A friend of mine told me he couldn't log into Steam because the servers are taken down due to a storm in Seattle. I couldn't log in either, but I haven't seen anyone else here talking about it. Annoyingly, I can't get it to run in off-line mode either.

So, can anyone else here log in or is the whole world Steamless right now? The Steampowered forums aren't available as well but I can't find any news about this on this on the Steam site.

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Create-ivity - a game development blog

I'm not having this problem.
I'm on the other side of the country, though.

supposedly there was a power loss at one of the Steam server locations, at least that's what the guys were saying in IRC

gosh I wonder if steampowered.com would have info on this?

The Steampowered forums aren't available as well but I can't find any news about this on this on the Steam site.

He said the forums weren't available. I couldn't get them to load on my PC either, but that may be because I'm using Opera and it hates some pages sometimes.

Edit: Nevermind, the page is just extremely slow.

maybe because you were already logged in when the power went out. afaik nobody can log in since the power outage, hence also disabling offline mode.

gg valve for:

1) having all the auth servers in one region

2) not having an Uninteruptable Power Supply for these important servers

3) deleting local auth info when you can't connect to auth servers, which means you can't even play offline when auth servers are down. Why oh why didnt they have steam run automatically in offline mode when you already have your auth info but you can't connect to the auth servers.

bah

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These words are my diaries screaming out loud

Good points yeah, especially #3. Don't forget the updates that sometimes break things while you can't roll them back.

Otherwise I'm fine with Steam, but this, nah. I can imagine this brings up all the old anti-Steam sentiments with a lot of people.

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Create-ivity - a game development blog

Thank god I'm not the only one. The funny thing is the support site you get sent too from the error window doesn't work either. All it does is trying to convince you that evil firewalls from hell are the only reason for Steam not to work and it's basically all your fault.

If this isn't the ultimate argument against steam I don't know...

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Why snark works.

Apparantly there are about 1.5 million homes without power in northwest America. The storms have even caused 4 deaths so far. I think I'll call myself lucky that I just can't map - others have it much worse right now.

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Create-ivity - a game development blog

I might turn on the news and see what's going on. I didn't know it was so bad.

(steam still sucks, though :rolleyes: )

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Why snark works.

Yeah, in a 2 hour period the people without power in my area alone went from 7,000 to 300,000. It was nasty winds were up to 100+ mph on the coast and the mountains. By the way, there's been 3 hikers missing on Mt. Hood for a couple days. I'm sure they didn't make it after last night. It was said that because of the winds and cold up there, leaving your skin exposed would frost bite it within 5 minutes.

Valve isn't that large of a company. Even if people think $100+ million is a lot of money, it isn't enough to set up another location for a software developer and pay all the bills and keep the company afloat. They would take a very large hit from doing that, probably an unrecoverable one.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

And that brings us to... why Steam is fundamentally flawed.

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Why snark works.

truth, i'm having the same problem too, hopefully i can remember the password i used when i created the account

Hehe, yeah. I forgot my password a while ago too, and the secret question answer as well. Got it back with help of their support system though, and it didn't even take that long.

Well, it's layout sketching for now, hopefully things will be better tomorrow. :smile:

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Create-ivity - a game development blog

yeah, i was freaking out until i saw this thread, thought maybe they'd lost my account

For some reason I cant go into Steam in offline mode either.

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Aaron's Stuff

I can't log onto my accoutn because my account information wasn't
stored on this computer (yes I always have "remember password" checked,
but yesterday it prompted me for one).

News flash: "Half Life Mappers Go On Rampage As Valve's Servers Decide To Be Lame For 24 Hours"

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Posting And You

Everyone that had connection and tried to log into Steam when the servers were down got their account information reset on their computer, so off-line mode is unavailable for them. Unless you knew about this and disabled your internet connection when starting up Steam, you can't log in untill the servers are back on-line.

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Create-ivity - a game development blog

The authentication servers are back.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Yup, noticed it. :smile:

Steam purchases are disabled untill further notice bytheway, but the rest is operational. Phew.

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Create-ivity - a game development blog

I couldn't even test my f**king map

I hope Valve has learned an important lesson about what can happen when you put all eggs in one basket... I thought they were a bit wiser after all Steam is an international service, it would've made sense to have some alternative servers in Europe and Asia even if you'd play the money card it still would've made sense.

Steam network is a bit too fragile for it's own good... when you add this up with the rest of the problems that never existed before Steam(flawed updates that break more than they fix, BS like advertisements on games, etc.) one comes into the same conclusion that reaper47: Steam is fundamentally flawed system.

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''Everyone wades in s**t until they're competent enough to walk on it. Jesus style.''
Dystopia - Empires

This is just a small peak but chances are high something worse could happen with steam. Valve going bankrupt, for example.

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Why snark works.

This is just a small peak but chances are high something worse could happen with steam. Valve going bankrupt, for example.

Yeah, that bothers me a lot. The fact that the games are not really "ours", ever. And that they can be taken away from us, or modified, without any recourse on our parts.

Bad enough that we have to deal with ads in the Steam interface. But say Valve decided- YEARS after we paid for a game- to patch it and include advertisements in it to make a little extra $$. There would be nothing we could do.

It already annoys me that Won, and now Steam, prevent you from playing older versions of mod (for example TFC before it was deformed into TF1.5)

.

I guess it's not too hard to find a crack for Steam in case we 'must' because the Steam network gets taken down, but the whole idea is somewhat troublesome yeah. On the other hand, you can play on whatever computer you want, provided you've got the time to download these games on them. I'm not sure if that outweights the issues though.
Preventing older versions to be played isn't a big problem imho, unless an older version simply worked better. In which case they should learn from it and revert the changes that made it worse - or make them optional to cater to a wider public, which I think is a better solution. Preventing version fragmenting isn't a bad thing on itself. Working with multiple versions at once is a big pain imho, especially for developers.

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Create-ivity - a game development blog

Wait I got a better one - Valve getting bought by Microsoft!

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Why snark works.

Wind storm was pretty rough up here too (I'm a little ways up the coast from Valve) and I couldn't sleep because all these lawn chairs were flying against my window during the night and even our stand-up barbeque got blown over and that thing is heavy as hell.

Wait I got a better one - Valve getting bought by Microsoft!

They'd steal everything of use from the games, and mutate them into
these horrid things that they'll whore out on their next s**tbox
"system" that can't even handle what computers can, even though they're
just half-assed clones of PCs (take a look at HL2 for Xbox -- a third
of the polies and probably alot of lag)

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I'm allergic to tequila, it makes me break out in felonies.

I think Steam has a great premise, but I really think you shouldn't have to be connected every time you want to play a game on Steam. It's great as a distribution system, but I'd rather not have to have Steam running to play my games.

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o

I agree. Lets not forget the many people in the world still on dialup (if fate had me living anywhere else in the area, I'd be on pair gain). It wouldnt be so bad if Steam's offline mode worked reliably, but as has been pointed out, it doesnt. In fact a friend of mine who only plays on offline mode due to dialup suspects updates are designed to break within about a month to stop people from playing in offline mode all the time. Its a great anti-piracy measure, but also leads to a fair few people getting pissed off, especially when the server dies and were all in the same boat with the guy on dialup.

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"If you talk at all during this lesson, you have detention. Do you understand?"

• My yr11 Economics teacher

anyone else still not able to log onto steam?

ohh and.....ES IS GOING TO IGF!!!!!!! See you there!

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Posting And You

it was off for a few minutes but now it seems to work again?

PS: Congrats on ES winning the moty, omega!

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Why snark works.