WON to be Phased Out During Summer

Chris D

Chris D

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In a news post yesterday on the Steam Powered web site, mainly in relation to the latest Counter-Strike updates, it was announced that Valve's plans to gradually start phasing out the WON authentication system in place of Steam by the end of summer. The news post also recommends that if you haven't yet already downloaded Steam then you can download it here.

This has all been on the cards for a while now and when it was first announced that this would happen last year, it caused quite a lot of controversy. I'm certain there are still players out there that are either unaware of what Steam is, can't be bothered to make the transition or completely despise Steam's concept. For the ones of you that fall in the latter category, I recommend you read this article that I wrote some time ago that discusses Steam, its concept, the future of it and why it's now so much better than it was.

You can read the full news post here.
 
[RDH]MastahFrag said:
whats WON?
Click to expand...

It was the system you played on before steam.(HL version 1.1.1.0 or older)
I believe it stands for Winners Online Net or something.
 
won is what used to connect people to online play! now valve uses steam.
 
wow, that really looks...

say the thing Chris_D says is, that Steam is going to 'wipe' WON out or something? in any case get it to never work? i don't get this guy ppl....
 
Valve doesn't really have any control over what happens with WON.(sierra is gone now, so that leaves it with Vivendi I think)

Other games used it.(see link in my previous post)
 
Great. In other words, Valve is making it so that people with 56k cannot play any games. It is impossible to use Steam with 56k (at least for me), but WON worked decently. Wonderful.
 
Chuckstar said:
It was the system you played on before steam.(HL version 1.1.1.0 or older)
I believe it stands for Winners Online Net or something.
Click to expand...
World Opponent Network.

theagentsmith said:
Great. In other words, Valve is making it so that people with 56k cannot play any games. It is impossible to use Steam with 56k (at least for me), but WON worked decently. Wonderful.
Click to expand...
Don't be silly, you can still use direct IP! :p

But yeah, it is a little tight to screw dial-up users out of a game that would works on another system. Cut back by all means, but remove? :|
 
yeah but, 56k is getting awfully old. soon everybody needs to turn to higher, because the games alone are too much of a bandwith for something liike that...

btw varsity...your countdown timer seems going up instead op counting down...
 
[RDH]MastahFrag said:
btw varsity...your countdown timer seems going up instead op counting down...
Click to expand...

When you get into negative numbers, things start to count up to add to the numbers.

That's a countdown timer from September 30th, 2003. So naturally, it's in the negative numbers now :)
 
Yeah, well, I should be getting cable soon, but there are still quite a few people that have dial-up, namely people far away from other houses that only have a phone line (like me). It costed about one grand to run cable to my house, and they are taking their precious time hooking it up, too. I can only imagine for gamers on farms and such. :(

I agree, perhaps it can be cut back on, but why do away with it completely? There are a lot more 56kers (or worse) than most people think that rely on WON for their Half Life needs...
 
theagentsmith, are you one of the people that tried Steam out straight away when it was released out of BETA? If so it's likely that it seemed unuseable for you because of the massive bandwidth drain at the time. Yeah, sure, it'll take a while to get your games up to date, but there's no reason it won't work with dial up. Mine works fine. Bare in mind while the updates are downloading most, if not all games will be unplayable.

Try it now. There isn't a big rush of people using the bandwidth right now so it might work for you now.

[RDH]MastahFrag said:
wow, that really looks...

say the thing Chris_D says is, that Steam is going to 'wipe' WON out or something? in any case get it to never work? i don't get this guy ppl....
Click to expand...
Like the news post says; they're shutting down WON for authenticating Valve games and using Steam instead.
 
Chris_D said:
theagentsmith, are you one of the people that tried Steam out straight away when it was released out of BETA?
Click to expand...


Actually, I downloaded it a few months ago on my old computer, and tried it. Took a looong time to change my normal HL to Steam Hl, and then get the updates. And then I couldn't get into anything. I finally joined a game with somewheres around a 5000 ping, and then it froze. So I figured it was my computer.

I just recently got a new computer. Downloaded it. Tried it. Never was able to join a game. Deleted it. Tried again. Still, no.

So, perhaps its my karma... but I've heard from other 56kers that they couldn't play either.
 
Only thing I can think of about the MP games is a) there's an option in the settings of Steam to select your connection type which defaults to DSL/Cable and b) the default MP rate etc. is optimised for broadband users.

I can play CS ok, but at first I had a ping in the thousands because of the ingame settings not being correct.

Apparently the best settings for dial up are

rate 2500
cl_updaterate 30
cl_cmdrate 20

I can't see the correlation between being on dial up and it not working. I mean sure, it's not the most ideal solution in terms of content delivery, but actually playing the game should be exactly the same as WON. I might be wrong. Ever reported your problems to Erik Johnson or John Cook?
 
I never really bothered to report anything, because playing on WON was always fine by me.

Maybe I'll try that if I get the patience to download all the patches again, though, thanks a lot.
 
I think magazines run coverdisks with the caches on, just like they did for the exes.
 
Just jumping in as another 56ker saying Steam works great, actually in my experience it is better than WON for me.
 
Bah.

WON is better than Steam, imo.

If I dislike a patch, or the changes it introduced, I could always survive on the old patch for a while. Now, with Steam, if it wants to update the main client, but there's an error, or the download isn't fully available yet, I can't even play a single player game.

I can live with Steam, but I feel hella sorry for those with 56k. I don't think most of the people still with 56k have the choice to change, for all those saying "it's time to upgrade!".
 
Kangy, if Valve roll out a patch to a game or a Steam client they can always rollback the update. They've done this on a few occasions where a patch has actually generated further problems for users. It's always been done within an hour or so.

Different people have different opinions about it though. I think if a poll was made after WON is phased out about whether they preferred WON or Steam that Steam would come out tops. Time will tell...
 
I had 56k on steam for a long time, I never had any serious problems....
 
It's funny because I could never get WON to work; and while everyone else was struggling with Steam, I was able to tweak and adjust the settings to play easily. Unfortunatley this means that the cheaters using WON are now coming over to Steam as well as the whiners, the unskilled, the pus... well you get the idea.
 
I find it hard to believe that people still play old HL mods. Move on people, there are better games now days.
 
iamaelephant said:
I find it hard to believe that people still play old HL mods. Move on people, there are better games now days.
Click to expand...
In your opinion there's better games, but as we speak there are 82,717 people playing Half-Life, Counter-Strike and its related mods.

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

That is considerably more than any other game available right now. And that's just counting the ones that are on Steam.
 
Dont get me wrong, I'm not knocking anyone who is playing these games, God knows I played TFC, CS and DOD to death. I just would have thought people would have moved on by now. Maybe it's just me....
 
Oh well, at least Ricochet is already on Steam!

But Chris, you took my post te wrong way. I mean "if the TFC team introduced something that I personally hate, I can always play the release prior to the latest one."
 
Well this sucks. I hate playing with steam, I still play the "old" 1.5. With all of those silly changes Valve has done since 1.0, I'm surprised so many people are using it. I guess I'll have to give it up, oh well
 
Well im not sure about other countries but in Australia we are supposed to be all "high-tech" bullshit.. our government thinks im that stupid? :(

About 25% of people have no access to any even slightly resonable form of faster-than-56k internet and those that do must pay the most insane prices...for 50mb in a month!

Argh.

The general trend however seems to be that our measly population of 20 million dosen't count for shit next to america etc. And they have nukes. :(

No im not anti-american. Im just cynical.
 
Aw.. well it's not so unexpected. We all knew it would happen sooner or later. I use steam anyway so i'm not affected by it.
 
havent I read this "new" news post before?

EDIT: stupidity makes me cute
 
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