Steam Registration Servers Overloaded

duckle writes "The Inquirer reports that "The World has come crashing down around Half-Life 2 players today, as Steam's authentication servers in Europe have died.", and deemzzzz_k writes "It looks like even Valve wasn't quite prepared for Half Life 2's popularity. HL2 requires registration to unlock the game and although the Valve/Steam homepage claims that it fixed registration issues the servers are still overloaded. Registration is "delayed" and temporarily unlocking the game takes 20-30 minutes over a 1.5MB DSL line." This seems to primarily be an issue for folks who bought the game from a store; I purchased the game via Steam and was playing at 12:15 am PST on launch day.

No problems here

[elh_inny]

I'm in Poland. I've had no problems in the morning, my friend has just unlock his copy.

Not just the CD-based customers

[attaboy]

I ordered online through Steam last night and it took about 30 minutes to unlock. I had already pre-downloaded.

On a slightly unrelated note: what's with the mid-game/mid-level load times? Are they just slow for me, or does anyone else feel like they may as well be downloading the game textures from Steam as you play?

Outage was yesterday

[FromWithin]

I'm in the UK. I got everything installed and running in about half an hour. I got the Steam account setup, but when it couldn't connect to the server, it told me it was busy but I could still play the game anyway. It connected and finished the process during the night after I'd already played the game for about 5 hours. It's a brilliant game, and I think they've done really well with Steam considering the size of the load they have taken. I have no complaints.

Re:A telling statement

[joelhayhurst]

Half Life 2 is not the same as Halo 2.

Re:Gotta stop piracy!

[Girckin]

No, the source code wasn't stolen from inside, someone hacked into their computers and copied it out. See the Final Hours of Half Life 2 [slashdot.org].

Re:Last night was no parade

[aliens]

An internet connection is not required as you play. Once you signup and register you can have steam start in offline mode, unplug yourself from the wall and you're done.

Just an FYI in case you're without internet some day.

Re:Gotta stop piracy!

[xsupergr0verx]

Archive.org [archive.org] has it. Powerplay was all BS anyway. A lot of babble, and no substance or working product.

Notice on the left you won't see id software's logo. That's because Carmack laughed them out of his office, he saw right through that crap.

Steam works perfectly for me. Bought HL2 last month through Steam, and played right at release time.

Re:Last night was no parade

[Buzz_Litebeer]

The CD is required to play if you install with the CD.

At least on my machine.

Re:This happened to me last night

[bloodstains]

What if I don't have the Internet? What if I want to play on a lan that doesn't have Internet access?

I guess you'll learn to read the System Requirements next time:

Minimum System Configuration
* 1.2 GHz Processor
* 256MB RAM
* DirectX 7 capable graphics card
* Windows 2000/XP/ME/98
* Mouse
* Keyboard
* Internet Connection

Just buy it through steam

[ValuJet]

I purchased HL2 through steam and had no such problems. I probably would not have purchased the game if it wasn't for the ability to buy it online over the internet. I loved not having to wait in line at a store or install it from discs.

I understand that people who purchased the game via the brick and mortar stores kinda got the raw end of the deal, but I was very satisfied with the way buying this game worked.

Unlocking doesn't use the Net

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlocking doesn't use the Net except for the DL of the key. From there on, it's all your processor's work. So a 1.5 MB DSL line will NOT accelerate unlocking. It's the fetching of the key from the activation servers that takes time, and if they go down, someone's in trouble. Doesn't make sense that they'd go down, tho, because I could DL from teh content servers at 1.0 mb/s when I normally can only DL stuff at 150 kb/s.

Re:Last night was no parade

[sycotic]

Ninth. Afaik, there are no cracked copys of hl2 on the web yet, so if you were a cruminal, you still wouldn't be playing.

Half Life 2 (c) Valve *READNFO* [nforce.nl]
Half-Life 2 (c) Valve *EMPORiO FIX* [nforce.nl]
Half-Life 2 (c) Valve *OFFLINE ACTIVATION PATCH* [nforce.nl]
Half-Life 2 (c) Valve *EMPORiO FIX* *REPACK* [nforce.nl]
Half-Life 2 (c) Valve *ONLINE PLAY METHOD* [nforce.nl]

The above suggests that some time between the 16th and 17th of this month you could, in actual fact, have been playing it :)

Firefox

[Robmonster]

For the lazy, get this extention to fic the slashdot bug:-

http://hardgrok.org/blog/item/slashfix-firefox-e xt ension.html

Geez, you people need some friggin' perspective

[Richard Jones]

I, along with countless others (judging by the hl2 forums), managed to have my game unlocked for playing withing *minutes* of the official release time.

That's simply *impossible* without the online distribution and online unlocking mechanisms that Valve put in place. Unless you live *in* the store, and have an incredibly fast CD drive and ability to swap CDs at a superhuman rate. Even then, I doubt you'd be able to beat my time.

You people are whining because you were delayed in some cases by 2 hours?!? Get a grip!

So their servers were unable to cope with an initial spike. So what? Do we pile on the abuse whenever some poor schmo's webserver gets slashdotted? So Valve did underestimate the peak of that spike. So what?

And finally, I'll always support Steam because it means the money is going straight to the developer. That's a good thing in my books.

ps. I've never had a problem with the password resetting system either, and I've used it a number of times.

PARENT qualifies as "Informative"

[chade01]

You guys have some low ass standards for informative.

Re:Gotta stop piracy!

[spoco2]

Exactly, that's what I see it as, Valve trying to cut out the middle man, and damn it, I say good on them!

I was dubious about the whole Steam thing, but my brother had an ATI card with the free copy included. He doesn't have broadband, so I said I'd download it for him, and then we'd copy it over to his computer.

Now, if Valve had been intent on f*cking things up for the consumer they would have made this a damn painful experience. But it wasn't.

Downloaded HL2 et al (CS Source, Half Life 1 etc.) onto my machine... he brought his over, connected to my home network, simply copied the entire Steam folder over to his computer, deleted one config file (ClientRegistry.blob) and that was it!

Ran it on his machine, it configured itself for being on a new machine, asked for the password to the Steam account and it was ready to go.

And now... this is the bit I like. Once he's finished playing HL2, I can just fire up Steam on my computer and play it... cause I already have it installed... and Valve say that's legal and completely OK... How cool is that?

I'm sold on this idea.

I do agree that it'd be nice to be able to download some coverart for CDs, and even better have the ability to back up whatever games from Steam you want (it would split it over whatever size media you have)... but really, it's quite cool.

Re:The problem with DRM...

[Shodan2020]

Actually, everyone who has the original half-life game with key id can play Half-Life, TFC, Counter-strike, whatever, over Steam. WON being discontinued didn't render anything obsolete. You have to dl a small 500k steam setup exe and install it. Form a steam account (takes like 10 seconds) and put in your CD key for half-life. It will unlock Half-Life and all these other mods that you can use. It's not hard. Really.

Re:phone number to complain?

[mrchaotica]

Read this [cornell.edu], print it out, and take it with you when you try again to return the product. I'm reasonably sure there's something in it to the effect that stores are prohibited by law to refuse a refund for a non-functioning product, even if it's an open game.

[insert standard "IANAL" disclaimer here]

Re:Gotta stop piracy!

[Anonymous Coward]

While I agree with you that Half-Life 2 is a great game, and that MMRPG's have had lots of opening day problems, what really irritates me about Steam and HL2 (and I was one of those people last night having to retry a dozen or so times to get it to go through), is that they didn't have to do it this way. An MMRPG has to access the internet to enable play, HL2 is using this purely as a method to stop piracy.

I don't even have a problem with the process or with Steam as long as the system works like it should efficiently. It's when I finally get the kids to bed and I sit down to play a game that I paid $55 for and end up spending about a half-hour trying to get it to register so that I can play that I get annoyed. Copy-protection is all well and good as long as it doesn't inconvience the paying customers - particularly since it seems to have barely hindered the pirate-crowd.

Experience from someone who bought the game:

[Thaelon]

• Install the game from 12x DVD-ROM drive (DVD edition of the game): 5 minutes.
• Activate/Unlock/Enable the game I bought: 45 minutes. (I'm wtf'ing at this point already.)
• Start the game off a SCSI 3 RAID 0 Array of (4) Atlas 10K IIIs on a system with 768MB of RAM: 2 minutes (More wtf'ing ensues.)
• Have the game crash and hardlock a dual CPU computer: 45 seconds to fully lock up & require a reboot.
• Reboot: 2 minutes
• Attempt to start the game and have steam tell me, "Sorry this game is unavailable right now, please try again later.": (Extremely irate WTF'ing ensues!) I bought the fucking game, I installed the fucking game, why can't I PLAY THE FUCKING GAME!?!
• Attempt to start the game again, (watching task manager): hl2.exe appears after 5 seconds, then vanishes.
• Attempt to start the game again, (watching task manager): hl2.exe appears after 5 seconds, then vanishes.
• Attempt to start the game again, (watching task manager): Game starts, requires 2 minutes. (head shaking ensues)

55 minutes after I start installing the game, I get to play it.
To Valve: Steam is an atrocity, I just bought the collector's edition and I'll probably crack the game anyway so I can run it without the atrocity that is steam and without the disc. (The disc is required by the way, at least to start the game if you installed from a DVD).

Re:This happened to me last night

[9Nails]

I read somewhere at Steam, or maybe in the *gulp* users manual, that you need to connect to the Internet to register. And if you click the little box on the Steam login window that reads "Remember my password" then you can use Steam in an off-line mode and play your games disconnected from the Internet.

This is all theory, I haven't actually tried it yet.

Not so.

[igorthefiend]

While indeed those who bought the retail version did suffer more, there was a period last night (around 10PM GMT) when you couldn't *log into* Steam at all, no matter which version you had.

Gotta stop ENCOURAGING Piracy.

[mcheu]

There's a reason why I'm posting here instead of playing that game.

My own experiences were more like:

Insert disc1. wait...3 minutes
Insert disc2. wait...3 minutes
Insert disc3. wait...3 minutes
Insert disc4. wait...3 minutes
Insert disc5. wait...3 minutes

Fill in blanks for steam. wait... 5 minutes.

"Unable to find Master AuthenticationServer"

Retry.

"Connection Reset by Peer."

Swear. Retry.

[repeat any of 5 random error messages]

Swear. Repeat.

Email to Sierra Tech support. Email bounces.
OK. Try VUGames Tech support. web email form disabled -- it's there, you just can't type anything into it.
OK. Try emailing directly. Email bounces.

Swear. Swear some more. Give up and go out.

Next day. Try again. Ok it accepts my registration, but authentication servers are too busy to activate me for real, so it sort of puts me on probation and lets me play. Still waiting for Steam to recognize me as a legit user.

Re:Gotta stop piracy!

[Nogami_Saeko]

I'd love to know how your friends were playing the game several days before they unlocked it. Unless your friends were magazine reviewers, what you're claiming is impossible...

It wasn't available through ANY pirate channels before the release, and I was enjoying playing it before the pirates did.

I'm a paying steam customer, and I was thrilled with the way it was delievered and unlocked. I (and a WHOLE lot of other people) hammered the Steam servers at 12:00:01 AM when it was released, and it unlocked flawlessly in about 10 minutes.

I'll happily purchase other games through Steam.

N.

Re:not Steam's fault

[Fallen_Knight]

www.suprnova.org -> games -> half-life 2
bittorrent download, fast, and works.

That is how hard it is to pirate a game nowadays.