I have never had any problem with Steam, but Origin has completely locked out of my Sims games because they keep losing my account information and then tell me that the several different attempts I made to re-login were incorrect. I can’t play Sims or Sim City at all because Origin has locked me out. Steam has never given me this problem. Which is good, since I’m addicted to Civ 5.
Well, I’m not blaming the umpteen millions of them who can get it working just fine but sure, must be the software that’s broken if those umpteen millions can use it and a few hundred can’t. Why would anyone suspect user error, software conflicts or bad hardware on the customer side?
Was 75% off during a Steam summer sale. GOTY edition, even.
I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be impressed that you work with military programs but can’t get your friend’s copy of ArmA to work like tens of thousands of others have managed at this very second or what.
As a former defense contractor employee, I have to wonder about someone who flaunts that they work on government military contracts, since they frequently discourage you from even mentioning when you work on fully acknowledged projects. (Partly because even acknowledged projects frequently have classified aspects.)
Heck, they encouraged us to not even mention where we work on Facebook and Linked-In and use some euphemism for it.
Certainly a handle on a message board is considerably more anonymous than Facebook, LinkedIn, or other social networks. But still…
And how the hell does someone with that kind of background not get Steam up and working?
My 12 year old nephew did it several times.
There are only a few possible explanations…
Steam truly has issues despite the multitudes of successful users who get it to run daily
Cardhu and his associates cobbled together some bizarre configuration that has hardware issues
Cardhu is vastly over describing his qualifications and just doesn’t know what he’s doing
I suppose it’s possible that Steam has issues with atypical powerhouse cards like Quadros. I’d expect people who work on military simulations to have those for their home workstations. Still, those cards aren’t meant for gaming and are optimized differently (they’re optimized for GPGPU calculations and things like parallel or distributed rendering in CAD programs), and I imagine their drivers are a nightmare for gaming considering how much Nvidia and ATI have to hand-tweak their consumer card drivers for new AAA releases.
I’m still a bit dubious, though, because I had a lower end Quadro once and didn’t have any issues with Steam.
It’s also possible that their system can run the Steam client but just can’t handle ArmA itself due to a Quadros card which, again, isn’t Valve’s fault if the consumer doesn’t have a suitable system.