Chris0132 wrote:You may be interested to know that according to steam, there are two and a half million people logged into it right this second.
Is that really 2.5 million people or several hundred thousand people and 2 million spambots ?
You cant go by what the program says is people logged in. They want you to think more people use it than actually do. And most of them dont care that the majority of registrations are not legit.
I had this argument with an admin on a forum once. He claimed the number of registered users as a justification for something, and then subsequently couldnt dispute that the actual number of users was a tiny fraction of that, and that most of the registrations had never posted because they couldnt. (Registration didnt have an effective spambot filter, but the forum itself was password protected. So Spambots could create as many registrations as they wanted to, just couldnt post.)
Now, I havent tried to register with steam, so I dont know what they use to keep out bots, but I seriously doubt what they do is adequate. And why should they care ? 2 million bots all trying to do something is actually good for their marketing image !
If your place of residence doesn't have decent internet, honestly whoever was in charge of building it is doing you a major disservice.
Decent high speed internet stopped dead here when the goverment legislated to require all cables to be underground. The phone companies made a last minute above ground roll out to beat the deadline, then stopped using cable. Everything built or service added after that has been first ADSL, which is slower than cable, and now forced wifi, which is slower again. Both ADSL and wifi suffer from continuous variable length signal drop outs. I just have to watch the 3G indicator on my phone to see how often there is no signal, and thats in the same place.
So its not a matter of who built the building. Its a matter of what the phone companies provide in terms of infrastructure, and what ISP's can do with it.
edit : That being said, for general internet use, there is no real problem.
The problem occurs with large file download or the need for continuous feed. So you can download 200mb at an average of 20, and then the handshake at the end times out and you have to do it again. And again. And again. The larger the file, the more likely it will fail part way and want to restart. Sound just plain doesnt work here. Cam works on ADSL, but not on wifi.
So net is fine for general usage, but what steam wants to do is just not on.
And this isnt going to change here anytime soon. The phone companies are forcing everyone to go wifi, and thats the least reliable service.
If we had decent fiberoptic cable into every house, then steam would be fine. But we dont, and probably never will have because it costs too much to dig up every street in the country to lay the cable.
