I've never come in here before but I thought I'd mention this. Steam it seems will require an active internet connection to play any HL or HL2 games or mods. Hence, any LAN party without internet won't be able to play NS. That fact alone could make this whole forum worthless. Which is a pity as I like LANs.

Yes this is a serious problem.

We are planning a large LAN and are trying to find a way around the mandatory internet connection. (perhaps force people to use older clients?)

Either way.... its going to be a huge hassle.

QUOTE (Ryo-Ohki @ Sep 11 2003, 11:43 AM)

...Steam it seems will require an active internet connection to play any HL or HL2 games or mods. Hence, any LAN party without internet won't be able to play NS....

That is sooooooo lame!

Steam is lame in general.

How much more difficult would it be to have a smaller LAN?

Dunno, i've mad it a habbit for when I have people over that we all use some cheap 5 port switches, and we can all sap off my cable. I've had 6 machines run CS at sub 50 pings off my one connection..

# We're preparing a new installer on CD for cyber-cafe owners. Contact biz@steampowered.com if you're interested in receiving this.

from www.planethalflife.com

Cyber cafes are different though, because they are assumed to have internet access. These cds are just for ease of setup, I think.

Whats going to have to happen is that you will need an internet connection. Best thing to do is block all of the ports except the ones that Steam use according to what I read.

However we run into a problem.

The location where we run our large LANS (100+ people) is in the university. PSU does not like shared connections. And we dont charge money for our lans so paying PSU for each connection would bankrupt us. We are just a student club.

I hear that there will be some sort of LAN patch for steam. I hope so because I thoroughly hate the idea of steam.

Out here, my friends and I somehow managed to get ahold of an 11-room, $2,000,000 home which we have turned into our permanent LAN party. There are never fewer than 8 gaming-capable machines on our network at any one time, and sometimes as many as 25. We invite our less-computer-savvy friends over to play since many of them don't have gaming-capable machines themselves, and I must say that steam is going to rip that place apart. We have several 16-port 10/100 switches and lots of 2.8ghz wireless for everyone to connect into, but I will be honest enough to say that we only have 9 copies of half-life, and that's simply not going to cover it. I won't go into the debate about warez ethics, but I will say that requiring internet authentication for a LAN game simply makes no sense. We have plenty of old client patches laying around, but having our totally non-profit LAN parties cut off from future updates when we're already such excellent customers of VALVe (9 copies of half-life @ average $30 each, depending when and where we purchased them = $270... more than VALVe is normally going to get out of 3 individuals)

So, we won't be able to take liberties with our Half-life copies and play them on LAN. What ever happened to games which allowed a multiplayer spawn install for each copy of the game you purchased? Even if that copy was only LAN-viable, we'd be up to 18.. certainly enough for most occasions.

Is the only solution to buy more copies of HL? Pffgh. HL2 is going to cost enough to keep our gaming cash in check for quite some time.

go read the steam forums guys, even valve isn't stupid enough to make this requirement permanent. Gabe himself said in an e-mail that's been copied and pasted numerous times that the internet auth for single-player and LAN is just temporary. I believe he said 2 weeks, so don't worry about it. Though... that IS "valve time", so expect it to be around for a few more months.

EDIT: after a bit of searching, I still came up with nothing. I swear I saw it, I'll look more for it later.

If steam kills lans

I will be ****

but then again steam wasn't looking hot at the start but thats to be expected


I feel confident in saying that valve isn't stupid enough to do something like that


and if they are then they deserve to loose are support

I have still not heard any news regarding steam and LANs. If I find out anything Ill post here.

It wont last for long guys. Valve would not do this and put the CPL in an extremely difficult position.

If anyone has been to a CPL, you'd know how reliable a Net connection is there....

Well shortly after steam came out somebody said that in around two weeks the online dependance of steam would be patched out.

It's almost there, but not quite. When you first installed steam, disconnecting from the internet would stall steam. Now, you only need to be online to log in, and as soon as that is done you can start and stop games as you please while "offline"

I imagine it wont be long until you can choose to skip logging on if you are offline...

like he said above, use an older client or don't use steam. I find steam to be a nice program in the fact that is updates everything automatically and doesn't force you to use laggy updater clients, not not update at all. But the neccesary internet connection at all times even when your playing on LAN is rather annoying.

Now i admit, im not keeping up with this matter at all. So if i say something totally nubified. Help me not laugh

---

WON : People keep saying that they are phasing out WON ID's and are gunna make it mandatory for steam. This true ?

Steam : For steam, with all its automatic updates, you really do need a boradband connection. Which i would most deafintly have if the UK's god damn phone company pulled its god damn head outta its arse and UPGRADED THE WALES PHONE EXCHANGES!!

There are so many people stuck out here in the middle of nowhere with nothing. I actualy connect at 28.8.. or sometimes a magic 31.2 if im lucky. And play with an average ping of 200 - 300. Of which i can actually play quite well.

But back to the point, If steam is introduced as all you can use. Then 56k'ers that have no choice in being 56k'ers really are going to loose out. It will take us forever to download updates, and if we need steam to play even offline at lans, which may have no access to a connection. Then we really are screwed aint we.

Ah well, thats my stress over with.

most perplexing..

im 56k ..
to download just the steaminstaller_cs.exe..
will take me about 20 hours..

i'm not sure what it's like everywhere else, but cable and ADSL is rather expensive..

as far as these steam based games, (i'm shaking my head) .. i don't think they would leave it for LAN to require an internet connection.. it just doesn't seem .. i dunno .. smart

in reguards to steam .. i've sent a request to Australian PC magazine, asking if they could get the steam installers onto one of their disks in their next issues.. i dunno.. (still shaking my head)

if you're worried about authing:
amazon.com sells half-life: blue shift for 10 bucks apiece, and game of the year (more mods on the cd i think) for 15 bucks
thats one problem down

Im not worried bout authing. Although some people may be .

Im just worried how im going to still play a game when its going to take me forever to download anything. I would happily have Broad Band if Wales wasn't such a useless un-technological (that a word? lol) place.

PHL posted some info from a Valve post .. Steam will support LAN gaming, an internet connection WILL NOT be required.

Its just going to take some time to get it implemented .. just calm down ya'll

I run a net cafe myself, and we're worried about all this steam nonsense too.

Especially, with 2.1 being steam-only. We do NOT want to sign up for steam's "LAN cafe" deal...as it gives it to us hard u the backside.

Anyone with any ideas?