Thanks for breaking my game CA

Having not played NTW for a few weeks because I bought Mass Effect 2, I decided yesterday to fire it up again. I clicked on my NTW icon, up comes steam saying updating...... WTF says I, I had "Do not automatically update" turned on. So I go to the download tab to see how big it is, and its well over a gig, which may be nothing in the UK or US but in my neck of the woods is bloody expensive. So I pause the update, and try to launch the game. Nope, not allowed, it starts updating again and says it will launch in x amount of hours when it has raped my internet allowance and cost me a fortune in extra usage fees. So I turn steam to offline mode, and try again. "This game is not ready to be played in offline mode". So effectively this game is now broken until I download a huge patch I don't want, which probably contains all the files for the expansion pack I have no intention of ever buying. I can't help but feel that if someone tried this on xbox 360 or the PS3 there would be hell to pay, but no one seems to care because its a PC game and therefore it doesn't matter if they shaft the user. A case in point is Assassins Creed 2. On xbox or PS3 you can play it whenever you want, but on PC you have to be connected to the net, if your connection drops then the game pauses. Which means me and a large number of other potential players will never buy it, because my net connection is iffy and quite often drops out for a few minutes. Plus I have a gaming laptop which I take with me everywhere and unless I fork out another small fortune to get mobile broadband I wouldn't be able to play AC2 anywhere but at home. Same story with Silent Hunter 5, I've bought all of them from 1-4, but will never buy 5 because of the same DRM as AC2. And yet the pirates who this DRM is meant to hinder cracked it immediately, and can play offline. So the only people their DRM hurts is legitimate users, and their own sales. Way to shoot yourselves in the foot guys. Ok, went off on a bit of a tangent/rant there, but you get my drift, it really annoys me that that CA and steam don't even let me choose to download a huge update. Makes me feel like they have no respect for their customers.

you forgot to add in the end this: /rant

Now I feel you, I tried to go back playing empire and steam servers were so full that I spent 3 days to just log into my account, but after that... no probs

Originally Posted by Mr MM

you forgot to add in the end this: /rant

Now I feel you, I tried to go back playing empire and steam servers were so full that I spent 3 days to just log into my account, but after that... no probs

How is that a rant? Seems like a legitimate criticism to me?

Your post on the other hand is arrogant and rude.

Yeah... extremely annoying when you get home after finishing your exam and have to wait endless hours just to watch steam updating (happen to me in empire 1.5). Now I just simply click on 'remenber my password', and steam will automatically open (and update) when my dad woke up and start the comp at 6 am, the update normally will finish when I woke up at nine (holiday!).

they consider auto updating a feature and a service. But i dont see how you can blame CA for this.. more like steam. But its the nature of the beast. Most of these companies are assuming you have the bandwidth to update games.

well most have at least a 1mb connection nowadays, I have a 10mb connection and I live in Brazil, where all things related to pcs are darn expensive

I haven't been able to play NTW for a month now because of the stupid update wanting to redownload the whole game.

Yeah, not good on a freaking satellite internet connection with a 500mb/day download allowance. 22 gigabytes my ass.

Thankfully we'll be at a place that gets a cable connection soon. Download limits are the worst thing ever.

Originally Posted by Swerg

I haven't been able to play NTW for a month now because of the stupid update wanting to redownload the whole game.

Yeah, not good on a freaking satellite internet connection with a 500mb/day download allowance. 22 gigabytes my ass.

Thankfully we'll be at a place that gets a cable connection soon. Download limits are the worst thing ever.

This happened to me too, but I re-installed the game from the DVDs and after that it only downloaded the update.

I know what you mean, I have a 80g restriction

If the game is trying to download itself.... there is another problem

Originally Posted by Mr MM

I know what you mean, I have a 80g restriction

If the game is trying to download itself.... there is another problem

So glad I have access to a university-grade connection in my residence… my family's stuck with a bottom-end DSL (300 kilobit on a good day; the telco can't give us anything faster, and we'll be damned if we pay Rogers a cent), and I think the monthly limit is still 2 GB .

All those words in that huge paragraph in the first post sort of blurred together after the third line. tl;dr.

If you had elected not to download automatically, Steam generally does not forcefully apply patches unless the install is a mess or corrupt.
You could always reinstall from scratch, I am guessing by the content of your post you did not buy a dl copy. I am not going to give details due to the rules of this forum(Google is your friend), but it is possible to get hold of older steam updates for this game, outside of steam; which would enable you to bring your copy up to the same state it may have been pre patch while being kinder to your bandwidth.

Originally Posted by Hexcaliber

If you had elected not to download automatically, Steam generally does not forcefully apply patches unless the install is a mess or corrupt.
You could always reinstall from scratch, I am guessing by the content of your post you did not buy a dl copy. I am not going to give details due to the rules of this forum(Google is your friend), but it is possible to get hold of older steam updates for this game, outside of steam; which would enable you to bring your copy up to the same state it may have been pre patch while being kinder to your bandwidth.

Nice notion, but Steam has a habit of changing settings and randomly deciding that the entire game's data file is corrupt and needs to be re-downloaded. It did it with ETW and NTW to me, usually about the same time it decided to DL a patch after I told it not to.

Steam sucks.

you can try to stop steam from altering your files, specially after steam updates itself

Originally Posted by Mr MM

you can try to stop steam from altering your files, specially after steam updates itself

So every time Steam updates, I should check that it hasn't reverted my "Do not automatically update" back to "keep this game up to date automatically" before I try to launch it?

it is a good policy, since that sometimes when there is a major update of steam people claim that it leads to revert to basic settings... since I don't care about if it updates or not I can't confirm myself

And that's just one of the things why I don't like steam. I admit it was hate on the first sight when few years back it forced me to download some files for my Half-life 2 as part of its copy-protection. I had only a dial-up back then so you can imagine how painful the following hours were.

Now I have 8 mb line with no monthly limit but I still don't like that adware service.

What you post or not, is not my concern, nor is your opinion of my posts. Although what he said fits exactly the bill for a rant, you can see that steam failed with me once too, and that was what I was sharing.

Settle children, play nice. And it was a bit of a rant, I even mentioned that I'd gone off on a tangent/rant.

I am settled down daddy