Help Poppa Albear With Steam Query

PostHelp Poppa Albear With Steam Query by **Albert** » Wed May 05, 2010 2:17 pm

Ok, so get this, I have just found out that my Father has set himself up with a Steam Account so he could buy Napoleon Total War.

This is a bit like walking into a sports shop and catching Stephen Hawkins browsing for a new Trampoline.

Anyway, the issue he is having is that he has to DL the entire game (21 GB) from Steam, and he has now been downloading for over a week. He thinks the best DL speed he is getting is about 30kbs.

He's on an uncapped 4Mb ADSL connection, so surely he should be getting better speeds than that?

I know you lot rave about Steam, so would really appreciate a bit of advice.

Much Love

I can't remember the specifics and frankly I doubt its the issue here but anything's worth a shot. Tell Steam to use Chinese servers (its one the download tab in settings somewhere), and then close and restart it.

Interestingly, if you happen to have the game downloaded anywhere, you can use a steam backup to save you having to download it again at all.

Thank you Beeswax, and TTK.

He's in South Africa, so I'm wondering if what Beeswax suggested about the Servers could be partly to blame.

Where's KP/winkle when you need them...

I thought South Africa had a terrible internet connection problem...

They must have improved it. Apparently I can't lay copper because too many people steel it.

Not my words, someone elses.

Stu wrote:I thought South Africa had a terrible internet connection problem...

They must have improved it. Apparently I can't lay copper because too many people steel it.

Not my words, someone elses.

It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest to be honest.

Although they live in Johannesburg, which is like their Financial Capital, so I hope they have at least some form of Decent Internet.

I should prob get him to run a Speedtest just to see what speed he is running, but his IT dude insists it should be 4Mb.

Get him to run Speedtest, yeah, because he may genuinely only be getting shit-ass speeds.

There's some wizardry you can do with Steam to force it to use an optimal download server but it's a bit weird so make sure he's not genuinely on Connection Shitass Major before we go through that.

TheTurnipKing wrote:Interestingly, if you happen to have the game downloaded anywhere, you can use a steam backup to save you having to download it again at all.

Sorry, to clarify, what I mean is that the files from someone else's Steam backup should work perfectly well when restored into your own Steam, as long as the game is on your account. A Steam backup of a game should be identical reguardless of game and account - you don't need a reinstall a backup of your "own" copy.

So if the connection does turn out to be an issue, it might be possible to source a backup from someone else who has a copy of the game locally, on a USB stick or something?

So I got him to run a Speed test this morning, and he got

0.90Mb/s DL
0.30Mb/s UL

This is with 2Mb ADSL Line.

Now I can appreciate this is pretty crap, but still even with the above speeds he should be getting better DL speed from Steam than what he is currently getting, right? (he's getting onto his ISP about this regardless)

To add to his woes, he left last night with his Download at about 70%, got back in this morning, and it had dropped down to 30%! Bless! I know how frustrated we get when we have to wait a few hours, so I can't imagine how annoying it must be to have to wait weeks.

Any idea's? The old man really loves his Napoleon so would be ecstatic if we can help him out.

Does your old man look like Joss Ackland?

Just wondering...

no, but he does have "diplimatic emunity"

Albear wrote::lol: no, but he does have "diplimatic emunity"

I bet the people from the townships are siphoning off his internet. Would never have happened 20 years ago.

Albear wrote:So I got him to run a Speed test this morning, and he got

0.90Mb/s DL
0.30Mb/s UL

This is with 2Mb ADSL Line.

Now I can appreciate this is pretty crap, but still even with the above speeds he should be getting better DL speed from Steam than what he is currently getting, right? (he's getting onto his ISP about this regardless)

To add to his woes, he left last night with his Download at about 70%, got back in this morning, and it had dropped down to 30%! Bless! I know how frustrated we get when we have to wait a few hours, so I can't imagine how annoying it must be to have to wait weeks.

Any idea's? The old man really loves his Napoleon so would be ecstatic if we can help him out.

Those speeds should equal about 100KB/s when you convert from megabits/second to kilobytes/second.

Does he know anyone with a disc copy of the game? You could run the installer off that and then he'd only have to d/l the patch.

Help Poppa Albear With Steam Query

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