How about an "it's ok, I will live" option?

Cons:
- Connecting to steam takes long
- Starting up games takes long
- Its dependend on one system, valve's down, everythings down
- Update-ing sucks
- Its bulls**t that you need internet for a singleplayer game
- Friends system never work
- Your steam needs to be activated to use Hammer
- Download manager is a bit unorganized.
- The files are way more unorganized and editing is way harder.
- It dosnt work from time to time, making you reinstall, get a new acc, delte some files mannualy and CTRL+ALT+DELETE and stop it that way. If blizzard made it, it whould be 10 times better.

Pro's:
Auto-update, yay!. Thats all folks!
Oh, and the friends network, but they never work.

Seriously.

yawn

I'll be back in about an hour to 'piss you off' some more, and I'll explain everything clearly and coherently for you.

How is a 100MB patch frim fileplanet any different from 100MB patch from steam OTHER than the fact that steam installs it for you (a good feature for n00bs (you?))

-First off, I am shocked and appalled that you called me a noob. That cut deep man, going right after my one weakness. I am apparently in over my head! Anyways, with steam there won't be any 100MB patches, that's the main difference. Valve can release a bunch of small updates that squash annoying bugs when they appear instead of waiting for three months to get a decent number of serious bugs worth patching. Also, nobody has to dick around with version numbers and all that crap, and nobody has to sit in line for 3 hours on fileplanet to download a gigantic patch that may or may not succeed. If you find all this to be bad than you are an idiot, or at least masochistic. Also, you no longer have to download say all of TFC when you want to get HL up to date, but I'm certain you'd remember those days since you've been around since the beginning.

We're NOT idiots just because we DON't like what you like. And I have been playing Half-life since the release date of the original. I think that was before steam wasn't it?

-No, you're an idiot because you say things like the stuff in the post I was replying to and this post. It helps to have substantial reasons for your positions in an argument. I haven't seen any yet, especially when I'm going to blow up each and every thing you say below because of really obvious things that you should have noticed as a 6 year HL veteran.

What's different about the server browsers? let's see, Server name, game name, users in game/capacity and ping. YEP they BOTH have them. hmmmm...

-Well, steam is faster, for one thing. Steam doesn't require a console command to give you ping times. Steam's filtering system also reliably works, which cannot be said about HL's old one. Plus steam doesn't force you to update the master server list like HL used to, which is very useful when you only wanted to play TFC instead of refreshing all 30,000 CS servers. You can search for servers without entering the game, which saves time if you're only looking to play at a certain server or two.

What we didn't LIKE was the autopatching.

-Why not? Are you so much of a nerd that you have to do everything by yourself? The autopatching makes updating quick, easy, and painless, and since the patches themselves are so small (see above) it really doesn't affect your net connection or your ability to play your games and look at porn.

I have NEVER even opened the Sierra Utilities program ONCe in the whole 6 years.

-Neither have I, which was the point. Steam got rid of that crap that wasted space on my computer, and back in the day supposedly caused other people problems.

How the heck do you KNOW its so stable despite aging? News: IT'S NOT OLD!

-Reading helps. Half-Life is really old. Six years in fact (or is it five? I dunno, its been that f**king long). As it aged and I upgraded computers HL got more and more unstable and was prone to crashing upon loading. For my laptop it had something to do with my desktop resolution being set at 1600x1200 while HL was set at 1024x768, and about 50% of the time it wouldn't reset correctly and I'd have to quit and try again. Pretty annoying when you're trying to compile maps. Steam cleared all this up and I no longer have any problems running HL. In fact, I have never experienced any crashes with HL. So what I said was that steam has made my copy of HL stable after a few years of creakiness. Oh and as an aside, steam is perfectly stable.

I never had any glitches UNTIL steam came about and changed all my settings.

-It changed your settings? HOLY s**t! Change 'em back dumbass. And don't accuse me of misinterpreting what you meant, because you obviously didn't take the time to read what I originally said. I have never encountered any steam problems, but I didn't use it in the very early beta days. All the people I know who use it haven't had any problems either (aside from things like the friends system). I have used steam on three different computers with no problems either. I guess I'm just damn lucky?

If i wanted to install a mod I can get it off of fileplanet or KaZaA or BitTorrent, I can do it all by myself. Hooray! for anyone who doesnt need a program to install programs for them. But... how did they get THAT program installed? someone must have done it for them... oh well.

-Guess what, not everybody can use Kazaa or bittorrent because of firewall settings at their universities. And who wants to f**k with fileplanet? It's called 'ease of use' but then you're going to tell me that it makes everything so much more difficult for some reason. Plus it allows mod teams to get their names out there that much easier.

If you don't have enough room for Ricochet and DMC, you seriously need to upgrade.

-Oh I have the room, I just don't see the need to waste it on stuff I'm never going to touch. You missed the point, which again makes me question if you really have played HL since the beginning. There was a ton of complaining from people who didn't want stuff like DMC and ricochet on their computers but because the patches always checked for them they were forced to keep them. This eliminates that problem. Again, it's ease of use. Plus on my laptop I'm rather crunched for space between my mp3s and porn and I need the space. Besides, ever heard of old computers? The ones that HL can still run on? Yeah, they might not necessarily have 70 gig hard drives that can hold all 5 official HL mods and everything else. Why should those users be screwed out of an updated game?

the freinds network doesnt work for some reason.

-WHO CARES. Did you buy HL2 so you could use the friends network? Cause if you did, I'd suggest returning the game right now.

Perhaps if you had given up on HL, you wouldn't be here today calling me and idiot and pissing me off.

-Perhaps the world would have been spared from my s**tty maps, but it's too bad you weren't here to prevent me from making them. Oh, and I hope you don't burst a blood vessel from reading all of these rage-inducing words.