow. If anything, I'd say the hardware survey proves that Steam was a smart decision; despite what a fair number of vocal nay-sayers may say, the vast majority of HL gamers already have high-speed internet.
And nobody is really innocent in a DDoS. Unsecured computers become drones which ffed the attack, flaws in internet internal structuring + the general sad state of security on most servers, design flaws in software and hardware, and even the people who just want at the content (in this case, to play on Steam) hammer the server and make getting it under control that much harder.
Uhm, yeah. 97% of the people who downloaded the huge file shouldn't have any problems downloading the huge file, and that's a sign that most people can download it just fine. Do I sense a logic flaw?
I do believe steam is a good system, but I believe that the requirement to fetch all updates from teh internet is bad. I mean, on networks with multiple steam computers, everyone has to download the patch individually, and none of them can limit network speed so all of them kill the network downloading. I see that as a problem, but I trust it will be fixed sometime.
As for the DDoS, I don't much care. I believe it, because it would make sense, but I also wouldn't be much surprised to learn it was false. In short, I think both options are equally viable, and neither would mean much to me.
That is an informed, well-thought-out non-offensive opinion you have there.
<span style='color:orange'>Mmmm. Sarcasm -- it's what's for dinner.</span>
Valve either releases a good product, or they release it on time.
They've never done both. Any game company that can't hit its release dates within a couple months has absolutely no credibility, I don't care WHAT game they are. Source code theft? HA! Know how many games are released that were built on the code? A little too late you morons!
And you base that on what exactly? I personally think that the publishers tend to push the developers into providing release dates that they will have trouble keeping, because game programming rarely goes as easily as planned.
the prospect of playing with your friends with a few clicks seeing all their info havng an IM system and being able to add friends from ur current game is an absolutely brilliant idea!
But unfortunately 60% of the time (for me anyway) friends isnt working so you never see those friends u met that time when you played well ^^
I think with all the downtime and updates sofar it should be a fair bit better than it is
My oppinion anyway
I don't think that they could be victims of a DDoS, look at the amount of bandwidth all the content servers have, to DOS the entire system would take an absolutly enormous amount of bandwidth. Granted, they are using a ton of bandwidth on a regular basis but still.
I think it is obvious that Valve needs to get a new Press Release department. They don't release any news about anything. Some official statements every so often would be nice. Perhaps, even they could get a clue.
/rant
[nin]Th|eF
<a href='http://www.natoindexnumber.com' target='_blank'>www.natoindexnumber.com</a>
And think how many of those, even the 'hackers' *spits on term* have even the BEGINNING of the knowledge of how to execute a DDoS even on a simple DSL circuit, never mind something the size of Steam?
VALVe's rollout of Steam would have them <b>executed</b> in any other IT field. The fact that it is gamers has simply been used to allow some grievous failures to take place without any form of censure.
Combine that with the various problems users have had since (which stinks of poor hardware testing, yes I'm aware that you can't test everything, thank you Mr-Smart-Comment-Immediately-After-This) does really make them look like a bunch of codemonkeys.
As long as we keep playing their products we give them the clear message they can screw people around and the only consequence will be some people whining despite the fact they continue to play.
I'm not too bothered about steam myself, the rant being more about the casual attitudes inherent of publishers/developers towards consumers in this day and age =/
It was a gamescanner/messenger. You got a UIN like ICQ, and the frontend sorta resembled ICQ. Users on your list who were playing games got their game's symbol next to their name. To join them, all you did was double click their name and BAM. Made pubbing with friends so easy.
Also had this neat little retry feature that repinged full games every few seconds till there was an opening, letting you go about reading forums or sites while you waited.
Loved that thing. Too bad it passed beyond the rim.
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The fact that it is gamers means that there was a huge audience wanting them to "hurry the f*** up" and release something.
Sizer, I really don't think valve KNEW that it wouldn't make sept 30th when they announced it around April.
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The fact that it is gamers means that there was a huge audience wanting them to "hurry the f*** up" and release something.
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So? <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif' /><!--endemo-->
It's not like any of the software houses even VAGUELY keep to their release schedules. It's not much of an excuse.