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Steam's online features are bugging me--even when the games themselves are just fine
Because my internet connection is not constant, there are some times that I'll be gaming when I'm offline. Achievements might not get registered if I get them while offline, along with a few other issues.
A few months ago I bought Defy Gravity, and started playing it. Offline. Then I went online later and played it again. I got several later achievements but NOT the very first achievement. Why? Because I was offline when I should have gotten it.
So now I have to check every game I play, and if it has Steam chieves, I can't let myself play them when I'm offline. And that's a darn lot of games--the only ones I can think of in my library that don't have Steam chieves are Recettear, Terraria, and Saira. And maybe a few that I haven't really gotten into yet. The other evening I was offline and wanted to check out Zombie Shooter, but I couldn't find out whether that had any chieves--because I was offline. And because of that, I couldn't let myself play it. (Turns out it doesn't.) Can't even let myself play Faerie Solitaire because that's got chieves, and I really don't like having to replay a game just to get a chieve that I should have already gotten.
There's also Steam playtime. Steam doesn't track how much time you spend playing a game if you're offline. That's why I have less than an hour logged playing Fate of the World; I'd also have far more hours playing Recettear if it counted offline play.
Most hilariously, I used a trick in DEFCON to get the winter sale achievement, which involved setting my computer's clock to Christmas Eve or something. If I adjusted the clock while playing, it would add an EPIC FUCKTON OF HOURS to my Steam playtime for DEFCON (it was early December then, so I basically added a few hundred hours). When I discovered this, I realized that I'd adjusted the clock while playing, then adjusted it back after stopping. So I had to adjust it forward again, reopen the game, and readjust it back. That finally fixed the issue.
Just a few other things that make Steam inconvenient. Though I'll admit it doesn't really have anything to do with DRM (directly, at least).
(cross-posted to the SteamGifts forum)
Comments
There's the Steam Achievement unlocker, if you're really worried about that.
Yeah, it's mostly the little things that I have issue with Steam on as well. One of the biggest issues I have, albeit still minor (with a 3rd-party program called SteamTool), is the inability to partition games without using a piece of third-party software. Now if only Valve itself can update Steam with this...
Yeah, odd how Steamworks is actually a liability when your internet connection isn't constant. Are they trying to weed out poorer and not-quite-first-world gamers or something? :P
I'm not exactly sure what you mean but I think you're talking about those times when Steam refuses to start offline mode for pretty much any reason it feels like (usually because of program updates).
That's within the realm of major problems with Steam, thus not one that I mentioned here.
Which means if you forget and go where there is no internet, then no games for you
I've been able to start it without an internet connection before. (I don't have Steam start with operating system startup.) However, sometimes it refuses to start without an internet connection, and this happens irregularly.
The offline mode is about the only thing that bugs me. I guess the achievements would bug me if I bothered playing much that has them or gave enough of a damn.
It does record how much time you spend playing stuff offline though. It's tracking Riven right now, and I don't think I've reconnected to Steam since I started playing it.
Well, I personally don't care much about playtime, but since that's publicly displayed, it becomes part of my personal information, being a source of information to strangers looking at my profile suggesting what my tastes are. It also becomes a "political" tool in the sense of drawing attention to a certain game or another. For example, people were once considering playing Faerie Solitaire en masse after the epic FS giveaway on SteamGifts (where 12,999 copies of FS were given away by the developers), in order to get it into the top ten most played games list on Steam.
I only use it to play co-op with my friends
But...but...how do you think I look if I have TF2 and Deus Ex all over my recent gaming history? I gotta maintain my console/anime/indie cred somehow, right??
[/facetious]