Its a big deal when it prevents paying customers from well... paying.

Playing a steam support ticket isn't really going to do much about server issues. They are just going to say something like "try again later." Valve IS aware of this stuff, not 30 mins ago I was chatting with a valve employee who said they were aware of the demand issues from the sales and were working on it. The problem is they should have done this BEFORE the sale, not during.

That peer stuff with hubs is for bandwidth of content serving. While that's a problem too, many of the errors I've been posting in this thread are are from not enough steampowered store servers which ARE under valve's control and CAN be solved by adding servers.

Dades wrote on Jul 5, 2011, 17:09:

Same goes for reserve bandwidth, etc. If they did this every time there were capacity issues, they'd quickly overcome them. Doubling might sound like a lot, but valve has humongous growth rates anyway, they'd need that capacity pretty soon regardless.

You keep using Steam despite having supposedly many issues with it. Why should they change anything? You act like this stuff is a big deal but you don't do anything about it. I can't say your attitude about their problems being easy to solve by just throwing money at them is very realistic or knowledgeable either. Valve doesn't have their own dedicated worldwide network in a traditional sense, they peer with major hubs around the world using CDN placement. They can't just magically make all of the peers be able to handle their capacity either. It's amazing it stays up at all under the weight of 20 million users mashing at the same time to see what the sales are while also delivering patches, demos, streaming video and all that shit.

If it's so insufferable then start exploring the problem with Steam Support or stop using it. I can't think of a single service other than Amazon that manages to handle that kind of burst demand without investing hundreds of millions into infrastructure. Maybe Valve does need to investigate more distributed load balancing like Amazon but don't act like that's going to happen quickly, without growing pains or affecting things people like about Steam like the frequent sales.

Same goes for reserve bandwidth, etc. If they did this every time there were capacity issues, they'd quickly overcome them. Doubling might sound like a lot, but valve has humongous growth rates anyway, they'd need that capacity pretty soon regardless.

Krovven wrote on Jul 5, 2011, 14:41:
Don't know what to tell ya Dev. You are the only person I know of that has been having any real issues.

Error 503 Service Unavailable
Service Unavailable
Guru Meditation:
XID: 1194269462
Varnish cache server

Krovven wrote on Jul 5, 2011, 15:09:
As for the Access Code...can't you just try having it sent again? I've done that 3 times in the last few days and again, no problem.

Krovven wrote on Jul 5, 2011, 15:09:
Just doesn't seem like a very big deal to me. I get more page errors just randomly browsing the web.

Dev wrote on Jul 5, 2011, 14:45:
Start browsing some publisher catalogs and look at every screen of games they have (especially if they have more than 30) and you'll see that message pretty quick

Krovven wrote on Jul 5, 2011, 14:41:
Don't know what to tell ya Dev. You are the only person I know of that has been having any real issues.

Error 503 Service Unavailable
Service Unavailable
Guru Meditation:
XID: 630883625
Varnish cache server

Not exactly true blah blah blah, links to community patch

It's usually their writing that annoys me. The same characters, played by the same actors, in the same stories, again and again and again. I repeatedly heard this had 'old school' (i.e. hard) rpg combat, and choices are always nice, so I clicked the buy button and hope to finish downloading before 2013.

Dades wrote on Jul 5, 2011, 07:52:

and its very annoying to have to wait for longer than usual page loads from steam

First world problems.

and its very annoying to have to wait for longer than usual page loads from steam

Slashman wrote on Jul 4, 2011, 11:12:
Dragon Age: Origins is actually a great game with meaningful choices and consequences and combat that doesn't require the use of an awesome button. The DLC and expansion seem not to be that great. I didn't buy any of them. But the base game is worth it IMO.

Krovven wrote on Jul 4, 2011, 12:50:

Dev wrote on Jul 4, 2011, 06:38:

vacs wrote on Jul 4, 2011, 05:16:
on a different note: Steam is completely down, no connections can be made to any steam server worldwide. Of course one can still play one's game offline.

Come on valve, this happens every big sale or game release, you need to start quadrupling your reserve bandwidth.

So going down briefly for maintenance at 5am EST (2am PST) is unacceptable?

Dev, you ranting about Steam not having enough servers, etc, etc is getting a little long in the tooth considering Steam has very very little downtime and even more rarely that it falls during prime-time.

Jerykk wrote on Jul 4, 2011, 17:57:

Most of the mods don't really fix much, they just change the gameplay elements or modify cosmetic aspects of the game.

That's not entirely accurate. There are tons of community fixes on Newvegasnexus.com. 215, to be exact. There are also a couple of compilations for these fixes, though the one at newvegasnexus is pretty outdated. The one here is more up-to-date: http://www.ravenmodding.terminal47.net/?p=768>lang=en

Most of the mods don't really fix much, they just change the gameplay elements or modify cosmetic aspects of the game.

Verno wrote on Jul 4, 2011, 13:17:
That Frozen Synapse price finally looks about right, I think I'll bite on that and meh to the rest which I already own anyway. I think some of us are rapidly approaching the steam saturation point where stuff can go on sale all they want but we already own most of it