Ain't that the truth. I've seen some very well respected, very civil and very intelligent people get banned on SPUF under some very dubious claims. Funnily enough the mods are more content to let "hur...dur...Steam sucks" posts pass with a simple thread lock, but will come down hard on any threads with actual valid criticism. One user that comes to mind straight away is crunchyfrog555 whose knowledge of UK law was absolutely legendary and he advised many SPUF users on their rights under UK law. I think this is what pissed off the Hammer Legion mods. As I understand it, the third time around, he didn't even bother challenging it and just abandoned Steam in general.

Steam is evil. Either believe it or not. Case closed.

You are either against Steam or a bloody fanboy. Because there can't be a middle ground.

I couldn't care less. I'm enjoying my games on Steam. Protected by the juggernaut that is the EU consumer protection legislation. If others want to bitch like little school girls, then it is their choice.

Yeah, I feel the same way (without the EU consumer protection part because I'm not European, but yeah). I like Steam. It's convenient, the social features are nice, etc. I'm not picky about where I get my games from, and client DRM doesn't hugely bother me. I prefer to get stuff from GOG, but that's only partially because of DRM, a big part of it is that I love the extras and I just want to support GOG. I'm not a fanboy, but I don't think Steam is the devil either.

There are worse things than Valve's Steam: Ubisoft's UPlay... >_<

Didn't you know this is the Internet. If I hate something and you disagree with me then you are nothing but a fanboy, and if I love something and you disagree then you are nothing but a troll and hater. That's how it works Simon. You may as well learn it sooner than later!

Me.

=> I am really surprised regarding Blizzard, because even though they made a genuine effort in getting a better customer support, it's still down to luck (= finding a competent person) and there's still some "horror" stories happening. Regarding Nintendo, +1.

=> Regarding Valve not spending enough on customer service, it is 100% true and I really wish they would spend more on this.

However, I don't think they should spend it on the forums: too much crap is flying around there. In my opinion they should entirely rework the Steam Support platform (provide an entire database on fixing common bugs for each game, + including a system where you can submit/upvote a bug/issue entry, then when it reaches x votes Steam has to provide an acknowledgment under 48h, and a fix/official personalized statement under a week). Growing rapidly recently, and it's still small: do we have 5 millions users ? In your small community, of dedicated gamers. If you go outside and meet people buying Call of Duty, they don't even know what is a DRM. Sadly, this part is only a conspiracy fantasy. Valve isn't spending money on that.

People are using Gabe Newell in "funny" pictures and video because he's the CEO of Valve and Steam, a little fat, a gamer, rather friendly with everyone - he's the perfect stereotype of a gaming "nerd", and many gamers were able to get AAA games normally sold for $60 (or $30 after a few months) for $5 during Steam sales: this is why people like to make fun of him in youtube videos and pictures. Because Wal-Mart or Amazon are old companies only based on an economy of scarcity, not abundance (like Steam). But even them are evolving: Amazon launched its digital distribution of video games relatively recently (= years after Steam), and is now having "Amazon Sales" and making "Amazon Bundles", with pretty low prices ($30 for 3-4 games worth $20 each).

Valve is switching to the F2P business model because it's the latest trend in the video game industry (everyone is doing it) and it will probably give them even more money (through the micro-transactions) than the usual business model. Just because TF2 and Dota 2 are F2P doesn't mean they don't earn money - in fact the TF2 Mann-Co store already earned them 5+ millions dollars (more than 2M in October 2011). "Free" doesn't mean "not profitable", far from that. Free to play, pay to play more. By lessening the risk of a purchase, the gamer can give a chance to games he would have never bought at full price. Thousands of people gave a chance to indie titles during sales and ended up loving these games (example: Killing Floor). The problem of the enormous backlog is indeed concerning, but it is not caused by bad purchasing decisions, it is caused by the lack of time and motivation of each gamer. Steam will soon be a sinking ship if it doesn't improve, now that Microsoft will add its own digital distribution platform in its OS, that Amazon fully launched its own platform, and that Origin can live on its own with EA titles.

---------- => I provided plenty of facts that you can verify yourself on the Steam platform and the Steam forums, and you ignored ALL of them. These weren't taken from my buttocks, but the official Steam website.

=> I also asked you to provide more details on your problems (in Private Message if you weren't willing to display it here) BEFORE I would make any judgement, and you refused to provide these informations.

=> I then carefully analyzed the very few informations existing in your message (about your bans, about your exchanges with the moderators) and explained you how the moderation was working and what COULD have happened (conditional), and you refused to answer or provide any additional information, you just called me a fanboy. Once again, your escalating hostility and verbal violence in your posts are not helping you, it's also reinforcing my belief that you have a problem with authority and self-control.

You refuse to waste your time with someone asking you for more informations regarding your issues with Steam, and the accusations you're making, yet you're spending hours on several forums to repeat these accusations, again and again. You have time to hate, but not to understand.

Again, when I try to explain you the mechanism of the moderation on the Steam forums, you keep hammering that I am "defending" them: you are not trying to understand, you are trying to determine who is guilty and who was "right". If describing how a system works is "defending" it, I'm afraid I'm defending reality over fantasy. Explaining you how a law work doesn't mean I support it. You shouldn't based your opinion solely on reputations. I saw a lot people getting banned "for next to nothing" too. But I took the time to think about it and finally understood what happened. If you can't overcome your first feelings, you'll be barking up the wrong tree all your life.

Thank you for the profanity.

Regarding your 6 friends having a MBR failure in two days, by which magic they all got their Master Boot Record corrupted, that non-OS/non-partitioning softwares never write in (beside a few virus) ?
And how is that there is no trace of it online, on any forum ? (nice post on pcgamer.com btw) Maybe it means Steam has the power to censor all blogs, forums and websites on the Internet... Soon they'll be knocking at your door !

According to you, one of the most widespread software for gamers (Steam) would have potentially destroyed entire HDD-worth of files, yet everyone but you forgot about it ? If 6 of your friends got hit in two days, how come there isn't thousands of people reporting the same problems ? You've got the most unlucky friends on earth ?
Speaking of MBR corruption, did you manage to fix it ? What part of the MBR got corrupted ? Did your 6 friends seek compensations from Steam for the damage caused by the data destruction ?

So nForce chipset mobos... what does it has to do with the Steam<->MBR corruption ? Unless Steam managed to flash the motherboard firmware (would need to go into DOS, get user input, and reboot twice), corrupt the Southbridge, who then corrupted the HDD's MBR, I don't see how it is relevant.

I'm afraid it's very probable you or a friend would no longer get your HDD recognized, and when asked "what have you done before it disappeared ? Did you installed a software recently ?", you remembered that Steam updated itself recently and went directly to "it's Steam fault !", without ever thinking there could be other reasons, like Windows wrongly writing in the VBR or modifying/updating/wrongly loading the IDE/SATA drivers. I too had to fix corrupted MBRs, for many different reasons (virus, partitioning errors, hardware failure), it's really hard to pinpoint what caused it. Unless you can provide the entire process you went through to determine it was finally entirely Steam's fault, you're just making empty accusations.

Again, explaining how a system works isn't supporting it.

However, if by explaining how that system works, I'm debunking false accusations based on wrong assumptions and misunderstandings, yes, I am "defending" a company, I am "defending" it from ignorance.

Scientists proving global warming is happening ? Defending Al Gore and all the companies behind him !
Earth is spherical ? Defending anti-christians !

It seems your global hostility toward companies is preventing you from having a fair and accurate judgment on them: all you see is evil greed, all you see is customers being screwed over and over.

I think your overall cynicism is out of control, there is a difference between companies like Monsanto and GOG.com, failing to see it is only helping Monsanto, because no matter how evil and wrong they'll behave, they'll never get a negative feedback, a punishment - while on the other hand, no matter how hard GOG.com will try to please their customers, to be "good", they'll always be "an evil company trying to rip people's off". Then why companies should try to behave correctly, if in the end they're all "evil and greedy" ? Why bothering ?

Not identifying what's good and bad in a company, skipping directly to "all company are evil", is, in my honest opinion, a sad expression of intellectual laziness. You can hate EA all you want, they're still funding projects, still paying developers, still releasing games (some good, some bad) - so rather than saying "EA is crap, their games are crap, everything they're doing is crap", one should pay attention to the details and see that, for example, Mirror's Edge, while not perfect, was a genuine attempt at providing an interesting and new gaming experience.

People who skipped on Mirror's Edge only because EA funded it actually hurt the EA employees trying to make a different EA, while it reinforced the EA employees trying to keep the same greedy EA we all know.

If being good (or not-too-bad) with your customers is rewarded, through sales, fidelity and reputation, companies will -also- try to be good with their customers.

Of course they'll never give up on trying to make money, because without money they would simply close, everyone is fired and no more goods/services are sold & provided. To get a balanced and respectful company, we should incite them to make money while being good.

This is why many of us joined the GoG.com beta. This is why many of us supported the Humble Indie Bundle, Indie Royale and the others right from the start. This is why many of us bought games directly from the indie developers the day they accepted to sell a DRM-free version.

If an indie dev perfectly knows that, despite the easier piracy because of 0 copy protection, he'll be greatly supported by the few but reliable respectful gamers, he will be much more likely to make the jump and get rid of his DRMs.

This was back in 2005 when Steam didn't have that many users - all my friends played Counter Strike however, and so had Steam. No surprise you won't find much about it now - but despite your laughable defense (yet again), you still don't give a reason that makes sense except to make ridiculous guesses.

You do really know nothing about MBR, do you? A MBR doesn't destroy ANYTHING on the drive itself and it is perfectly possible for software to cause the MBR to get corrupted. It's also easy to repair a MBR on NTFS drives with the chkdsk command. Please, if you're going to defend something, at least know how it works.

To explain the problem completely:
- Steam would update and ask for a reboot - (all still Windows XP back then) - and after reboot, Windows would lock up. Rebooting the PC then, would show the "no drive bla bla" message - because the MBR was corrupted, the drive couldn't be used. The EXACT same problem happened to all my friends and the only computers that weren't affected, were those that didn't have Nforce motherboards and/or were running Intel. Heck, my brother who was sitting 5 feet away from me had the problem an hour after I did and before you make some claim of a virus, no there was no virus. It was the first thing I checked and the Steam forum had several topics talking about their PC locking up after a reboot and then having drive problems so I then was sure it was Steam. They rushed out a patch an hour or two later and then all topics were removed. Not locked, removed. If it hadn't been done during early afternoon European time on a week day, I'm sure a lot more people would have had it happen to them - but Americans were asleep and most Europeans were at work (and most of my friends were unemployed back then including me).

Now, you know-it-all, still going to come up with sad excuses how it's not possible while you don't seem to even know what MBR does or means? And if you had any brains, you'd realise that, if within such a short period something so rare happens on so many different systems with only one piece of software in common that had just updated ... seriously? You make up excuses? And maybe you have an excuse why Steam deleted the topics as well, hmm?

Wow man all I have to say is you read too much in my reply which wasn't even directed towards you.

I can go on and clarify my statement but since you already took it outside of its context, there is no use.

Great, now you're providing additional informations regarding your grave accusations, now everyone can try to understand what happened.

Regarding the MBR, you can most of time fix it with chkdsk, but if it affects the partition table you're good for hours of recovering the data, and since most people don't know how to do it, they'll go to the next repair shop who'll format the HDDs and reinstall the OS. Technically it's just modifying boot and partition informations, but users are users and will destroy their own data while trying to "save" their computer, and if Steam caused that MBR corruption, Steam is responsible for the data loss because they can't expect their users to correctly deal with MBR issues.

You're saying that "it is perfectly possible for software to cause the MBR to get corrupted", it is indeed possible, any partitioning software does that (the partition table has to be modified some way). However, why the hell Steam would modify your partitions or modify your bootstrap code ? Steam never had a partitioning feature nor fiddled with boot, in 2005 there was no project of launching a Steam OS.

This is why I asked you to provide more details, because there quite a lot of other problems Steam could have caused and is likely to have caused in a faulty build of their client, but MBR corruption is probably the least probable.

Since you're bashing over Steam moderation without taking the time to understand how it works, I was afraid you wrongly attributed the responsibility for MBR problems to Steam, and this is why I asked for more details, like I asked for more details on your moderation-related issues. Then I guess "when 6 of my friends had a MBR failure in a span of two days" was a typo, you meant 2 hours, now it's plausible that only a handful of users were affected: in 48h there would have been thousands of affected users and several threads on non-Steam forums.

Do you remember which part of the MBR Steam corrupting ? the boot part or the partition table ? If Steam is fiddling with such "intimate" part of our computer, users should be informed - especially now, they're "perhaps" planning on going on Linux (rumors of a Steam distro or a partnership with popular distros), so they're going to modify the MBR "again". I prefer to call myself want-to-know.

I know what is a MBR, and if I missed something about it, I expect other users with a better knowledge of it to teach me what I got wrong, rather than calling me a fanboy and a retard. As far as I know, the MBR parts that could prevent a HDD from being recognized would the boot part or the partition table. They're only modified by the OS or partitioning software as far as I know. What is wrong there ?

"if within such a short period something so rare happens on so many different systems with only one piece of software in common" great, you're now bringing context to your accusation, this exactly what I was asking for in my previous post: explain and provide details. Like I said above, your misunderstanding of how the Steam platform works + very unlikeliness of such problem ("something so rare") lead me to believe you were pulling it out of your hat.

Regarding your constant focus on "excuses", I need to repeat myself: I am no trying to determine who is guilty, I am trying to determine what really happened. Only once your accusation of a MBR corruption, something that could qualify Steam as a malware (according to some standards), we should proceed to judge Steam and see if:
- it was a complete mistake
- it was voluntary (who knows ?)
- it was the result of a lack of due care and testing

Remember the Myth II HDD-wiping fiasco: Bungie recalled as much faulty copies as they could (no matter the cost) => it seemed it was a genuine error, you couldn't blame Bungie of having that bug on purpose, or because they didn't care about their customers.

If Steam indeed caused MBR corruptions, were they guilty of a lack of due care or concern ? That question can only be answered once you fully proved Steam indeed caused such MBR corruptions.

Coincidence doesn't mean causality, and sadly you don't seem to be the most reliable person regarding the Steam platform when you call Steam forums moderators "Gestapo" and getting super-mad over a temp ban for writing f**k. This is why I am experiencing difficulty in believing you. If you were calm and were providing as much as details as you could on your accusations, I would be the first to thank you for giving us informations we couldn't get anywhere else.

Now regarding the assumed massive censorship on the Steam forum in 2005 over that bug, I find it strange that I can't find any trace of it anywhere else on the Internet - if my MBR was corrupted by Steam, and my threads were deleted on the SPUF, hell every major gaming forum would get my thread and every gaming news website would get an email - I don't understand how all the users who got their MBR corrupted walked away from it like if nothing had happened.

Now, assuming the MBR corruption did happened and was caused by Steam, if the Steam forum moderators deleted all the threads regarding that MBR corruption to "cover up" the fiasco, this is terribly wrong (for Steam) and I still don't get why it hasn't spawned a major "shitstorm" online.

In 2005 there was already quite a lot of people going on forums/news website on a daily basis and it wouldn't have required a gigantic effort to rally the flaming torches and pitch forks: everyone hated Steam because it was slow, it was crashing, it wasn't letting people play their game because the servers were frequently down. A MBR corruption would have been enough to start a month-long riot -at least-.

Finally, if the MBR-corruption-caused-by-Steam happened, if the forum "cleansing" happened, then we (me included) will immediately, now in September 2012, contact Steam for an answer, and if no answers are given within a week, publicly ask for that answer on every major gaming forums while sending all the details to news website. Why should we let a company get away with this and keep this precious information on a niche community forum like gog.com is baffling me.

Are you ready to take this public, to spread that information (MBR corruption + cleansing) and back it up in front of the whole world ?

[whispering]
Pssst, Klem, just so you know, this IS public. EVERYONE can see what you guys are writing. That guy over there is looking really weirdly at us too... Ima go back to eating this donut.

Yes, because it's a corperation it has to be evil right?

I've never known a corrupted MBR on a NTFS drive to require more than a simple chkdsk - I think only something bigger like a failed partitioning or a format would really require more than just that but as you said, most people have no clue what happened and might have their hard drive formatted.

Actually that's not true and you should know that. If Steam drivers caused the Nforce drivers to break or flip out, (you know, drivers that also handle disk access and so on), then it's perfectly possible for the MBR to get damaged. The fact that it ONLY affected Nforce users seems to make it very likely that something wrong happened on reboot after Windows updated its Steam service/drivers.

And as unlikely as it is (and I've never known any other piece of software doing this), it's very obvious Steam was laying at the root because it involved everyone having updated their Steam + the forum getting "cleansed" of the posts.

I'm bashing Steam moderation because it's an atrocity - I avoid it like the plague yet still manage to see plenty of occasions where they were abusive towards people, banning people unjustly, etc. You can make up any excuses you want after the facts without having been there, but I DID see it and I know what they have done and can do. When I said 2 hours, it's a guestimate - it's been 7 years ago. It was the same day, however. The fact that it spans two days isn't hard to get: you have to reboot for it to happen or did you miss that part? Again, Steam could perfectly have caused the problems without wanting to fiddle with those parts if it somehow caused system drivers to flip out. You must be quite weird if you think I'd invent such a detailed story just for a laugh - and then you wonder why I call you a fanboy when you go above and beyond to prove me wrong when you weren't there. A "normal" person wouldn't do that - you're like the Steam inquisition.

Fact remains, it happened - if you Googled more, you'd probably find posts from me all the way back to 2005 complaining about that. Back then, I didn't even think ill of Steam so had no reason at all to invent something like that (and it would have been a lot easier to invent something simpler anyway, you think I'm daft?) - Valve did that themselves by screwing me and my friends over time after time - like when they preloaded Condition Zero without asking which pushed our household over the monthly download limit, costing us $15 - and when you paused the download, it would restart itself automatically. Do you really need me to answer that? It's pretty easy: they updated, discovered that the update caused these issues (maybe thanks to my forum posts and that of others) and by the speed of the new update, they must have known what caused it as well. And why hide it? You know why - you said it yourself. They'd be liable for loss of data. They did the one thing which covered their ass: new update and pretend it never happened. If they hadn't made a new update a few hours later, I might have started to doubt it but I predicted they would after it happened and they did.

And about the forum: why on earth do you keep acting as if it's a "coincidence" that I didn't keep a backup of the topics - same with your BS about the arrogant moderators. You think I take screenshots of every post or topic I make? Once it's gone, it's gone unless you're admin. Erm, think for a sec: most people wouldn't make the link to Steam anyway so wouldn't go to the forums. Then of those who are left, the majority had a PC they couldn't use. The handful of people who posted on the forums weren't even certain what happened - I wasn't either and still hadn't verified it wasn't a virus until friend after friend called me with the same message: their hard drive couldn't be detected upon start up. It's only after I checked for viruses that I was certain that it had to be Steam itself. When I went back to the forum, all topics had been removed and I had no topics to post my findings into.

Do you find it unlikely that the people who posted the topic just assumed that Steam didn't like the accusations? There weren't many - a handful maybe that I recall - so it doesn't seem like a big leap to me that it was easy of Steam to keep it all quiet. You need enough people to raise an alarm - if only 150 people on Steam get unjustly banned by VAC, it won't get in the press either. I did however complain - just not on the Steam forums because I was sure to get banned there. A friend or two of mine complained on Dutch forums too but it didn't result in anything (surprise surprise).

In the end, I think you can defend anything you want (after all, look at religion) but that doesn't make you right or accurate. I was there, I know what happened and whether you believe me or not, I don't care. It was just one small example out of many where Steam could have done the right way but didn't.

no it doesn't have to be evil and hopefully more and more companies put their customers first but if you are arguing that Valve is putting its customers first and its better than EA, then you are seriously naive.
I totally understand that there r degrees of "evil" and that no video game company can be compared to a bank and I totally agree that EA winning worst company in US versus Bank of America is a proof that people got their priorities mixed up.