I still don't understand the whole trading card and ranking thing. I was invited to the trading card group one day, then woke up to being level twelve later.
yes it's a completely fucking shit system that has totally hijacked the steam community thing, revamped every profile to make it a dumb xboxlive/ps3 trophy cabinet, and basically cynically tries to manipulate gamers' inherent e-peen impulse to buy into their crappy fucking trading card system. very shitty. now you have a 'gamer level', which is plenty enough to fuck with people's competitive/in-it-to-win-it psychology, and the only way to gain levels is to partake in their completely fucking arbitrary and non-skill based trading card system.
gg steam. another 'sandbox' experiment that they pass off innocently, but which is basically a massive corporate cash-in on their community (just like the innocuous changes they to tf2 in a 'playful' mood). valve are the worst company of the lot for having a bunch of rabid fanboys that will never admit through all of valve's twee-innocent faux-naive bullshit that they're extorting their community just as hard as EA do with bf4 paid-dlc announcements. the only difference is that steam launches all their crap with a few clever-witty comic books and an irreverent blog post, and the community laps that shit up.
tl;dr: hope gabe's inevitable heart-attack comes soon and fast.
gg steam. another 'sandbox' experiment that they pass off innocently, but which is basically a massive corporate cash-in on their community (just like the innocuous changes they to tf2 in a 'playful' mood). valve are the worst company of the lot for having a bunch of rabid fanboys that will never admit through all of valve's twee-innocent faux-naive bullshit that they're extorting their community just as hard as EA do with bf4 paid-dlc announcements. the only difference is that steam launches all their crap with a few clever-witty comic books and an irreverent blog post, and the community laps that shit up.
tl;dr: hope gabe's inevitable heart-attack comes soon and fast.
Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-07-08 14:12:18)
That is not fair. You don't have to take part in the card system if you don't want to. I sold all of my drops. If they were EA they would make you buy it straight from them. If you can collect them all from a set you can craft a card and get a coupon for a sale. They also give free card packs randomly that you can sell. I don't consider that nickel and diming.
Oh I think it's a completely fair assessment. The cards cost money but don't really give you anything but levels that don't give you anything? That's how I understand it. The profiles and interface did need revamped a bit, and that's what they did...but they didn't fix it. Steam is still a crash-prone environment with an increasingly difficult-to-navigate interface due to unnecessary redundancy, hidden features and slow-ass servers. It can take me up to ten minutes to load a single screenshot page sometimes. And that's sometimes the amount of time it takes me to start the program, where if I click anything Steam related it will collapse in on itself with a bootstrapper error. Starting Steam is almost ritualized with me now. I go to the processes tab in task manager, run Steam, wait for steamerrorreporter to close itself, log on and then don't do anything else at all until the interface appears and loads completely. Honestly, they've had what, eight whole years to get their shit together? Instead they bog Steam down with unnecessary garbage and turn it into a lumbering wreck.
there was a long period where people could 'opt in' to the stupid new steam community profile that reconstructs the entire personal profile around trophies and 'cards collected'. for that long period, i opted out. want to know why? i have no interest in steam trading cards. i hoped it would stay that way. evidently not. now everyone is forced to have a shitty new profile that restructures their entire steam community around collecting meaningless trading cards. before gamers could have a steam community profile that put their actual gaming history/community groups at the fore of attention; now the entire profile is basically a trophy-cabinet and an achievement show-case. these were the least important things to me over the last 8 years of using steam community. i do not give a shit about collecting console-style achievements or trophies. nor showing them off to other players. on the previous profile, i could check people's team histories, their gaming bios, their official steam group/team affiliations. now it's all buried beneath a bunch of loud, noisy and obnoxious graphics about their in-game 'achievements' (i.e. a collection of arbitrary and skill-less tasks).Macbeth wrote:
That is not fair. You don't have to take part in the card system if you don't want to. I sold all of my drops. If they were EA they would make you buy it straight from them. If you can collect them all from a set you can craft a card and get a coupon for a sale. They also give free card packs randomly that you can sell. I don't consider that nickel and diming.
every drop and hand-out steam gives is just to generate a basic level of market activity. it's like casinos giving you chips to play with when you join a game. or a free starter token. valve didn't spend all that time and money developing a new system if it didn't ultimately end up in a lot of bozos buying more dumb shit they don't need off the steam store. you even 'unlock' the ability to get more "random drop cards" by SPENDING MONEY on the store. it's just another secondary/subliminal motivation to drive people to spend on their games' micro-economies.
Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-07-08 14:45:03)
Spot on, Uzique.
altho I do not use the steam profile for anything but...using steam, and haven't taken any part/ intrest in this matter, but sure give people abilety to trade/waste money/ etc. , but to make it an xbox style moneywastingpodium is just sad.Chou wrote:
Spot on, Uzique.
I've been harassed for my pre-order hats on TF2 by complete strangers before. I'm dreading trading card harassment now, but I'm hoping that won't take off quite so much.
I'm bewildered every time i log onto that game
I really hope there's only the second update today, because I feel like I might lose my shit if it starts a third one when I try to log on. And only because I know it will be adding more crap without fixing anything that's already there. Like screenshot servers that function like it's 1988.
I also like how it has to freeze the ENTIRE FUCKING INTERFACE to "convert game content to a newer format" or whatever the fuck it wants to do. Seriously, it's more convenient to simply reinstall the fucking things rather than have to sit through twenty fucking minutes or more of enforced idle time while a dozen chat windows are crying for attention.
e1: 5 minutes. 3%. FUCK OFF Half-Life.
e2: and seriously, you have to go to the task manager to force a minimize of steam's myriad windows while it's doing its thing in order to...use your desktop. gets old.
e1: 5 minutes. 3%. FUCK OFF Half-Life.
e2: and seriously, you have to go to the task manager to force a minimize of steam's myriad windows while it's doing its thing in order to...use your desktop. gets old.
I don't get this trading card thing. I've never even looked at steam community. I just checked my profile and i cant see anything to do with that kind of stuff?
everyone's level and steam experience is based around trading cards. before it was a largely text/group-oriented profile that put people's gaming bios and their group/team membership first and foremost. now the entire page is achievements, 'game progress %', and a bunch of XP points that all add to... trading cards.
Meanwhile the Steam servers become crappier and crappier with each cosmetic update.
But...it doesn't do anything. I used to think Steam wasn't retarded. It seems it's just for the benefit of compulsive completionists, but I can't really see anyone else showing off their profile of how much of their life they've spent playing video games.
Off and on all day. I hope it's worth it to have work done on worthless trading cards instead of a functioning network.Sorry
The Steam Community is currently unavailable. Please try again later.
If you hate it, why are you bothering to look at the steam community? Don't like it, don't look at it.unnamednewbie13 wrote:
Off and on all day. I hope it's worth it to have work done on worthless trading cards instead of a functioning network.Sorry
The Steam Community is currently unavailable. Please try again later.
I can't say I've ever looked at it apart from yesterday. I open steam, launch a game. That's it. I don't get any issues
well it's pretty obvious that 99% of the people who are complaining used steam community as a regular part of their gaming. jesus, dumbass.
"i never ever used this before but im outraged" - no one.
"i never ever used this before but im outraged" - no one.
Xfire > steam
Newbie is going on about it being down when he doesn't even like it.... But good job on missing what I was saying, top marksUzique The Lesser wrote:
well it's pretty obvious that 99% of the people who are complaining used steam community as a regular part of their gaming. jesus, dumbass.
"i never ever used this before but im outraged" - no one.
i think he was talking about steam servers themselves being down. steam community is the same thing as steam friends and the whole online network. steam keeps restarting to give mini-updates to this shit-wreck. i would be equally confused if he was trying to check his trading card inventory after complaining about it.
Pretty much this.
I've had Steam installed on one PC or another since Half-Life 2, so it was difficult to ignore the evolution of the platform. I've seen good changes and bad changes, but mostly superficial paint jobs to cover up the slowly spreading rust. And right now, Steam seems to be creaking underneath the weight of unnecessary feature creep.
@bennis: before you tell me "don't use it then," it's a bit difficult to avoid given that so many of my games run on Steam and that it's supplanted my use of programs like MSM, YIM, Xfire and ICQ for talking to online friends. Heck, even CoH2 uses it for invites.
e: 5 minutes to load up a single page of screenshots. gg, valve.
I've had Steam installed on one PC or another since Half-Life 2, so it was difficult to ignore the evolution of the platform. I've seen good changes and bad changes, but mostly superficial paint jobs to cover up the slowly spreading rust. And right now, Steam seems to be creaking underneath the weight of unnecessary feature creep.
@bennis: before you tell me "don't use it then," it's a bit difficult to avoid given that so many of my games run on Steam and that it's supplanted my use of programs like MSM, YIM, Xfire and ICQ for talking to online friends. Heck, even CoH2 uses it for invites.
e: 5 minutes to load up a single page of screenshots. gg, valve.
The problem with Steam is Valve hires nobody but exceptional people that are allowed to work on whatever crazy ideas they have in their head.
So nobody wants to do something "boring" like improve the groaning and creaking Steam program. It's something that hiring some basic software engineers would fix but they won't do it because it's not how they think they should work.
So nobody wants to do something "boring" like improve the groaning and creaking Steam program. It's something that hiring some basic software engineers would fix but they won't do it because it's not how they think they should work.
Browsing in Steam in general is SO slow compared to Firefox, Chrome etc.unnamednewbie13 wrote:
e.g: 5 minutes to load up a single page of screenshots. gg, valve.
Last edited by Spidery_Yoda (2013-07-11 07:22:05)
That's the trade-off for having an in-game browser, probably isn't necessary and it might go faster if it was optimized but that's the way it is. They're always improving it anyway, it didn't always have a decent tab-system or the ability to search the text on a page or even copy/paste when it first came out. I heard it's based off of Chromium(a light version of Chrome) like the browser CCP used for Eve when they finally decided to make it functional a few years ago, but I'm not sure if it's true or not.Spidery_Yoda wrote:
Browsing in Steam in general is SO slow compared to Firefox, Chrome etc.