Like, right now. Valve got hacked and even though the leaked info is encrypted to high hell do it anyway.
I did it yesterday and just got a password reset email I never asked for, my conclusion is that somebody was trying to break in.

Someone in Belarus was trying to log in to the Google account associated with my Steam account. So there's that, too.

And how, per say, is changing your password supposed to stop the hackers from requesting password resets?

OMGHAX

Thanks for the heads up Tibby.

Jon`C: How do you determine if your google is attached to your steam? I don't think it is, but I want to make sure before I start changing every single google associated password, too.

I had someone trying really really diligently to hack into my gmail and facebook a few weeks ago, but they were really obvious about it. Last year someone got into my gmail though, and I had to contact google to get it back. They let me still log in, but were using my account as a zombie for phishing, and even when I changed the password they'd somehow still be logged in.

Thanks for the heads up Tibby. Been changing all of my passwords of late anyway.

Also, the passwords weren't encrypted. They were hashed and salted. That's a much larger problem to handle for anyone interested in cracking them.

The passwords should be fine. I'd be more worried about getting say... fake emails to my email address asking me to reset my password which direct you to the hackers site so they do know it

Wish I didn't have to use this piece of crap, or Games for Windows or Live. I don't mind on-line registration but forcing me to use these to play games I bought is annoying. Even more so with all these hacking incidents recently.

STEAM IS SUCH A PIECE OF CRAP, WITH ALL IT'S... IT'S...

Yeah there's really nothing wrong with it.

Unless you have a system that has 1gb of ram. Many games would run better for me if I didn't have to run steam. Though there are things that I like about it.

Not that much better.

If you've only got 1GB of RAM, Steam is the least of your problems.

Steam takes up just enough ram that on 1gb running TF2 the OS gets pushed to paging/swap file. At that point things just go down hill. I can play frozen synapse just fine on my laptop, as long as I am not running steam. Run it through steam and it gets a major performance hit.

Like I said, I like parts of steam just not all of it.

Protip: buy more RAM. This isn't 2005.

It's much more likely that your laptop GPU doesn't like the Steam overlay.

Seriously? I've used steam on 768 and it was fine. Steam uses ~100 megs. Close the main window and it goes down to 20.

From now on when software runs ****ty on my computer, I will remember that it is because the software is ****ty and not my computer.

Steamworks requires a 4 MB service and about 2 MB of libraries loaded into the game process. That's 6 MB. And most of it isn't used very much - resources, initialization code, anything that responds to user input or specific network events - so it will get swapped out almost immediately. In the end you probably have at most an extra 100 KB in a tight kernel.

I like Steam but it crashes quite often for me on OSX Lion (recently upgraded) & Windows 7 (fresh install) on my iMac9,1. It's the only application that ever crashes (besides Safari on OSX Lion when I used to play Quake Live). It seems to crash less when I finesse it like a lady.

Hey remember when Steam came out and everyone was all "OMG THIS IS A PIECE OF **** WHAT DO I NEED THIS FOR" yet it worked almost perfectly fine?

The only serious problem I had with Steam was the constant auto-updating. Either I started using Steam more or they stopped updating it so damn much or possibly the updating process itself got improved somehow, but I haven't been annoyed at that in years. Otherwise it's pretty swell.

Now EA Origin, on the other hand...

Neither would they be anything wrong if I didn't need Steam to play games, the point is I have to have it installed (and with my comp they is always an issue when installing steam though once installed its fine)

If I was wanting to play multi-player online I could kind of understand it, it acts as a portal, but I don't. I want to play single player yet I must have an internet connection in order to play. (Dragon Age annoys me in that respect too, when my internet goes down I loose all addons until it reconnects).

Yes Steam has good points:
- It's a semi decent communication tool
- It makes it easy to connect multiplayer
- it makes it easy to show off achievements
- It makes it easy to update games.
However out of those four I only care about the last one, and I have many games which can update themselves without requiring something like Steam.

The final issue I have is a personal one, I like to keep my gaming computer as clean as possible, the only things installed are what are required to play my game, and it annoys me when I have to install anti-pirate software or something like Steam. It adds unneeded clutter to the computer which the designers could easily have avoided. And on the anti-pirate topic, most of the games I have which have DRM or whatever can be obtained on the black market, it doesn't work and it does persuade some people to avoid the game or even to get the pirated copy.
I'll stop my rant now because I could go on about it for ages.

A. Steam doesn't act as a portal for multiplayer games, except passibly for source games like TF2.
B. It doesn't require an internet connection beyond initial activation. Offline mode is one of the most significant advantages Steam has over any digital platform outside of GoG.
C. The Steam method of updating is excellent as stated, because it doesn't update only when you're about to play (the Playstion 3 syndrome).
D. Games requiring Steam to play are the games' fault, not Steam.
E. Keeping a PC "clean" was a cute sentiment back when everyone had 500MB hard drives. Now we all run multicore systems with 60+ services idling in the background, etc. Very little of this affects performance, especially on a gaming machine. Not to mention, Steam is actually pretty good about "clutter", keeping everything contained in a single program folder, including all your games. You can even move this directory to a new system and have it working in no time. There are many PIRATED games that can't handle this.

If your such an absurd sperg about keeping your "Gaming system" clean, why don't you go complain about windows aero or something equally absurd. Also steam has proven 100% successful in stopping pre-0 day piracy on steamworks games, and quite often they aren't cracked for days after the steam release. So yes, it is a successful non-invasive anti piracy DRM policy.

Also, since Steam came out I've bought precisely 0 PC games at the store.

-I feel that part of the service is being overlooked. Though "Oh my god these steam sales are raping my wallet" is a valid complain, I suppose.

You should just buy an Xbox or PS because, the neat thing about gaming computers is they do so much more than just play games.

Because of this post, I have decided I do not like you.