Loading... Steamed

Welcome to the 1,029th Edition of Loading...

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The Pulse

You vote with what you view at Ten Ton Hammer, and the result is the Ten Ton Pulse (What is Pulse?).

Here's today's top 5 Pulse results for today:

Biggest Movers in the Top 20 for today :

Global Agenda (UP 37 to #15)
Atlantica Online (UP 2 to #11)
City of Villains (down 2 to #13)

Loading... Daily

Loading... Steamed

With developers like SOE and EA increasingly dependent on Steam for distribution and anti-piracy measures. MMO developers might want to note the rampant player support issues that gamers have experienced with Fallout 3, Dawn of War 2, and yesterday, Empire: Total War. As anxious as we are to see a digital download experience that beats the evaporating Games for Windows retail intiative, putting all of our eggs in the Steam basket might not be the best choice just yet. Learn why in today's Loading...

Loading... digitally distributed without DRM.

Transcription is a dirty job, even if you are a pretty good typist, the punctuation, grammar, half-formed sentences, and inflection slow things down considerably, and I'm not the best typist. But we all share in the shyte here at Ten Ton Hammer. I was typing up the Champions Online - Bill Roper dev chat from last Thursday night's Loading... Live vooncast (CCP on EVE Online's March 10th expansion Apocrypha tonight at 7pm Eastern, by the way, join us!) for a good 5 hours yesterday and was looking forward to a good night of gaming.

I'm easily as big a strategy game fan as an MMO fan, and Empire: Total War was released yesterday worldwide. The Total War games, along with the Civilization series, has been on every PC I've owned, and if there were a /timeplayed slash command for these games, I wouldn't be surprised if my total was in the many months.

So naturally Empire: Total War, described by some early reviews as the ultimate strategy experience on the PC, was a big deal to me, and yesterday evening seemed like a perfect time to unwind. I'd paid my $73 for the collector's edition well in advance (though I hate, hate, pre-ordering when I don't get into beta too- with retail it almost made sense, what with inventory and all, but with digital distribution, not so much). After a six hour download of a client that rivaled beta Vanguard for size, I installed the game only to find that you must have Steam and an Internet connection to "activate" the product and play. Interestingly, there's no multiplayer component to the game (yet), so this is purely a DRM thing. Entering the key I got the error "Servers are busy, try again later" and the game didn't appear in the My Games tab in Steam or anywhere else on my computer.

Annoying, but it happens on launch day, and from what I read on the Steam boards the same thing happened with Fallout 3 and Dawn of War 2. So fine, I waited a bit and tried re-installing, which is when I got the much more distressing message "This game cannot be installed. (Cancel)" Wha? Ok, my rig is certainly capable, I just paid the equivalent of a half month's worth of value meals for the Special Forces Edition (told you I was a fan, though SE turned out to be my downfall), and now Steam is telling me that installation is verboten without even the reacharound of a detailed error message. I tried uninstalling, which only took me to the Steam My Games page. Apparently the headache that is Vista even bows to Steam.

The next few hours were spent reading forum thread after forum thread, typing up polite if terse support tickets for Steam, SEGA (the game's publisher), and Direct2Drive (where I downloaded the game). No one on the Internet has a 1-800 number or live chat helpdesk anymore, which is a definite problem if we have to rely on these companies for licensing to play our games. Steam makes Blizzard seem like a dream to deal with in regard to instant support gratification. I deleted blob files, re-downloaded the client files, reduced my router's formidable firewall to a ghost of its former self (though I'd never had trouble with blocked ports ever with Steam), tried to trick install shield into doing a fresh install, and ultimately uninstalled and reinstalled Steam, losing all of my installed Steam games in the process - there goes another few hours of downloads and installs. Reinstalling Steam at least let me install the game from scratch, but still I got the "Servers Busy" message (a look at Steam's traffic monitor showed that the midnight traffic had decreased considerably from 4 hours earlier) followed by the mind-shattering "This game cannot be installed".

Finally, at about 1 AM (with launch day gone forever) I get an email from Direct2Drive. The Special Forces Edition had two separate keys, a base game key and a special edition key, and they'd only sent out the SE key. This is apparently why the install failed and appeared to break Steam. In their defense, D2D has given me very good customer support in the past, but still, I don't think I'll be purchasing from them in the future unless I have no other choice. From what I saw and read, there were plenty that didn't go D2D around the Internet that had plenty of trouble with rancid download rates and the "servers busy" message from Steam too. My real beef is that Steam didn't reject the extras key when I was installing the game - that would have pointed me directly toward Direct2Drive and less frustration, if not an earlier resolution.

For their many respectable advances and million-plus world-wide concurrency, Valve still has a long way to go before devs should go all-in with Steam, starting with phone-in support, pre-loads for every game (to eliminate the bandwidth bottleneck), and better key testing procedures to kick out bad keys. Stardock continues to impress me, and I'd hope that they get a bigger slice of the game release pie to see how they'll handle things.

I did finally play some E:TL at 2 AM this morning, and how good was that fifteen minutes of ship combat tutorial? So good that my thoroughly exhausted self couldn't sleep for wanting to play more. After six hours of downloads and as half as much again with trying to get a bad key to work, the magic of gaming was restored to me, but this is going to be one long workday.

Have a digital download horror story of your own? Share it in the Loading... forum or feel free to email me.

Shayalyn's Epic Thread of
the Day

From our AoC: The Courtyard Forum

Age of Conan subs fall below 100,000

Okay, before I hear the sound of thousands of gamers lurching
forward in their seats and shaking their fists to proclaim that the
title of today's Epic Thread is nothing but journalistic
sensationalism, let me say this:

Cambios started it!

And,
actually, he was pulling his info from a Eurogamer article on Age of
Conan, and they were speculating on Funcom's own fourth quarter
financial results. You might say he had some of his facts straight,
even if the "facts" he presented were more like guesses.

So,
why Epicify (Shut up! It's a word) this thread if it's not chock full
o' hard facts? Simple--I kinda like AoC, and I like to see people
talking about it. I felt the bones of the game were solid, and while I
played it I had fun and enjoyed the story line. For me, the fun tapered
off too quickly, but enough time has passed since launch that I'm
confident some more fun has been piped into the game by now. I may give
it yet another whirl someday soonish.

Plus, I like fights. And
Cambios and Acidbaron are going at it in this thread. If you want to
fight, too (or maybe just to state your case for or against AoC
in a calm, balanced, rational manner), we've got a thread for that.

=================================

Awesome Quotes from the
Epic Thread:

"That's
a nice little drive by personal attack. Too bad it is inaccurate. My
posts and articles always have facts, citations, etc. And I avoid
personal attacks as well. It is a good system--I highly recommend it."

- Cambios

"Your
'facts' were picked apart on several occasions. Your personal agenda
against this game was clear since the first day you set foot on these
forums. Same goes for your populist approach of trying to get as many
clicks [as you can] on your own poorly-constructed blog,
which again confirms that your main motive is to get personal
attention. And if you wanted personal attention...you got it now."

- Acidbaron

=================================

Do you have a favorite Epic Thread? Let
us know!

3 new MMOG hand-crafted articles today! 142 in February! 278 in 2009!

New MMOG Articles At Ten Ton Hammer Today [Thanks Phil Comeau for links and Real World News]

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EverQuest 2: Time-based Research Coming?

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West Virginia legislator to introduce bill banning Barbie dolls

Why he would want to do this is beyond my Ken.
Truck full of lightbulbs hijacked in California

Police are still baffled as to exactly watt happened.
Couple drives 170km with Cobra in car

Eyewitness reports suggest it was Major Bludd and Firefly; Hawk and Roadblock scramble to intercept.

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-Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle and the Ten Ton Hammer team

Last Updated: Mar 13, 2016

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