Publicado originalmente por CLBrown:

Weird trend of "locking" every thread addressing bugs in Steam Client?

I have an issue which I am trying to read up on, hoping to find a solution. Certain application on Steam (NOT ALL, just some) are trying to "auto-update" and ending up corrupted, and unusable. Removing and reinstalling doesn't help. I either get "content unavailable" or "corrupted data" or "servers unavailable" errors. Every single time.

So, I came here looking for explanations for why this might be happening, and how to resolve it. And what do I find? Every single thread dealing with ANY such issue has been shut down, by the same "moderator," with the following explanation for why.

"This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion."

Now, the interesting thing is, these were not "old threads." In one case, the entire thread was created within two months of the moderator "shutting it down for being an old thread."

This is VERY suspect. A way of preventing discussion of some issues going on with Steam, it seems.

Anyone else noticing this practice?

2 months is the typical amount of time for an "old" thread to be locked.

I would consider anything over a month of inactivity old.

It's simpler to make a new thread, even linking older threads for more information in your post.

Publicado originalmente por CLBrown:

I have an issue which I am trying to read up on, hoping to find a solution. Certain application on Steam (NOT ALL, just some) are trying to "auto-update" and ending up corrupted, and unusable. Removing and reinstalling doesn't help. I either get "content unavailable" or "corrupted data" or "servers unavailable" errors. Every single time.

So, I came here looking for explanations for why this might be happening, and how to resolve it. And what do I find? Every single thread dealing with ANY such issue has been shut down, by the same "moderator," with the following explanation for why.

"This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion."

Now, the interesting thing is, these were not "old threads." In one case, the entire thread was created within two months of the moderator "shutting it down for being an old thread."

This is VERY suspect. A way of preventing discussion of some issues going on with Steam, it seems.

Anyone else noticing this practice?

Nope, as stated its pretty norm, your not supposed to bump threads from months ago and make a new thread and link the old one if its related.

But "months old" is NOTHING when we're talking about technical issues. Unless it's a "bug" that appeared and then was fixed within days of it appearing, these issues will continue to occur, regularly, for YEARS.

I've found tons of threads and comments... mainly OFF of Steam, mind you... referring to this issue. The "corrupted downloads/server unavailable/etc" issues which occur after certain auto-update events fail. This is an ONGOING ISSUE.

You'd think someone there would recognize that these issues ought to be addressed in some more permanent fashion. Instead of having a metric @#$*-ton of individual posts, one from every person experiencing it, having one (or perhaps just a few) "master threads" which anyone experiencing the problem can refer to.

That's how this site USED to work, by the way. I was one of the very first users of Steam, back when it first launched, and when there were, literally, only about two dozen items available on the platform (mostly the original Half-Life and its mods, and Half-Life 2, plus a few "experiments" like "Codename Gordon" or "Spacewar.")

Basically, these days, "Steam Forums" have been rendered virtually useless for any form of technical information, because there are a huge number of redundant threads, most filled with the exact same (unhelpful) suggestions, and a pile of "wanna-be-kewl-kids" trying to be disruptive.

But I'm facing a big pile... a couple of dozen... Steam games I've bought and paid for which are no longer available to me because of these issues, and Steam is utterly unhelpful at providing support. And even the "community support forums" are useless, because of this, frankly, pretty ridiculous practice of "locking threads which are older than a McDonald's drive through timeframe."

Thankfully, I no longer really buy much from this site, but I'd sure like to keep all the thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of purchases I've made over the years. Valve/Steam really ought to do their best to help its paying customers keep their purchases. (sigh)

Publicado originalmente por CLBrown:

But "months old" is NOTHING when we're talking about technical issues. Unless it's a "bug" that appeared and then was fixed within days of it appearing, these issues will continue to occur, regularly, for YEARS.

I've found tons of threads and comments... mainly OFF of Steam, mind you... referring to this issue. The "corrupted downloads/server unavailable/etc" issues which occur after certain auto-update events fail. This is an ONGOING ISSUE.

You'd think someone there would recognize that these issues ought to be addressed in some more permanent fashion. Instead of having a metric @#$*-ton of individual posts, one from every person experiencing it, having one (or perhaps just a few) "master threads" which anyone experiencing the problem can refer to.

That's how this site USED to work, by the way. I was one of the very first users of Steam, back when it first launched, and when there were, literally, only about two dozen items available on the platform (mostly the original Half-Life and its mods, and Half-Life 2, plus a few "experiments" like "Codename Gordon" or "Spacewar.")

Basically, these days, "Steam Forums" have been rendered virtually useless for any form of technical information, because there are a huge number of redundant threads, most filled with the exact same (unhelpful) suggestions, and a pile of "wanna-be-kewl-kids" trying to be disruptive.

But I'm facing a big pile... a couple of dozen... Steam games I've bought and paid for which are no longer available to me because of these issues, and Steam is utterly unhelpful at providing support. And even the "community support forums" are useless, because of this, frankly, pretty ridiculous practice of "locking threads which are older than a McDonald's drive through timeframe."

Thankfully, I no longer really buy much from this site, but I'd sure like to keep all the thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of purchases I've made over the years. Valve/Steam really ought to do their best to help its paying customers keep their purchases. (sigh)

Sounds like the Windows 7 bug.

Publicado originalmente por CLBrown:

I have an issue which I am trying to read up on, hoping to find a solution. Certain application on Steam (NOT ALL, just some) are trying to "auto-update" and ending up corrupted, and unusable. Removing and reinstalling doesn't help. I either get "content unavailable" or "corrupted data" or "servers unavailable" errors. Every single time.

So, I came here looking for explanations for why this might be happening, and how to resolve it. And what do I find? Every single thread dealing with ANY such issue has been shut down, by the same "moderator," with the following explanation for why.

"This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion."

Now, the interesting thing is, these were not "old threads." In one case, the entire thread was created within two months of the moderator "shutting it down for being an old thread."

This is VERY suspect. A way of preventing discussion of some issues going on with Steam, it seems.

Anyone else noticing this practice?

That thread was the old thread, hence why they posted it was quite old before locking. Simply create a new topic with the actual issue.

Publicado originalmente por CLBrown:

But "months old" is NOTHING when we're talking about technical issues. Unless it's a "bug" that appeared and then was fixed within days of it appearing, these issues will continue to occur, regularly, for YEARS.

I've found tons of threads and comments... mainly OFF of Steam, mind you... referring to this issue. The "corrupted downloads/server unavailable/etc" issues which occur after certain auto-update events fail. This is an ONGOING ISSUE.

You'd think someone there would recognize that these issues ought to be addressed in some more permanent fashion. Instead of having a metric @#$*-ton of individual posts, one from every person experiencing it, having one (or perhaps just a few) "master threads" which anyone experiencing the problem can refer to.

That's how this site USED to work, by the way. I was one of the very first users of Steam, back when it first launched, and when there were, literally, only about two dozen items available on the platform (mostly the original Half-Life and its mods, and Half-Life 2, plus a few "experiments" like "Codename Gordon" or "Spacewar.")

Basically, these days, "Steam Forums" have been rendered virtually useless for any form of technical information, because there are a huge number of redundant threads, most filled with the exact same (unhelpful) suggestions, and a pile of "wanna-be-kewl-kids" trying to be disruptive.

But I'm facing a big pile... a couple of dozen... Steam games I've bought and paid for which are no longer available to me because of these issues, and Steam is utterly unhelpful at providing support. And even the "community support forums" are useless, because of this, frankly, pretty ridiculous practice of "locking threads which are older than a McDonald's drive through timeframe."

Thankfully, I no longer really buy much from this site, but I'd sure like to keep all the thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of purchases I've made over the years. Valve/Steam really ought to do their best to help its paying customers keep their purchases. (sigh)

I'm sure they will be fine without the dozens of dollars that would have otherwise been spent here.

Publicado originalmente por cSg|mc-Hotsauce:

Sounds like the Windows 7 bug.

Well, I'm not running Win7 on this machine. So I'm not sure what you mean.

Unless you're referring to how Valve started "turning off" access to Steam on Win7 as Microsoft's "end of support" date was approaching? And suggesting that maybe they're "turning off" Win10 support now, in the same way?

Publicado originalmente por CLBrown:

Publicado originalmente por cSg|mc-Hotsauce:

Sounds like the Windows 7 bug.

Well, I'm not running Win7 on this machine. So I'm not sure what you mean.

Unless you're referring to how Valve started "turning off" access to Steam on Win7 as Microsoft's "end of support" date was approaching? And suggesting that maybe they're "turning off" Win10 support now, in the same way?

No. Just Win 7 issues.

Valve hasn't done anything with Win 10 support.

Publicado originalmente por The Living Tribunal:

I'm sure they will be fine without the dozens of dollars that would have otherwise been spent here.

Ah, yes, the "scr3w the customers" mentality.

I sure hope that's not what THEY are thinking. And if that's how YOU think about relating to other people, well... it's best you never get into a position where you have to interact with other people.

Nobody said anything about "what's best for Valve." We all know that what's "best for Valve" in that context is for us to hand over our entire wallets and then walk away, getting nothing at all in return.

But I'd hope that the majority of people working at Valve are not, in fact, sociopaths. And that they'd acknowledge that cheating people is not, in fact, in anyone's best interests, their own included.

But in any conversation about... well, almost ANYTHING here... someone always comes along and says something like you just said. In effect "drop trou, bend over, and take it!"

Which is (a) not helpful in any way, and (b) pretty damned evil.

Valve also did this...

Publicado originalmente por Taylor Sherman:

To explain further, we recently enabled a new compression algorithm which is vastly better-performing, and will enable faster downloads with much lower CPU load on clients. It will also improve unlock times for preloads for users on SSD (for spinning disks, the disk writes are the bottleneck). This was good just to save CPU load but it is also necessary for the faster (> 1Gbps) internet speeds people have in some places now, and it also really improves the experience on the Steam Deck.

New content coming in to Steam is now being compressed with this algorithm; existing content will not be converted. So if you're on an old client version for any of the reasons discussed here, there will still be many games in the catalog you can download and play (so long as they are not being updated, or if you can pin them to a particular build using branches supplied by the developer). Unfortunately we can't support having the data in both formats for new content.

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/app/3238670/discussions/0/594022859095939680/#c594023708174098589

Publicado originalmente por cSg|mc-Hotsauce:

Valve also did this...

Publicado originalmente por Taylor Sherman:

To explain further, we recently enabled a new compression algorithm which is vastly better-performing, and will enable faster downloads with much lower CPU load on clients. It will also improve unlock times for preloads for users on SSD (for spinning disks, the disk writes are the bottleneck). This was good just to save CPU load but it is also necessary for the faster (> 1Gbps) internet speeds people have in some places now, and it also really improves the experience on the Steam Deck.

New content coming in to Steam is now being compressed with this algorithm; existing content will not be converted. So if you're on an old client version for any of the reasons discussed here, there will still be many games in the catalog you can download and play (so long as they are not being updated, or if you can pin them to a particular build using branches supplied by the developer). Unfortunately we can't support having the data in both formats for new content.

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/app/3238670/discussions/0/594022859095939680/#c594023708174098589

:nkCool:

Interesting.

I hope that's not related to my current issues... but I'm on a system without any SSDs (my "online games" drive is a 24TB Seagate Exos drive, by the way, with stuff from Steam and several other clients all sharing that drive).

And none of my content with which I'm having issues is "new content." Case in point... "Far Cry 3 - Blood Dragon" is one which failed (and the base "Far Cry 3" as well). Another is "Star Trek - Bridge Crew." And pretty much EVERY "Assassin's Creed" game, except for the first two.

One thing that is absolutely consistent is that every "Ubisoft Connect" connected game on Steam which I have has the same issue. But it's not JUST limited to that... for example "World of Tanks" has the same issue. So far, it's the only non-Ubisoft game I've experienced t his with, but it's hard to say that this is not going to expand from here.

By the way, I appreciate your approach here... civil and informative. Sadly, a rarity in the Steam forums as of late, I've noticed.

Publicado originalmente por CLBrown:

Publicado originalmente por The Living Tribunal:

I'm sure they will be fine without the dozens of dollars that would have otherwise been spent here.

Ah, yes, the "scr3w the customers" mentality.

It was you that said you were no longer able to afford to buy from the site.

Sorry, but this is how Steam works.
Old threads get locked as to not constantly get bumped up to the front, causing confusion.

That's just a good policy.
Not a bad one.

Not really a valid thing to complain about.

If you have an issue, post about it, don't go backwards for months and months.

Nothing to do with messing with the customer.
That makes no sense and seems very silly to say.

Publicado originalmente por The Living Tribunal:

Publicado originalmente por CLBrown:

Ah, yes, the "scr3w the customers" mentality.

It was you that said you were no longer able to afford to buy from the site.

Nope. That's you "reading in." I said nothing of the sort. I said I do not buy much from Steam anymore. Not that I "cannot afford to buy."

I buy from others sites, unless there's absolutely no choice in the matter. Like "Half-Life" or "Portal" games.

Steam is the only site that ever "removed" stuff I paid for. Steam is the only site which has ever "forced upgrading" in order to continue to use stuff I paid for. (Granted, a few other sites also do that, but I don't buy from them and never have.)

I know ways around all that nonsense now. But I'm still not especially inclined to give money to a business which has, unilaterally, removed things I paid for.

In the USA, apparently, this is still considered legal. In Europe, right now, this is being challenged, and I expect that in Europe, this will be declared illegal very soon. Hopefully, US law will follow on from that example, but we'll see.

But I prefer not buying from any business which treats my purchases from them as "one-sided contracts" where they have no obligations towards the customers. And Steam has, increasingly, moved in that directly over the past couple of decades.

My Steam Library is very large... as expected for someone who was a steam member since essentially day one of the company's existence. My complaints re: steam is that I continue to have to jump through hoops to keep what I've paid for.

If that's hard for you to understand... that's not really my concern.