I have been playing NS for a looooong time and today, for the first time when I click on NS it shows the Updating Game window, then closes and says "This game is currently unavailable, Please try again later" Eventually It starts but whats going on here?

Seam was updated yesterday for the engine and DOD. While you may not have DOD installed the load the update causes on the content servers valve has, causes your update of the engine to go slow and take loads of time. Once the load drops on the content servers you can get on quicker. You can see the content servers overloaded here:

http://www.steampowered.com/status/status.html

The graphs are a little missleading because they seem to indicate more bandwidth is avaliable, so why the lag? That is caused(I think) because some of the content servers are for specific geographic locations. While the content graph indicates there is bandwidth to spare, the content server that's serving your location is prob hosed when you are getting that error.

Ah yes, those magic servers that give out more "bandwidth used" than there actually is "bandwidth available"

:|

Statistics. 9 out of 10 ppl know that they can be made up on the spot and dont really mean anything




But yeah, the patch release is what would have caused the various steam abnormalities.