Have a summer sale. You would think that Valve would have alot more servers up especially with the high demand of really cool cheap games at 1:51 am PST. My usual download speed is a sweet 3.5 mbps but now is replaced by a dismal 244 kbps. gahaargh!! /rant over.

Gigabit upstream lines can become quite expansive (depending on the data-centre, the carriers and the peers). Redundancy isn't exactly easy to scale in that sector :/

Yes, it's fantastic. I bought Portal 2 retail yesterday. Imagine my extreme surprise and disappointment when the installer simply registered the game with Steam, shut down, and then started downloading the entire fucking game (11GB+) from Steam! What the hell do they think the disc is for?!?

So I had to google to find out how to actually install the game from the disc. This requires a workaround, since there is no option to do so using the normal installation procedure. It's not particularly difficult to do, but the fact that it is even necessary leaves me flabbergasted. And even then, it only installs up to 93%. The remaining 7% need to be downloaded from Steam no matter what. And with the download speeds they deliver these days, that takes quite a long time.

Valve are morons.

Actually, from their point of view it probably makes sense to make sure that retail versions of their games don't have any advantage over the Steam version.
That way, there is no reason for people to buy retail and they're potentially more likely to buy from Steam, unless they really like having useless discs.

It's still a jerk move, but then again Valve kind of specializes in those when it comes to extending Steam's market share, from what I've seen.

It's not that easy. Thanks to the convoluted protocol they use (which is apparently one they designed themselves or sommat), they can't just rent additional bandwidth as they have to set up the servers to use their system first.

Apparently, they've finally realised how poor this method is and now changing their content delivery system to use standard http protocols instead. If they do that, then they can simply rent out additional bandwidth as required.

Problem is though, this is Valve we're talking about. So this isn't likely to be fully sorted out for another decade or two...

Same here, only for Shogun 2, which I had to download 16GB for initially. Now it's another 18GB, and thanks to Australia's shitty internet I max out at 360 KB/s

Im not whining i'm ranting, there is a difference. I'm sure after this sale is over all of the servers that didn't explode will rememdy itself. However, i stand by my orginal point/complaint your choice.

You may indeed suggest so, but it'd be rather futile. Where do you think I found the solution? And what exactly leads you to think it is a bug? The fact that a workaround is posted on the support page does not in any way indicate that this is not intentional on Valve's part. It just indicates that enough people have been pissed off about it that it was worth posting a workaround.

There are only two possibilities for why the installer works like this:

1. It is intentional.

2. Nobody tested the installer even once before sending the master to the printer, if they had, they would have spotted this immediately.

Either way, Valve are morons.

It's a fantastic game though. He's not talking to you, he's talking to me. He just didn't bother deleting your quote before posting.

Because it only occurs to a small minority of users for some random reason. For example, I haven't had this bug. I imagine that 99.999% of Steam's userbase has never had this bug.

Meanwhile at Valve
:p