QotW: Season Finale

[Michael_Russell]

This will be the last QotW of 2006, so until 2007, here goes:

If you could pick three things that would improve Steam, what would they be and why?

Happy holidays, everyone.

[CommanderZx2]

Make it easier to re skin, because notepad isn't fun and it's difficult to judge what it will look like without closing and opening steam again.

Make it possible to manage your installed list of games. At the moment every game/mod is just under installed. It would be nice if you could make your own groups and drag and drop things into them.

The ability to receive news updates without having to close and open steam again would be nice as well. Although I wouldn't want the news appearing as a popup while using your PC. Rather the Steam icon change to show that there is news, then you can select for it to display it.

[Stylsy]

1. As Commander said, be able to manage / categorise your games list.

2. The ability to download mods through it, instead of just a listing.

3. SiN Episode 2 appearing in the list. :-)

[Raveness]

1. For the purposes of Single-player, validate the purchased software then turn completely off.

2. Let accounts have a guest password for when friends borrow software to play for a weekend.

[taker]

1. A Mac OS X version of Steam, selling games for Mac OS X.

2. An option to make the Steam client automatically quit when you exit the game which required Steam. (Isn't it totally pointless to keep it running continuously anyway? The check for new updates only runs when you restart it, as far as I know.)

3. A grace period of a few days to let you play your game completely cut from the Internet, without having authorized it online first in the past. This would alleviate a lot of concerns about not being able to play should your Internet connection be broken for a while or something happen to Steam.

[ran93r]

(1) The ability to see patch notes before an update to anything installed takes place, along with an option to "ignore this update until next time".

(2) As above, improved organisation of installed titles. I'm all for a manual drag n' drop process into user created sections/folders.

(3) Support for Proxies, vastly improved support. As in, should work with, without the need for arcane handshakes and the sacrifice of the villages only maiden. Sockscap gets it all running pretty nicely but the need for a third party app makes the vein in my temple throb.

[Scared]

1. Not having to restart steam to get update news or game updates

2. Customisable games menu

3. My account having VALVe/ Leet beta testing privelages

[elwing]

propose a stripped down sin1 multiplayer (without mod and sp game) for free to increase the community
or let the old sin version connect to the new one (never tested if it's actually possible since I also own the new)

[guru7892]

1. ability to organize game and mod list.
2. stat tracking across multiple games and comparison lists.
3. modding tutorials available for download.

[hahnchen]

1)Friends functionality improvement, with player profiles for matchmaking etc.
2)Improved more flexible UI, categorising your games for example. It's also not very intuitive right now, when I click the expand arrow in the top right, it should show me a list of "my" games in large mode. There should be a separate tab for games you don't own, so instead of having to tackle the store UI, I can just click and purchase from a "my games" style screen.
3)The steam media player to work properly. For some wasteful reason, it downloads a copy of the media with a gcf extension, then copies and renames it with an avi extension to play it. What's the point? It's a waste of diskspace.
4)Support for Switch/Maestro cards. It's great that Paypal is there now, but Maestro debit cards are too popular to ignore.

[djdoe]

1. Ability to make skins quickly and easily, and applied then easily as well.

2. Only connect one to the internet to validate, had my internet go down, THE DAY of release for sin. Blame my sister for taking the internet away

3. Most frequently played games area

[Undead Scottsman]

1. Organization. Currently, my games list is a long, unorganized mess. Games are all mixed together regardless of genre or sequence.. things like Half-Life: Source are listed below HL2. You can't tell what mod goes to what game.

The ability to create collaspable folders, populate them with whatever games we want, and change the order of the various games available on Steam is my #1 most wanted feature.

2. Unneccassary splitting up of games into multiple entries.

Do I really need two seperate entries for SiN 1 and SiN 1 Multiplayer? Or Half-Life 2 and HL2: Deathmatch, or even Dark Messiah single and multiplayer? Hell, The Ship has THREE seperate entries (The Ship (multiplayer), The Ship Singleplayer and The Ship Tutorial)

I'd really like a sweeping requirement to lower the ammount of entries for games on Steam. As of right now, my list would shrink by almost 20% if that was enacted.

3. Having to restart to get updates. Automatic sensing and retreival of updates would be most desirable, but even a big "Check for Updates" button would be perferable to shutting down Steam, waiting five minutes for it to remove itself from my computers memory (so I don't get the "multiple instances of this program cannot be run at the same time" error), giving up waiting and just killing the process, and finally restarting.

[ertertwert]

1) Steam started the Media section a while back with the debut of Zombie Movie. I would like to see Valve implement more indie movies and perhaps music as well.

2) Customization. Customization. Customization. Ad naseum.

3) The ability to load up a game without the necessity of Steam after the validation (Yes I know about offline mode, but technically Steam still uses up resources in the background).

[Standoff]

1 Customizing your games list. (the only thing on my list likely to happen...)
2 Unrated titles with age checking (I already get uncut games off Direct2Drive, cause I'm a perv...I mean male.)
3 A x64 specific client.