Steam, and the crapness thereof.
 

Without a doubt, Steam is probably THE most unstable program i've ever used.
For example, today, only a few minutes before i posted this, i tried to open Gmod, and the Steam window pops up. I expected this to be just the normal, run of the mill steam malfunction, so i closed it, and tied to open Gmod again.
Steam appeared again, so this time i took a closer look. It wanted me to pay for the whole orange box and Gmod again. That's £30 worth of games it wanted me to pay for, that i already owned. This isn't the first time it's happened, either. A freind of mine's copy of steam wanted him to pay for Gmod again. It turns out that all i needed to do was restart Steam, which i did, but that's not the point. The point is: Why does this happen? Was Steam written in a hurry? Or by apes? If there was any other way of playing my favourite games, i wouldn't use steam at all....

As a counter point steam is the most stable and convenient program I've ever used and have never encountered any problems with it.

Edit: And I think this title should be changed to "Steam: Spoonful of Awesome Sauce"

*jealous*
My copy has never even been near awesome sauce!

Mine is pretty cool, until I tried to load Vampire the Masquerade on my computer...
Dear god the file errors.
My poor computer didn't stand a chance...

Steam is to my computer what Thai food is to my bowels.

Thanks to Steam I got a free copy of Half Life 2...so I don't really have much to complain about...

Steam has heaping piles of issues each time it updates, but they fix the problems each time. Really, for as broad of a program as it is it does surprisingly well.

I like Steam, besides the single fact that I can't install any game I buy a hard copy of more than once. What would happen if I uninstalled the game or got a new computer? Am I screwed or does the steam account itself allow me to reinstall the game?

I guess it goes to show remembering your password/account name is important. Unfortunately, when someone else makes the account/password I'm not so great at the remembering part.

steamingpileofTitle™
 

You know, for the longest time, I can never remember how to get to the Steam website, should I ever need to reinstall or such.

But did you know that someone purchased an easy to remember URL that would redirect directly to the steam website?

My sentiments match the name of that site.

Still CS and the like are addictive as heck, and are fun on their own.

Yet I cannot access it from work right now... (Want to make sure it hasn't been changed since last I went there.) Don't want to post the link and find that it now redirects somewhere else.

I'll check on it when I return home in the AM.

You could just have you know used google.

Steam isn't exactly some hard to find vaporware.

He's referring to steamingpileofshit.com.

Yes, but he said he couldn't remember the name of the official site so I was unnecessarily pointing out the flaw in his clever allegorical lie as a way to voice my dissatisfaction at his dislike of steam.

Demetrius has the Title™
 

DFM called my lie "clever"! :D

See, I dislike it because I played CS before steam arrived. There was none of this 'Friends' list, there were no adverts for new Valve games, no darn background program you had to launch to play CS. Nope, just pure unadulterated CS. I miss that.

That's why I dislike Steam. It took something relatively awesome and then beat it about the face with a ice pick.

I have no stability problems with Steam. I just don't see any benefit from it.

If my game is unstable, it's not exactly rocket science to get the latest patch off the Net.
I like to have a disc with my games, so I don't use it to buy stuff.
If I want a free mod I can use Google.

On the downside:
It did force me to wait for Half-Life2 for over a year as I heard it's a real PITA on 56k.
If I want to play my perfectly stable HL2 I don't want to wait 5 minutes for it to dl and install a patch/update.

Don't hate it, but I would be just as happy (or happier) if it dissapeared tomorrow.

I thought that's the normal response to playing CS to begin with...

I primarily love it as a direct to drive purchasing program.

Mine just won't work in offline mode.

Thanks to Steam? Don't you mean thanks to ME? Cuz i'm pretty sure it was ME who gifted you my unneeded copy of Half-Life 2.

Owned.

Anywho, like Loki, I played CS pre-Steam and was rather happy. My biggest problem with Steam is that my dad got the Orange Box and we have separate Steam accounts. This lead to disaster. Not only can I not play Portal on my computer now, but I can't rip all the sound files from it getting all the separate glados voice files like I want to =(