Augury

For those of you who don’t know, last weekend was a “free demo” of Team Fortress 2 for people who don’t already own it. I know a couple of people who wanted to try it out, so we coordinated a little get-together to play together so I could show them some of the ropes.

Now — I expected it to be extremely busy. And it was. What I didn’t expect was that Steam would not even let me start a program on my own computer. The message I got was along the lines of “Our servers are too busy to allow you to start this program.” Come again?

This is the stupidity of schemes like this. I can’t even start a program that’s on my own computer. And it’s not like this game is like World of Warcraft or any other game where you’re constantly connected to a game developer hosted server. Once you’re in the game you’ve got your local client and a server hosted somewhere else, there’s no step involved where communicating with Valve is required at all, so it’s just a matter of copy protection schemes getting in the way of me playing the game.