Steam Sucks

I've defended Steam a lot in the past. It is a good distrobution method, and it gives you the option of not forking your cash over to asshat publishers like Vivendi and EA. To this point, virtually everything other than SiN Episode 1 was a Steam download for me rather than a retail purchase. Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike Source, Day of Defeat Source, HL2DM, and Half-Life 2 Episode were all preloaded and paid for. Episode 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2 were going to be next. But I've hit the breaking point, and it is unlikely I'll purchasing games through there again... or even purchasing games that use it since there is no way to play the friggin' things when I cannot log in.








01. Inexplicably, my password is not accepted. I did not change it.
02. Attempts to to change the password are met with "new password not valid."
03. Valve customer support responds with the following gems:

Please exit from Steam, and then delete the following files from your Steam directory.

C:\Program Files\Steam\Steam.dll
C:\Program Files\Steam\SteamUI.dll
C:\Program Files\Steam\ClientRegistry.Blob

Doesn't do a damn thing.

The issue you have described is most likely being caused by firewall or router restrictions preventing the normal operation of the Steam client application. Please follow the instructions below to configure your network for the use of Steam:


Configure your Software Firewall

Verify that you have the following applications in your firewall exceptions lists in order to avoid the most common connection errors:

STEAMINSTALL.EXE
STEAM.EXE
HL.EXE
HL2.EXE

Take a wild guess how much this helps. Running a firewall has never been a problem. Windows, Kerio, you name it. So I'm done with Steam, and I'm not sure if buying a forthcoming PS3/XB360 compilation package really solves the problem. It sort of just leaves me in the same situation as ditching playing games on the my PC to get an XB360 - I'll still be giving a company with lousy products my money. Valve + ATI = I want a refund.