Rock Bottom

My love/hate relationship with Steam

I play quite a few online games, and those which are the most fun are on Steam. At first I hated Steam, since it was yet-another account I had to sign-up for, and required me to be online to play my games. It has come a long way since the early days, and has grown to be the main distribution method for games. Indie developers are able to make their games available to millions of people without having to package or ship any cardboard boxes. Think of how many trees have been saved! I love that new content is continually added to the game I bought a year ago. Team Fortress 2 feels fresh, and Steam is able to deliver it without me having to download and apply countless patches manually.

Unfortunately this automation comes with a price- last night I wanted to play TF2, but could not because of a bug in the Heavy Update. In the old world I would simply roll-back to a previous release, but Steam does not allow that... and I'd be out of sync with the servers.

What was the bug? It didn't actually show up until after I had played the new version for an hour and exited the game. When trying to launch the game again, it failed because it didn't like this file c:\program files (x86)\steam\YourUserName\steamapps\tf\tf2_playerstats.dmx Simply deleting it fixes the issue. I found the details the following morning, here.

How does a bug like this get past QA? Sure this was a tricky one, but in reading through that thread, you'll see that likely thousands of people were affected by this. Most have Nvidia graphics cards like mine, but I saw some ATI references as well. Some are using Vista, some XP. It seems to me that this release was rushed. What for? It's not like this patch is bringing in more direct revenue for Valve, so why release something that hasn't been fully tested? Why risk breaking my favorite game to add a few new bells and whistles. TF2 was rendered useless and I spent the rest of my evening trying to fix it.

I realize that a QA department cannot catch every error, but I feel like this one could have been prevented had the release not been rushed. As PC gamers, are we too forgiving when a game is buggy? Do we have lower expectations than console gamers? Maybe Valve expects the world to be their QA department. They run some quick checks, but all regression is performed by the end user. If that's the case I'd just like to know ahead of time.

Comments?

AT&T Wireless is trying to milk me

Yes ladies and gentlemen, the old American Telephone & Telegraph company (aka AT&T, Cingular, Ma Bell) is treating me like a farm animal; only I yield monthly amounts of cash rather than a warm lactate every morning. Lately, they've been trying to squeeze even more out of me.

My most recent trouble with them has been over this month's bill. I finally noticed a few things have changed. For one, text messages are $0.15 to send, rather than $0.10. I don't have a text message plan- frankly, it's ridiculous that I should have to pay extra to send messages that use less bandwidth than a fraction of a second of voice traffic; but that is an entirely separate argument.

The real issue this month is a change in policy about when nighttime billing starts. I got my first mobile phone back in college- long before the Cingular merger. Money was really tight back then, so I made sure to know the rules on when my nighttime minutes began. 9pm is my starting time, and if I placed a call at 8:59pm and talked for an hour, I would only be billed for 1 minute. According to my bill, this is no longer the case. I placed a call at 8:28PM and spoke for 117 minutes. Unbeknownst to me (as usual), I had already used up my monthly plan minutes, so this was a $0.35/minute call! According to the normal system, I should have been billed for 32 minutes, or $11.20. I was actually billed $16.80, the equivalent of 48 minutes. Time to call 611!

I explained the situation to Angelina at AT&T customer service...

Angelina: <in a southern accent> "Well sir, we had a big meeting about this, and if you place a call before your nighttime minutes begin, you will be billed for the full time of that particular call."
Me: "If that's true, why was I billed for 48 minutes instead of 117?"
Angelina: "uhh, lucky glitch?"
Me: "You mean to tell me that I and millions of other AT&T customers have our personal information in a system with 'billing glitches?' Are you going to fix this glitch so that it doesn't happen again?"
Angelina: "Sir, I don't know how to fix it, but I can remove that charge."
Me: "Well, that's a start."

In the end she removed the $16.80 charge, but I really shouldn't have to run a fine-toothed comb over my bill every month. Their website reminds customers: "Paying your wireless bill has never been easier! Sign up for Auto Pay." Thanks, I'll pass...

The NewEgg gift card fiasco

newegg.com has finally pissed me off. I've been a customer for at least four years. They have decent prices, and a good "power-search" tool. I've placed many orders, returned partial orders, and in all this time they have never screwed up anything for me... until now.

I need would like to build a new computer. Something with four cores. Mmmm. Christmas was coming up and so I gently grafted this desire into the extended family gift-giving grapevine. Word got out that I wanted a newegg.com gift certificate. "Why not just cash?" Well, I have a habit -not necessarily a bad habit- of hoarding any cash I get. It ends up in a savings account, or goes toward paying off my student loans. Disgusting, I know... but with a gift-certificate I'm pretty much forced to buy something I actually desire.

Grandma was the first to attempt the purchase. She couldn't figure out the website, so she reverted to cold-hard-cash. She's 84, I don't blame her. Thanks Grams.

My father-in-law was next to give it a go. The guy is a scientist, so he had no trouble with the site, and even bought it a few days early to make sure I received it. Sure enough, on Dec 21 I got an email from NewEgg containing the proper redemption credentials. Danke.

The rest of the family procrastinated a bit, and bought them on December 24. That's two brother's-in-law, a sister-in-law, and my own parents. Now, maybe they weren't waiting until the last minute, maybe they just wanted me to receive my gift no earlier than Christmas Eve. Unfortunately I haven't received any yet. I did get an email though:

from	Newegg. com (info@newegg.com)
date
subject		Gift Certificate From www.newegg.com
mailed-by		newegg.com

So, there's one certificate- except that the email doesn't have a body. No body, means no Claim code, no Security code, no form letter to tell me where the love came from. So now I have to track down my family members and ask if they tried to send me a gift card from NewEgg- because if they did, I didn't actually get it; and I'm not sure if I ever will...

NewEgg, you've let me down. Did the NewEgg grinch get any of you too? Leave a comment!

Unimpressed with Vista

I don't use Vista. Unfortunately one of my clients wanted to try it out, so I built a new machine for him. It worked for 30 days and I got a call from my client- Vista kept telling him he needed to 'Activate' Windows.

I had activated when I installed the OS, but I guess it wanted to do it again- you know, just for fun. So, I told it to activate and it said the key was already in use. Of course it's in use- I already activated! I picked up the phone to call the 888 number since that was my only option.

A chipper female recording answered the phone. "Welcome to the Microsoft Product Activation Center. I can help you activate Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 Small Busin..." yadda ya the list goes on. Sounds like they are feeding me an advertisement for their product that isn't working. Anyway, usually after getting though that it has you enter 8 groups of 6 digits, and then responds with a similarly large number that you enter into your activation window. After entering my digits, the chipper female said "We're sorry, but this key is in use." Of course it's in use- I already activated! "Please wait while your call is transferred to a representative."

Make note- she didn't qualify the term 'representative' with any sort of adjective like 'skilled' or 'competent.' In her thick offshore-outsourced accent the representative asked me to read her all the numbers I had just typed into the phone. She asked if I had recently changed hardware in my computer. "No," I said, "why should that matter?"

It matters because MS doesn't want you moving copies of their OS from machine to machine- even if you did buy it legally. "But it's not their OS, I bought it!" Nope, still theirs, and it's married to your hardware, and cannot divorce and remarry. They want to sell you a new copy for each piece of hardware you own. Of course Miss Representative didn't inform me of this, but did tell me I might have to call back if I change hardware... Then, she read a huge string of digits back to me. Vista accepted them, and allowed me to use the computer I built.

But why did it stop working in the first place? Nothing in the hardware had changed, and after a reboot it claimed I had three days to reactivate Windows. Here we go again.

Chipper Female: "Activating your product will take about 6 minutes, if you have an internet connection and haven't already tried the 'Activate by Internet' option, I suggest you try it- it's much faster."

Me: "..."

Again, I enter the numbers and it forwards me to a rep. He gives me the same spiel and I say "Look, I'm stuck in an endless loop here. I'm not changing hardware, it deactivates Windows on boot!" After a long pause he says I'll have to talk to another team of people who don't work on Saturday.

That's really great Microsoft. It's bad enough that I'm spending my weekend troubleshooting your product, and now you want me to call back on Monday. At least I'm being paid, but my client can't be happy about that.

And so I googled, and found plenty of people with the same problem. Apparently Vista had based its hardware detection on some value reported by the Silicon Image SATA card. That value was changing at every boot! So by updating the driver and re-activating Windows, I was able to get it to remember that it was already activated. At least until I swap out a video card or something...

The moral of the story: Don't even bother with Vista. If Microsoft wants to win back their customer base, they need to grow up and realize that anyone who wants to beat their system will find a way. So just keep it up Microsoft, the more customers you deter with this sort of crap the better. They will all find alternatives- like Mac or Linux.