Zoraptor

[..]Unfortunately New Zealand didn’t quite make the cut to get one of Valve’s Steam Content Servers, so TelstraClear has set up our own. This means we can cache Steam games locally for our customers. However, the way the Steam system has been designed, means that we cannot control and therefore cannot guarantee that all your Steam download activity will be directed through the TelstraClear Steam Content Server - the Steam system will automatically direct your download activity based on a number of factors (including the location of the nearest Steam Content Server, how busy that Server is, and whether or not the particular game is available on that Server). If all or any part of your Steam download activity is directed to the TelstraClear Steam Content Server, then we will not charge you any data usage charges for the portion of your download activity that is directed to the TelstraClear Steam Content Server (by caching the games locally on our Steam Content Server, we are able to make sure this download activity does not impact your usage allowance). However, if all or any part of your Steam download activity is directed to another Steam Content Server (or some other distribution channel, such as HTTP servers), then you will incur data usage charges for that portion of your download activity. [..] Sauce

Domestic inter ISP traffic is still far cheaper than international bandwidth as it uses domestic bandwidth which is practically unlimited compared to international, so it still saves money even if your ISP isn't actually running the server. Valve servers are clearly marked on the list, everything else too. I think there is a way to check which server you're connected to (? it may be just specifying a server to get unmetered traffic from your own ISP), but I don't know what it is.

That isn't steam- if you clicked the link I made you'd see that the server(s) are not run by steam (valve), but by your countries ISPs as a way to minimise international bandwidth costs. They'll also cache stuff to minimise those costs as well, and it isn't kotaku being brilliant if you're pulling its info down super fast because it's cached, it is your ISP saving money. meh, some people just hate other people disliking something they like. See it a lot with steam, people insisting that offline mode works 100% fine because it works for them, insisting that support is brilliant because they've never had a problem and that anyone who has had a problem is lying. Occupational hazard, but at least it isn't in a general interest thread now. Don't blame me bro, you said the "whole point", not "the reason I like it" or similar. Please try to be more accurate in future, ta. Yep, no benefit. There are other programs I can use to do all of those things, no need for steam, hence no benefit. They were available to you previously, you've just bunged a middleman in the, er, middle who OKs everything you do and everything that is released. If you cannot see why that is a problem you need only look at MS and windows- a far less militated and far more open system. Free IE? Nice microsoft, providing an alternative to Netscape that just happens to have a bunch extra, exclusive features that actually already exist. Extensions to Java? Ta MS, adding extra features out of the goodness of your heart and not at all to Embrace Extend and Extinguish. Ta Valve, adding mod support, something that PC games have had for ages, I'm sure you ain't trying the E3 strategy Gabe learned at MS because you've got a beard and like knives and reply to emails and aren't really interested in money just in being super awesome. In reality rather than fantasy steams's extra services are provided because they are lock in features to try and make steam default and necessary, not for any other purpose. It's just cannabalisation (or E3) of existing PC stuff, not anything new. If I get a new one I do exactly what I did last time I got a new one, either put the old disk into the new computer or image it to a portable (which costs less than a full price game does here for a whole new disk). I also have backups (!!!) of my HD. Even when I did have a HD crash it wasn't a problem and I lost precisely nothing. I don't have any asbergian need to have my HD full of games, just the ones I'm playing will do, anyway. Good thing about no gatekeepers (understandably, not something you'd think about) is that I don't have to go running to Uncle Steam to reverify or redownload anything at all, in most cases I can either copy the files back or double click the installs, nothing else required, and it doesn't matter if the internet is down or I've just moved house or whatever either. It's sweet, glorious freedom, not indentured servitude to the Lord Your Gabe. And, at the end, if you bought all your games from Impulse or Gamersgate you'd achieve the same 'benefit' as it ain't a steam benefit, it's a general DD benefit.

Since this is pretty much the antithesis of vide(a)o game news and I'll be able to dig it up every 60 odd days... The 'whole point' of steam is to allow you to have everything under one canopy? Not to, for example, make GabeN money? If you want the potted version of the reason I dislike steam it's that it wants to act as a gatekeeper over an open system, has monopolist power and provides no actual benefit over what being on a PC already provides. If steam did not have steamworks and did not latch itself lamprey like onto 3rd party games I would not care about it in the slightest. And I already have my PC games under one canopy, it's called 'my computer' (or Cyrus to be technical, precursor to Xerxes) If it's the same situation as here (and it is) it's ISPs mirroring steam's servers to save on international bandwidth, rather than anything to do with steam itself. I can, on occasion, get unmetered downloads from GOG because they've been cached as well, and that ain't due to GOG, it's my ISP saving $$$.

If you really want a reply create a new thread- as doing it in here every time must be boring for others- but if you ain't got my beef with steam from what I've said in the last couple of posts it's unlikely you'll ever get it since I can't really be much clearer.

Which is cool, I really don't have a problem with people liking steam, my problem is pretty much entirely with steamworks as I have a problem with the unlevel playing field, shift towards lock in and closing of an open platform, all of which are ultimately very large problems. The rest is just frustration at, well, steamtards. The sort of people who celebrate lack of choice because the only choice is one that they like. If I were appointed God For A Day I'd never in a million years do the reverse and wave my hand to make steam disappear yet many steam fans would clearly be happy to force everyone to use steam just because they like it and anyone with other preferences can go asterisk themselves, an attitude that for anything other than steam would be widely deplored. It's unimaginable that you'd get hordes of people advocating only one flavour of ice cream or milkshakes or one make of car or one television provider, yet only one flavour of PC game supplier? OH GOD ITS HEVAN, to quote the great philosopher ~aphatmc. Anyway, bored now, next steam rant in 60 days.

The suppressor thing amuses me, as we have supposedly very strict gun control laws but my neighbour has a stonking great suppressor on his (.223) rifle. We're obligated to control noxious pests so we have a .22 for rabbits and possums, per Guard Dog anything else would be, er, overkill for that purpose- and I'd be picking steel out of the fruit trees as a full time job if using a shotgun.

Greylord is correct, of course, steam killed PC gaming because steam is not PC gaming, it's a software console running via console not PC rules. Hardware is irrelevant, you could turn the hardware components of a PS360, cell phone, and certainly the next gen consoles into a PC if you wanted to, it's the applied software that makes it into a console. Steam has done nothing but metastasise and cannabalise PC sales into their walled garden, sales of actual PC games- no walled garden central authority follow our rules we'll take our cut for the privilege, the stuff PC gamers supposedly want- have declined massively, it's just pseudo PC gamers who won't face the reality of the situation because "Oh noes I'm not an unwashed console mass, I'm leet, I use steam, therefore steam cannot be a console QED FACT!" That's generally why I limit myself to saying anything anti steam to once every two months, arguing the toss is like trying to convince someone from the People's Temple that Jim Jones ain't the messiah, he's a very naughty man. Frankly, if it were something like milkshakes ("hooray, only chocolate milkshakes are being made now I like chocolate milkshakes good work MilkN! you strawberry milkshake fans need to get with the times! nobody really dislikes chocolate milkshakes they're just being internet hipsters! Only chocolate milkshakes aren't a monopoly, you can still buy them at a supermarket or dairy! I'd prefer multiple flavours but I'll suck it up I guess!) you'd never get the level of slavish devotion etc etc etc. If that malignant tumour at the heart of PC Gaming Steamworks didn't exist I wouldn't give two (er five) asterisks about steam and whether people used it same as I don't care if people use Impulse or any other client system, as it stands their quest to subsume everything beneath their banner is something I dislike intensely. TLDR Wake up sheeples!!!1!!! etc etc

Paradox said exactly the same thing- and in their case at least it is complete rubbish since every single version of their games is identical no matter which vendor you buy from so there's zero need for extra patch testing, if it works on one it works on all. Don't know if the situation is the same for Arma as I ain't played, but I'd suspect so if there's unified multiplayer or anti cheating.

Announcement is all about positivity and building hype and momentum, if they plan to do something unpopular like disallowing resale they'll fudge the issue as long as they can.

If you're going to miss a human sized target in the context of a home invasion it barely matters whether you're missing with an AR or a shotgun, if you're planning on hitting with your 3rd or 4th shot you'd be better off using a handgun than either as that has the best handling qualities of the three. If you're planning on hitting with your first shot you're better off with a shotgun, it's got a better hit probability than an AR since you don't have to be spot on target, it's got immediate stopping power- even a non lethal round like a bean bag will put someone down- and if you're in a real situation having your shoulder turn blue the next day is going to be the least of your worries. If ARs were brilliant at close range you'd see SWAT/AOS/SAS etc armed only with ARs when storming houses in hostage situations, in reality they tend to have shotguns, pistols and smgs for the close in parts, and ARs at greater ranges.

I cannot believe that the most important news of the past week, maybe the past decade has been missed; after decades of development in a top secret bunker in the Australian outback the demo for Grimoire has been released. This thread is Videa Game News in name only. It was the link generated by a search for 'Crysis 2', method was working for me yesterday as that is how I got the DAO link. Not a big deal anyway if it's easy to verify.

North Korea is cooler than the UK- I've seen both MASH and Casualty and they never huddle around burning drums for warmth in Casualty. DPRK 1 UK 0

You can buy the Ultimate Edition, sure, at 2.5x the price of the base game- but originally, of course, you could not and bought the basic edition with its built in dlc vendor, and at that point steam was fine with the situation, they only became 'not fine' later. The point of DAO being available still are twofold, firstly it shows that the Valve policy was not always what it is now, and secondly it shows that EA had no particular wish to stop selling their games on Steam as it is still there. Note also that despite Cry2: Max* being available on steam the base game is not**, which is different from the situation with DAO where both are available. As Tale said, the discrepancy is due to grandfathering, ie the changes to Valve's sale policy were not retroactive- unlike changes to their Subscriber Achievement... For how EA Partners games are different you can also look at KoA: Reckoning which went out of its way to appease Steam. The Steam version had no compulsory Origin, something that no 'proper' EA game has had since the last Alice game (?) *I hope the link is right, all of steam's game pages are displaying a blank page for me at the moment, guess someone has reported me to the mothership for Thoughtcrime and my IPs been blocked... **As above, from memory as I cannot check.

My hypothesis is because a female protagonist is novel. Now if we were to suddenly be subjected to the next 10 years of only being able to play female characters, it might be different. I tend to think the reason is that, by and large, they are the type of female characters that men like to play, largely doing the things men like to do. A Croft/Archer are both attractive characters (in multiple respects) being a spy or a 'extreme field archaeologist', ie doing stuff that men enjoy and which is relatively 'safe'. It might be different if an RPG had a female only lead; if Michaela Thorton had trysts with D'Arcy and Gelato Man and Brayko it might make some men a little uncomfortable. Personally, I've found playing a female lead with romantic options hilarious, but then I usually find male romance options hilarious as well.

Nation building is pretty critical though, unless you want to have to fight the same wars over and over. US would roflstomp any other country including Russia and China, they'd just take longer. Still, there is always the possibility of something unusual happening. Might be interesting if someone else has a satellite killer and could take out GPS to see how well the back ups work and how well the military functions without modern ease of use type stuff, or could hack drones in combat situations, or bring down the internet but fortunately we aren't likely to find out.

Regional restrictions? Their backgraphic is Crysis 3 at the moment, for example. Direct link for ME3 and DS3 as examples, even if it won't let you buy them. .. it has nothing to do with requiring Origin. Steam still sells Uplay games without Steamworks, or games like Tribes:Ascend where you can install from Hirez without losing anything. It's widely available information that EA games got pulled because they were selling DLC through the game, which broke Steam's agreement with EA, that's why Crysis 2: Maximum Edition exists, bundled DLC sold through Steam. FACT FACT FACT FACT FACT FACT- - - - - IT DID NOT BREAK EA'S AGREEMENT WITH STEAM, STEAM THEMSELVES ALTERED THE AGREEMENT - - - - - -FACT FACT FACT FACT FACT FACT That is why games with exactly and absolutely identical behaviour to that which you claim- incorrectly- to be the problem and published by EA like, say Dragon Age Origins are still available for sale on steam. When Origin came out suddenly the exact same behaviour meant no steam, due to Valve's changes to the sales agreement. Thus Valve excluded the games. If EA wanted to exclude them DAO etc would not be on steam at this very moment, and if steam always had those rules DAO would never have been on steam in the first place. Demonstrably, verifiably, FACT, not some "widely available information says". Sheesh, your objection makes absolutely no sense whatsoever unless it's steam being the problem, else EA wouldn't sell Crysis 2 there either let alone sell on other DDs. Your argument is, in effect, that EA is at fault for not slavishly following Steam's- altered, pray they do not alter them further- diktats, diktats which no other DD vendor requires. Contorted logic, at best. El Oh El.

I think that is a fair (if non fixable) complaint. Oddly enough I cannot recall seeing anyone complain about the reverse in TLJ/ NOLF or similar, but I guess it does happen.

Again, since this always comes up about how it's poor innocent steam being brutally victimised by nasty people not obeying their diktats automatically like a good Paradox* lapdog. Still got it the wrong way around. Steam refuses to take EA titles which require Origin, not EA refusing to sell them via steam as you can buy DS3/ ME3 etc etc just about everywhere apart from Steam and EA demonstrably did not pull legacy titles. The exclusion is because Steam changed their TOS to exclude Origin and similar things like Connect. It's 100% and uniquely Steam's fault for wanting to be a special snowflake and dictate terms to all and sundry, and again Steam expects other vendors to sell stuff under exactly the same but reverse conditions, ie with their client and shop front end bundled into it. The key to keeping companies honest is not to have some monopolist sitting on a mountain shouting orders to the peons below about how they should sell their games, it's to have the spine and intestinal fortitude to tell companies to go FOADIAF and- here's the hard part- actually stick to it if they do stuff you don't like. Honestly, the free ride Valve get with their crap you'd think they were selling the cure to cancer rather than being a glorified Gamestop selling wholly voluntary luxury good with zero intrinsic value while taking a slightly smaller- but inflated, given relative costs of e vs retailing- cut which ideally ought to go to the creator of the product, not some jumped up middleman. *Who are now selling on Uplay. Still not on GOG though, eh, eh? Pathetic, supine, spineless, and liars to boot. FOADIAF. **plain text editor, she go crazy!

Not that oby isn't massively overstating things but the west's military is rather paper tigerish. They'd blat the traditional forces of any mid range organised power in a matter of days or weeks but that is not what they are being used for. They won't fight anyone whose WORDS ARE BACKED BY NUCLEAR WEAPONS so performance against them is irrelevant, and they've proven themselves less than awesome against irregulars and prone to end with Vietnam style Peace With Hono(u)r solutions. Ten years on from Iraq War 2 and the crowning achievement is an Iraq that still has ongoing problems and has Iran as its best bud. Predictable, but hardly what Rummy, Blair, asterisk Cheney and co sold as the glorious future. The one thing you can guarantee is that whoever the west fights next they aren't going to 'fight fair' and go stand conveniently in a field with their AKs and RPG7s and wait to be obliterated by a drone strike just for limited cachet of being labelled 'honourable' by the press in the west. There's nothing even slightly contradictory about it. If you want an illustrative example look at Rome/ Varus at the Teutoburger Wald. Rome was indisputably the most powerful military force in the world and they were also inert and retarded, being defeated by a relatively small and definitively less well organised and armed group of germans due to tactical inflexibility and the Germans not 'fighting fair' (ie going and standing conveniently in a field to be killed off conveniently, as above). .Export model MiG21s though, that's a very significant difference. Really though, the soviets were always likely to lose at close to 1:1 odds just as they were in WW2, problem was that in most important situations the odds were not or would not be anywhere near 1:1 Comparing Beslan to an Entebbe or a Iranian Hostage Siege is facile, the scales, the skills of the hostage takers and situations aren't even remotely similar. Once the chechens had got into the school there was only one way it was going to end whether it was Russian or US or anyone else involved because you had a well armed, well motivated and well dug in group, and no prospect of surprise.

Presumably they'll just sell the games on each others services. If you bought something like EU3 on Origin you never have to play it through Origin, nor do you have to have the client running and this is true for all (?) 3rd party games sold there, it's just a storefront unless it's an EA title. In effect it would be similar to buying, say, Anno2070 or ME3 on another 3rd party vendor like Gamersgate and just about exactly like ZombieImpulse. The people getting confused by that over at RPS really show that they haven't used much other than steam, wanting the client to run full time on 3rd party titles is a behaviour just about unique to Steam and Steam alone, other clients are far less intrusive and nannying though still not as good as client free like GOG or Gamersgate.

And the ultimate enemy in TW1 was basically Adolf Hitler for that matter. Adolf Alvin and his SS chipmunks were about as much a White Male Power Trope as it is possible to get.

Yeah, that's where I got it from along with Pharaoh last year. Both good buys, I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed that type of game and they don't really get made any more.

I whacked the Twisted Rune in BG2 in an utterly anticlimactic and pretty much dairy free roflstomp. They (especially that lightweight Shandygar) seemed to get fixated on dealing with two summoned deva/ fallen deva. Got hit with the annoying BGT bug relating to having your romantic interest vampirised where you end up with the BG1 version (level 5 Viconia, awesome!) being restored rather than the level 20 BG2 version you'd been playing with, but fixed it OK. My fault really, I knew it was a potential issue but had forgotten. Now doing Watcher's Keep prior to going to save some hippy self righteous elves in their forest city of gazebos and swimming pools, and marvelling at how my Berserk with a THAC0 of -9 can't seem to kill a mind flayer to save his life having blithely slaughtered dozens of them in the underdark. Also played a bit of Zeus in follow up to playing Pharaoh.

Unlikely, certainly, at this stage though everything is by default unlikely as there's so little info- there's a better than even chance that it isn't anything that has been suggested. To be honest I'd suspect that WB is looking to a similar system to the alternating Treyarch/ IW CoD releases aimed at annualising the Batman games, so I'd also suspect anything coming out will follow the safe and profitable formula, not take a detour into RPG land. I could of course be wrong, and it would be potentially very good news for Obs if I am.