Steam Servers

[DARKLY | Pixar's Ham]

Holy crap, I need to let all this anger out.

Steam is such a big company, one of the most symbolized gaming communities and they're very successful when it comes to marketing and customer satisfaction. But, their damn server hosting is so garbage, they're hosting all their servers on flipping potatoes. I can't help to notice that every hour or so, at least one steam server goes down whether it's the trade servers or steam itself.

Steam makes all this damn money off of the thousands of people that go on steam everyday, but they can't make their servers better.

It blows my mind.

 

[HappySticks™]

Valve doesn't give a shit about us. Deal with it.

 

[Cmp™]

It's a terrible situation, but there's not a lot we can do about it. I'm pretty sure Steam is the leading online platform, so Valve really isn't under any pressure from competitors about providing better service. In my opinion, the fact that they make so much money is exactly why they don't make more of an effort to fix the servers or at least send out a general notice of "Hey, our servers are having trouble. You might lose service, just a headsup."

Even that headsup would pacify a lot of players, because then we know they're aware of the problem and are working to fix it.

But don't expect a miracle. Valve is great at "fixing" the wrong things, just like Google did with YouTube. They'll happily spam you with stupid notifications with no way to turn them off without leaving the group, but when it comes to letting you know about server issues, lolnope. They'll screw you over in trading with their ridiculous security measures, but when those same security measures fail and you get hijacked, they don't give a fuck.

I'm sure there are a few helpful Valve staff members that honestly want to provide good service, but the current state of Steam suggests they are incredibly outnumbered by greedy employees that are focused on the paycheck more than the player, the ones providing the paycheck.

 

[DatGuy]

heh....gamers

server goes down one time in the middle of the afternoon....first time in months....FUCKING RAGE! BURN IT DOWN, KILL GABEN!

Steam is up and working..."I love you valve, can I have your babies?"

silly general public...

 

[Mizz]

Gaben op

 

[Mizz]

Also, why don't you guys do/play something elselol

 

[HappySticks™]

Also, why don't you guys do/play something elselol

Without a computer I just play with myself, does that count?

 

[Cmp™]

Except this isn't the first time in months. For the past week, the trade servers have been sketchy at best, the community servers have gone down at least 3 times just today and Valve has never exactly had a reputation for putting the customer first. They know they've got a virtual monopoly and they're using it as an excuse to deliver substandard service.

Despite what I posted above, I'm not actually angry. Annoyed that this is happening and will continue to happen? Yeah, because I happen to enjoy games. Isn't that the idea behind this forum? A group of people coming together by playing games they enjoy? Does it break my whole day and send me to the corner in the fetal position? No, because I also have other stuff to do.

My irritation doesn't come from boredom. It comes from knowing that Valve is making all this money and yet they are still providing a very substandard service, at least as of late, with no explanation or improvement. I'm not demanding or even expecting an instant solution, because I know that's stupid and delusional. All I'm asking is just a reason why it's happening so much lately.

 

[zackychuu]

It does bug me when every Steam sale, it's plainly obvious that the servers are going to start being slow, crashing and just generally acting up. As always.
And yet every single time, Valve does nothing about it. I would have thought that they would have added extra servers even if only for the sale period or the initial start up of the sale to handle the extra load.

Sure you could argue "Oh well they make money so they don't care"
There has been plenty of Sale situations where your basket would clear itself every so often while browsing through the store, or the store is so slow its actually hard or tedious to even buy stuff...most people just give up after it doesn't work the first few times.
It's hard to understand why they don't do something to sort out the issue.

 

[Mizz]

they only care about steambox right now
whutever

 

[Richard Matthias]

Holy crap, I need to let all this anger out.

Steam is such a big company, one of the most symbolized gaming communities and they're very successful when it comes to marketing and customer satisfaction. But, their damn server hosting is so garbage, they're hosting all their servers on flipping potatoes. I can't help to notice that every hour or so, at least one steam server goes down whether it's the trade servers or steam itself.

Steam makes all this damn money off of the thousands of people that go on steam everyday, but they can't make their servers better.

It blows my mind.

Sometimes, they take the servers down in order to perform maintenance. They might be patching software for security issues, updating operating systems or drivers, or installing new hardware, for example. These activities don't result in new features, but make Steam continue to run stably and efficiently.

Other down time events are used to publish new features in the server code. Sometimes, those features might not be immediately visible; making the servers use less memory, for example, allows them to support more users and have faster response times. Keeping the system up and running efficiently is their top priority. As time allows, they add features and publish them when they're available.

 

[DarkPaladinPrime]

The problem with Valve is that they are just lazy. They take way too long to make their games and it may seem like it was worth it at first after a while it just sucks. Tf2 is the worst they have so many problems that they don't fix, they don't listen to the community and make some new weapons, and they made the game F2P which is not necessarily a bad thing but it brought so many stupid players into the game and now it just sucks for me. Their servers are crap plus trying to play mvm is impossible when it takes 20 minutes to get into a game which most of the time has shitty players. My main point is Valve has made so much god damn money that they just don't care anymore. I really hate to see TF2 die like this because it such a great game. It deserves better than this crap.

 

[Cmp™]

The problem with Valve is that they are just lazy. They take way too long to make their games and it may seem like it was worth it at first after a while it just sucks. Tf2 is the worst they have so many problems that they don't fix, they don't listen to the community and make some new weapons, and they made the game F2P which is not necessarily a bad thing but it brought so many stupid players into the game and now it just sucks for me. Their servers are crap plus trying to play mvm is impossible when it takes 20 minutes to get into a game which most of the time has shitty players. My main point is Valve has made so much god damn money that they just don't care anymore. I really hate to see TF2 die like this because it such a great game. It deserves better than this crap.

75% of that is actually not Valve's fault.

Making the game F2P was actually a really smart move for them, because it attracted a ton of players. Most of the players then went premium to remove the restrictions bringing in a crapload of money. They can't control who plays it. The most they can do is advise the parents of the kids playing it who shouldn't be.
Weapons are really hard to bring into the game and make them new and interesting. The model reqs alone are enough to put the community and probably even Valve's own modelers off of coming up with new designs.
I'll agree with the servers being terrible, but again, thousands of other players are trying to get into the servers as well constantly, so it can't exactly be easy on the servers. I'd split the responsibility in half there.

 

[Shotgun Jesus]

Cum sandwich.

 

[DarkPaladinPrime]

Counter argument: They made the game F2P so it would attract more players. However a lot of the new players don't have premium accounts. The ones on Darkly do but in regular game servers they generally don't from what I have seen that is. Valve is still very rich so naturally they are pretty lazy (I would be too if I was that rich) so I don't blame them for not programming new weapons into the game (I have tried programming it is not easy and can be very time consuming) but since they have not added any new wepaons in over a year it is kind of annoying. If they could make some new weapons once a year I would be happy with that but that is just me.

 

[Gatherix]

We don't actually know how much money Valve makes. Valve goes to a lot of trouble to remain private, and releases very little financial information. While we do know their profit per employee is enormous, we don't know the gross, raw worth of the company.

On the topic of employees, Valve seems to be tremendously understaffed. And while this certainly isn't beneficial for its users, Valve frankly doesn't need to care; it retains its users, it keeps gaining traffic, and things like poor support ultimately don't deter many users; you're mad, but you're still using their product willingly. How many hours have you logged on Steam games that you don't actually own? If you hate them so much, why are you still using Steam?

Regarding Steam's servers, bear two things in mind. Not only do they process a lot of traffic, but their load is incredibly sporadic. Their server load is never constant, and from a technical standpoint that's somewhat difficult to deal with. It's like getting a mild DDOS every hour. Sure, they're cheap and could have more equipment, but it's not as simple as more servers = better performance.

Lastly, they're a company. Making money is their top priority, as is true for the vast majority of companies out there. Some of the things they do shouldn't at all be unexpected. When you signed up for Steam you signed a agreement that pretty much absolves Valve from everything; you've agreed that they can basically do whatever the hell they want and you can't even file a lawsuit. Sure, that's incredibly unreasonable and devious, but don't go screaming it's unfair when you've agreed to it.

 

[Cmp™]

Cum sandwich.

I only meant Valve makes a lot comparatively. Origin sure as hell isn't the front-runner in the PC platform.

As much as I like the Steam product, I would like to see Valve get knocked down a bit. I'd like to see them do something so lazy and selfish that enough players strike or something that it convinces them to care just a little bit more. Probably won't ever happen, but I can dream, can't I?

Gatherix said it perfectly. /thread

 

[jakksilves]

It is Valve, what did you expect?

As the world population grows out of control, so will the amount of people on it gradually increase year by year.

As more money is invested in the virtual markets, more accounts and people not seen before will appear.

That is my viewpoint on it but I have to agree with Gatherix, it does make quite a bit of sense.

 

[$alvador]

Regarding Steam's servers, bear two things in mind. Not only do they process a lot of traffic, but their load is incredibly sporadic. Their server load is never constant, and from a technical standpoint that's somewhat difficult to deal with. It's like getting a mild DDOS every hour. Sure, they're cheap and could have more equipment, but it's not as simple as more servers = better performance.

I'm not convinced the recent problems haven't been caused by actual DDoS attacks. A lot of major game servers (eg. EvE) have been hit lately with DDoS and there are a bunch of tools and botnets out there to launch a DDoS attack from, and to make matters worse network infrastructure aids more powerful attacks and then there's the matter of it being hard to even track where the attack is originating from because IPs are spoofed. I find it hard to believe that these issues are just a matter of Valve fucking up, seeing as how Steam is the centrepiece on which all their other products depend.

 

[OG buckshot jr]

I think a bigger issue than their servers that seldom go down is the platform engineering behind the programming. The fact that their largest gaming platforms (TF2 and CS) are not designed (at the very least from a server-side perspective) to run utilizing more than one cpu thread is atrocious and lags far behind the standard of today's hardware abilities.

I realize the audience Valve serves is vast, but I think even the shittiest host you can find has dual-core equipment as a minimum... I shake my head..