Leaving Steam

[winterflaw]

Hej guys, I'm leaving Steam, and that unavoidably means leaving BKM.

https://www.designflaws.net/pages/steam/index.html

I would like to take this opportunity to encourage you to resume publishing the stand-alone installer.

Thankyou devs for BKM.

I had no idea how wrong COH was until I played BKM.

I've played a lot of hours, and it's been great.

[The New BK Champion]

You are leaving steam because you can't unsuscribe the mail?

[winterflaw]

You are leaving steam because you can't unsuscribe the mail?

It was the final straw.

There have been ongoing problems of various kinds over a considerable period of time.

Technical problems are one thing, that's non-personal, so there's quite a lot more tolerance, then you have service problems, with ineffective customer support, and then finally you have conduct problems, when Valve behaves inappropriately. The last two combined in this case.

I was added to mailing lists without being asked (I think I opted out many years ago in fact, as I would have done so, and there have never been emails before). Slightly annoying but not a big deal and not why I'm leaving Steam.

Valve have deliberately or accidentally constructed the unsubscribe page alone to use a "save" button (other config pages don't have this - changes happen as you make them) and that page does not work in Firefox (there is content above the "save" button, so it can't be clicked).

Contacting support *at all* is problematic - the support site is wide and deep and does its very best to take you to an FAQ or your account page, and in the end you hunt around for *anything* which lets you send a support request, and I think it was a "billing problem" form I finally found.

Having done so, I was then informed support could not fix it, and I would need to install different browsers until I found one which worked.

It's one thing to blunder and add people to mailing lists accidentally. Mistakes happen, not a problem. It's a bit different if it's done deliberately, because it ignores my expressed choice, and so it could periodically reoccur. That's bad in its motive, and it's a minor annoyance. It's different again if having done this, either accidentally or deliberately, and having produced a broken opt-out page, you tell people it's their job to do the work to make it stop happening.

That's objectionable, and it's a different type of problem to the problems I had experienced over time with Steam/Valve, and so when there's been a range of problems, and now not just eyebrow-raising technical problems (both the Linux and Windows Steam clients are broken out of the box, on Linux) or support being hopeless (this is the case in any company) but the company being arrogant, and given my concerns about the data Steam reports (I have no idea what it reports and Valve don't document it - you probably have to assume the worst if they're not saying), and given there's only one game I play, and *finally* given the clear realisation of the entrapment inherent in the business model (the more you spend on Steam, the more costly it is to leave, so Valve can be awful and what can you do?), well, that was enough.

We might also add to this the balls up which made desync happen, which was I think not a problem prior to Steam and the second Steam patch, and that this has never been fixed.

[OrbitFace]

hello all)