Steam Haven

[Lexx]

I have bought exactly 0 games on GoG in 2017.

 

Most of the stuff released on Steam nowadays is simply trash. Just take a look at all these identical MMOs who all just look a bit different. Or all these identical open world sandbox survival games. I'm not saying they shouldn't be on Steam or whatever... I really don't care, because I don't bother with them... Just saying that there is rarely anything interesting going on as of now.

[SonicMage117]

Here's the thing though, while I don't expect anyone here to take me seriously for the obvious reasons that most users here on this forum are pro-GoG and anti-Steam, also the fact that some of the users here may be older which in case love GoG as it features "classics" from the 90's golden age of gaming by comparison Steam is modern/flashy and for kids

 

Greenlight has shut down months ago so there has been far less shovelware or even Rpgmaker games made by kids but over the last 5 years yes, definitely a mix of great indie titles and absolutely horrid ones. Still, would rather have a platform which enables/encourages new devs rather than restrict them. If GoG starts doing this instead of being greedy then I will definitely switch!

 

Honestly, I don't expect anything I say to change anybody's minds here but I will say that if these games were to "suddenly" come to GoG, then most likely nobody here would be saying anything negative. I say this only because we've seen GoG get plenty of horrible "classics" but that's okay because that's helping the GoG/DRM-free community out. Maybe I'll prefer GoG someday, who knows, the way GoG is currently run is unappealing to me at best. If major changes are made whilst keeping the Drm-free cause then I may consider switching.

[Lexx]

Eh, what's the deal with your fixation on "pro-GoG" and "anti-Steam" ... As far as I am aware, nobody except you mentions this stuff? Based on my experience, there is no such conflict going on here.

Edited September 11, 2017 by Lexx

[SonicMage117]

People on this forum have admitted they hate Steam in past threads lol shouting how they will/would never use it, for different reasons.

 

There are people here who have made a fuss and knocked anything small about anything that has to do with Steam down to the trading cards or leveling up on profiles.

 

The pro-GoG means they are for GoG, against DRM formats

The Anti-Steam means they do not support/like Steam

 

The same cult-movement I see on here, I've seen on other forums. It's okay, it doesn't bother me nor is there anything wrong with it. It just is what it is. I say it all though with respect as its not meant as an insult.

 

Edit: I should add that I do like GoG so I am pro-GoG but also pro-Steam. I just prefer Steam for what it's doing for the industry.

Edited September 11, 2017 by SonicMage117

[Bartimaeus]

Eh, what's the deal with your fixation on "pro-GoG" and "anti-Steam" ... As far as I am aware, nobody except you mentions this stuff? Based on my experience, there is no such conflict going on here.

 

Circa 2011, I was pretty happy with Steam and optimistic about its and Valve's futures. Lots of cool new futures, lots of pushing the industry and the markets with new innovations. There wasn't really a foreseeable future with Steam where things were going to be DRM-free, but oh well, you don't win every battle, and it wasn't one I ever expected anyways. My opinion on Steam and Valve have been in a slow decline since then, and at this point, I've been looking for a sign, any sign, that the Valve of old still exist. All I can see now is a company that only ever half-finishes ideas and features, takes literal years to fix bugs in their client, seems to have mostly abandoned making original games (and the creative process in general) in favor of either buying out other people's work and running with it (note: this isn't that new for them and it isn't limited to just their game development, either) or essentially never finishing anything at all because of their clearly now-dysfunctional company structure. They seem like a company that's in an extremely unique position to do some really great things in the video game industry, with near virtually unlimited resources...and yet, they just seem listless and directionless, always spreading themselves too thin over too many projects of wildly different designs and purposes that never quite seem to actually get finished, and so the only thing they really seem to care about anymore is raking in more money off of their incredible market position, and the utterly awful Steam Direct that is flooding Steam with an ever-increasing amount of utter garbage and shovelware is just symptomatic of whatever disease Valve seems to have contracted sometime within the late 0s/early 10s.

 

At this rate, I can't see my opinion of Valve and Steam improving: I can only hope that it doesn't get any worse - I'm not quite at "hatred", but rather just strong dissatisfaction, I guess. The biggest thing that I use Steam for these days is Steam Friends, for keeping in easy contact with my gaming friends: I only buy just a few indie games a year, and presently shy away from buying anything on it when I can. If I can instead buy from/pay directly the developer instead of giving any more money to Valve's obscene dragon's horde, I do. I'm not that big on GoG either, to be honest: Valve has taught me not to invest my money or time in these kinds of companies anymore, just as a rule of thumb in avoiding disappointment in yet another group of people or company succumbing entirely to greed. So I prefer to only give my money directly for the development efforts that I like, and nothing more.

Edited September 11, 2017 by Bartimaeus

[Hurlshort]

Steam used to run like garbage and had a completely botched offline mode. It seems to be much better now. 

 

edit: I originally used borked instead of botched, but after research, it did not quite mean what I thought it did. You learn something new every day!

Edited September 11, 2017 by Hurlshot

[majestic]

I say this only because we've seen GoG get plenty of horrible "classics" but that's okay because that's helping the GoG/DRM-free community out. Maybe I'll prefer GoG someday, who knows, the way GoG is currently run is unappealing to me at best. If major changes are made whilst keeping the Drm-free cause then I may consider switching.

 

So what horrible classics have you seen on GOG? Except Master of Orion 3 maybe, but that's arguably neither a classic nor truly horrible in the way a Ruins of Myth Drannor is. *shrug*

Edited September 11, 2017 by majestic

[SonicMage117]

As I said before, doesn't really matter what I say here (on this specific forum).

 

If I were to name any games in which my opinion or judgment were horrible "classics" then someone can argue and say it's all about tastes or opinion, fighting the inevitable... which was exactly my point in my original comment about judging thousands of games before playing them.

 

Of course difference being that I've played the games of which I have formed an opinion on. Which can be either a huge factor or a discarded memory depending on the reader.

 

It's easy but also extremely faulty to judge games this year on past years of productivity when nobody here has played them, I guess that's all I was saying.

 

https://www.gog.com/mix/bog_bad_old_games

 

Now I definitely wouldn't be able to take anyone who says "The reviews are good on GoG so it has to be good" because the reviewers on GoG are no different than the reviewers on Steam, extremely biased and indifferent. In fact, since the games on GoG are so limited in catalogue, I'm gonna say that GoG users are even more biased to give positive reviews than what's on Steam. Just saying :-L

[majestic]

As I said before, doesn't really matter what I say here (on this specific forum).

 

If I were to name any games in which my opinion or judgment were horrible "classics" then someone can argue and say it's all about tastes or opinion, fighting the inevitable... which was exactly my point in my original comment about judging thousands of games before playing them.

 

Of course difference being that I've played the games of which I have formed an opinion on. Which can be either a huge factor or a discarded memory depending on the reader.

 

It's easy but also extremely faulty to judge games this year on past years of productivity when nobody here has played them, I guess that's all I was saying.

 

https://www.gog.com/mix/bog_bad_old_games

 

Now I definitely wouldn't be able to take anyone who says "The reviews are good on GoG so it has to be good" because the reviewers on GoG are no different than the reviewers on Steam, extremely biased and indifferent. In fact, since the games on GoG are so limited in catalogue, I'm gonna say that GoG users are even more biased to give positive reviews than what's on Steam. Just saying :-L

 

Your honor, I rest my case. No need for even a closing statement here.

[Zoraptor]

 

I say this only because we've seen GoG get plenty of horrible "classics" but that's okay because that's helping the GoG/DRM-free community out. Maybe I'll prefer GoG someday, who knows, the way GoG is currently run is unappealing to me at best. If major changes are made whilst keeping the Drm-free cause then I may consider switching.

 

So what horrible classics have you seen on GOG? Except Master of Orion 3 maybe, but that's arguably neither a classic nor truly horrible in the way a Ruins of Myth Drannor is. *shrug*

 

 

Yeah, there's a massive difference between MoO3 'bad' and PoR2 bad (though to be fair, the most infamous PoR2 bug was actually a bug in the 3rd party installer software rather than the game itself). I actually liked MoO3 well enough, personally, as I hadn't played the first two games. OTOH I disliked Jade Empire strongly, though it's technically absolutely fine and a lot of people like it and found Rebel Assault 2 to be boring and have rubbish gameplay, but again some like it and it wasn't technically poor or anything.

 

GOG does sell a few games which are broken in certain circumstances- eg The Saboteur won't work if you have more than 4 cores- but they are labelled as such. I can't think of a single genuinely bad old game that is on there, and several newer but unsupported games have even been culled from their catalogue recently. About the only thing that seems to get you culled from Steam's catalogue is being mean to Gabe. There's certainly no way those 5000 odd 2017 games are all going to be supported and stable now, let alone in a year or two's time.

 

If anything GOG can be criticised for keeping things too up to date- which has led to some games losing support for legacy OS like XP.

[Bartimaeus]

About the only thing that seems to get you culled from Steam's catalogue is being mean to Gabe.

 

Spectacularly bad press can sometimes do it too, if the developer/publisher is small enough that Valve doesn't worry about offending them by pulling their game(s). That pile of flaming garbage Aliens: Colonial Marines was allowed to stay on, though, even after a huge amount of outrage over blatantly false advertising and total misrepresentation of the game.

[Bartimaeus]

Steam used to run like garbage and had a completely botched offline mode. It seems to be much better now. 

 

edit: I originally used borked instead of botched, but after research, it did not quite mean what I thought it did. You learn something new every day!

 

How many years did it take them to fix their offline mode? It's embarrassing. We still aren't allowed to have non-automatic-updating for even singleplayer games...all you can do is delay the update: Steam won't let you play it until it's been updated (or until you muck around with some semi-hidden files to make it think you updated, anyways). Steam Friends/Community also can't reliably keep track of when someone was last online (it often says they were last online like 20 hours just fifteen minutes after they signed off...), and they still have never fixed the "(User) is typing a message" that erroneously displays when you're talking to somebody but they're not actually typing anything that they introduced around 2011 and somehow never got around to fixing. Still no real customizable profile privacy settings, either...the latest versions of some forum board softwares have freaking better privacy options than Steam does. Bah.

Edited September 12, 2017 by Bartimaeus

[majestic]

Yeah, there's a massive difference between MoO3 'bad' and PoR2 bad (though to be fair, the most infamous PoR2 bug was actually a bug in the 3rd party installer software rather than the game itself). I actually liked MoO3 well enough, personally, as I hadn't played the first two games. OTOH I disliked Jade Empire strongly, though it's technically absolutely fine and a lot of people like it and found Rebel Assault 2 to be boring and have rubbish gameplay, but again some like it and it wasn't technically poor or anything.

 

GOG does sell a few games which are broken in certain circumstances- eg The Saboteur won't work if you have more than 4 cores- but they are labelled as such. I can't think of a single genuinely bad old game that is on there, and several newer but unsupported games have even been culled from their catalogue recently. About the only thing that seems to get you culled from Steam's catalogue is being mean to Gabe. There's certainly no way those 5000 odd 2017 games are all going to be supported and stable now, let alone in a year or two's time.

 

If anything GOG can be criticised for keeping things too up to date- which has led to some games losing support for legacy OS like XP.

 

I also enjoyed MoO 3 but doing so took some serious patience and the willingness to understand mechanics that - while sensible - weren't at all intuitive, or in other words, finding an answer to the question of MoO 3: "Why does the AI keep building troop ships?" was pretty tough. The manual was useless in describing the interactions between the statistics, just like the in-game help.

 

I can also understand why people weren't satisfied with the shift in gameplay from micromanaging a handful of planets to macromanaging an empire of hundreds of planets. It no longer was "Master of Orion" but simply a 4X game set in the Master of Orion universe. Kind of like JJ Abram's Nu-Trek is Star Trek in name only. Nice action movies, just no Trek. But eh, I digress.

 

PoR 2 never killed my operating system, I think I even got a patched version that no longer had the installer from death on the discs. The gameplay on its own was terrible enough. Almost finished it though. It's still on my list of games I want to complete at some point. Just for the sheer inanity of it all. :D

[majestic]

So I went and bought a game on Steam. Entered my payment details, tried to finish the transaction, gives me a nondescript error message about the transaction not being updated properly and I should try it again later. Except I had my credit card number down wrong, so no amount of waiting would have helped, nor did the transaction not work due to a faulty update or whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.

 

(Not to mention that Steam's payment details form has the usability and look & feel of a pre 2k Geocities web page)

[Gfted1]

Not sure if serious.

 

You entered an incorrect credit card number and feel that Steam should have told you what the specific error is? I cant recall ever entering an incorrect number but do other web stores specifically tell you if the number is wrong? Ive only ever been prompted to resubmit a form if I left a field completely blank.

[213374U]

Not sure if serious.

 

You entered an incorrect credit card number and feel that Steam should have told you what the specific error is? I cant recall ever entering an incorrect number but do other web stores specifically tell you if the number is wrong? Ive only ever been prompted to resubmit a form if I left a field completely blank.

 

Credit card numbers aren't random -- they have to conform to a checksum or some other algorithm. Entering an incorrect card number should prompt an "invalid card number" error, unless somehow Majestic managed to erroneously enter a valid credit card number that wasn't his own, or otherwise not good for the transaction. I work with this **** and it's a PITA to make the system accept fake card numbers so I can run tests... not about to use my own, obviously.

[majestic]

Not sure if serious.

Pefectly serious, yes. 

 

You entered an incorrect credit card number and feel that Steam should have told you what the specific error is?

 

Yes, obviously.

 

I cant recall ever entering an incorrect number but do other web stores specifically tell you if the number is wrong? Ive only ever been prompted to resubmit a form if I left a field completely blank.

 

Yes, they do. Have been doing ever since I went online shopping. Which was uhm... '98 or some such.

 

edit:

 

So, I just tried, GOG does so immediately, actually, without even having to submit the form.

Edited September 12, 2017 by majestic

[Gfted1]

Huh, alrighty then.

 

I guess its part of my mania to closely review the billing section to ensure Ive entered it right, that Ive never encountered that error. My wife is the opposite, she will click through stuff without even reading the prompts and it MAKES ME CRAZY! Ahem...

[majestic]

Huh, alrighty then.

 

I guess its part of my mania to closely review the billing section to ensure Ive entered it right, that Ive never encountered that error. My wife is the opposite, she will click through stuff without even reading the prompts and it MAKES ME CRAZY! Ahem...

 

Nah, that's fine. The amount of times I actually get the number down wrong is close to zero, maybe once in a year. I don't really check the number since it's muscle memory typing on the numbers block, 's just that every now and then my sausage fingers fiddle the wrong key. I was just surprised to get a silly useless error message like that from, well, Steam.

 

Which just goes to illustrate the point made here how Valve is resting a bit too much on their laurels.

[Blodhemn]

Talk about resting on laurels. It's really crazy that the offline mode is still glitchy after all these years. I assume the update check when a game is launched is a big part of the problem. Yikes.

[SonicMage117]

I've never had any problems with Steam thus far whether payments or offline mode.

 

I'm using Windows 8.1 which is the best OS for gaming. Does that make a difference?

 

Idk, I think alot of people who don't like Steam will not consider that it the format differs as the audience is mych bigger and it has wayyyy more features than GoG, Origin, Uplay or Epic launcher.

 

Marketplace/trading being the biggest one. I know nobody here probably cares about that but that is a huge plus.

[Blodhemn]

As a heavy Steam user, I'm not sure how much of that fits. Also I'm not so sure Win 8 is the best OS for games released a decade prior. But what do I know? Not much invested in format wars.

[Lexx]

I had to ise offline mode yesterday because my internet isn't working once again and it took many minutes till the client even gave me the option to use offline mode. This thing was loading in limbo forever... i guess until the final timeout happened.

[SonicMage117]

I think I get what you're saying now.

 

If you don't log on to Steam via another pc/laptop then offline should be fine from my understanding. If you do this, it will break the offline mode... which I think is only fair for any user/company in terms of contract. If this didn't happen, nobody would have to log in ever and everyone could share eaxh other's games for free.valve was smarter than that it seems.

 

Offline mode can probably void automatically if you log in and out of the phone app.

 

Also, if you have remember me checked and you have it to where steam automatically signs in on start-up but you log into another pc/laptop then you will have to log in with your password manually.

 

I use the two-step verification which sends you a text via phone provider or phone app Steam mobile, this is the ultimate security process for any user.

 

I think the first comment I wrote I may have misunderstood you, sorry about that.

 

 

 

Yeah, sometimes Steam takes a bit for me as well, whether it's updating on startup or just thinking in general. I use Steam's Big Picture in which has worked flawless for me, some people experience glitches on it but I've been lucky I guess. It's one of those things where some people experiences vary.

 

With all the profile info, messenger, marketplace, forums, diagnostic check, etc, security, artwork world, even if someone doesn't use any of that, it's still automatically booted up. Steam is like many apps in one so I kinda understand why it takes awhile sometimes, though I wonder how fast it would be if it was more focused on one thing like GoG.

[Fenixp]

When I try to download the free Bretonnia DLC for Total War: Warhammer, Steam launches the game instead of downloading free Bretonnia DLC fro Total War (and all that the in-game DLC page does is that it links to the Steam's store page, which then asks me whether I have Steam installed. From within the Steam's browser. In Steam's in-game overlay.) It is, naturally, an old issue that gets resolved differently for different people. I feel Valve is actively trying to make me buy a console for AAA games.

 

Edit: Solved by disabling Steam beta participation. Of course, I've had to enable beta participation in order to make my controller in Prey work properly on request of Steam's support. *sigh*

Edited September 23, 2017 by Fenixp