On Steam Outages

This week's Steam Message acknowledges the extended Steam outages that resulted from the recent storms in the Seattle area, which has taught Valve they need some help from the department of redundancy department:
It was a busy and windy week here at Valve. As most of the community knows by now, last week a major windstorm hit the greater Seattle area. Power outages are fairly common in the area, but the magnitude of this storm knocked out our datacenter, resulting in about 20 hours Steam interruption. This was very frustrating for everyone here and we know it was frustrating for you as well. We learned a lot and are taking steps to make sure that when the next storm like this hits our area 15-20 years from now *fingers crossed*, people will still be playing games on Steam while we are buying flashlight batteries.
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Dec 23, 2006, 10:19
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... Dec 23, 2006, 10:19
Dec 23, 2006, 10:19
 
The only people who can play Steam games without Valve's restrictions each time Steam goes down like that are those using hacked copies. That speaks volumes about what Valve really thinks of its paying customers
Actually, it doesn't say anything whatsoever regarding what Valve thinks of its paying customers... absolutely fucking squat. All it says is that people pirate/hack games - big revelation there! Feel free to continue your pointless tirade but stick to the facts. Steam is subject to outages that affect paying customers, much in the same way that Guild Wars or WoW are - that has absolutely NOTHING to do with what Valve thinks of its paying customers. It could also be argued that Valve does not have adequate contingency plans but apart from this freak weather event and the launch of HL2, the first full-scale implementation of Steam encryption, there has been virtually zero downtime and even those few occasions have been pretty insignificant... in fact I'd go as far as to say that Valve have done very well with maintaining Steam so far.

Obviously without using a centralised-server it would be possible to avoid the outages, which is a legitimate point, but that's not the case or the reality of the situation and as long as Valve continue to develop/distribute quality/popular games then Steam will continue to thrive. If piracy didn't exist then there wouldn't be a need for such systems anyway.

I won't even bother continuing because you have demonstrated on numerous occasions that you are an unreasonable anti-Valve asshat with especially small genitalia and a predisposition to intercourse with your terminally ill mother (ill from AIDS that you gave her, which you contracted from ass-fucking monkeys). I hope you get leprosy for Christmas, though we can't all get our Christmas wishes.

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Founder of the "I Hate Smiley Fitz" society

Remember: Riley has autism. He has trouble communicating, and in an overstimulating
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"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."
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