Feedback, Complaints or Problems

I was actually wondering not too long ago how it was possible that this website can stay in the green with the number of updates to the trainers that go on these days. I don't usually hang out at this site for any longer than it takes to grab the trainer i need and get back to my game, but I recently noticed the post about the monthly sub / donations, and the lament of the site about the constant updating, which got me to thinking...

Now, I'm offline more than online because where I live there is very little, if any, internet, and one of the things that drives me ABSOLUTLY MAD is steam not allowing me to play my effin games if there is an update out, not even offline! Its total BS! You can GUARANTEE that if its a game I want to play it, its new enough that it gets an update every other day, which pretty well guarantees that I can't play it when I want to (the only time i have time to game are those times i dont have (or have very limited) internet and updating is impossible...

The solution that I've come across for my own purposes is to wander down to gmcpywrld and grab myself a perfectly legal fixed exe, then swap out the file from the original in my steam library and add the game as a non steam game. Steam doesn't update non steam games, but manages it just fine. With this method I get to keep the game in the steam list for easy access, and I can play the damn thing when I want to and update as needed.

Of course this doesn't work for MP games all that well as you need to be updated to play online, but for the great majority of games (that I play anyway) this works a treat.

Which brings me to my point. As much as you guys hate writing trainers for the same game every day, us gamers hate having to update our games every day. This is VERY MUCH a problem for both you and your customers and I think that you are absolutely in the best position to solve it for both of us and increase the value of your site to your customers at the same time.

All you need to do to make your life (and mine) easier is to make an app that can act as a firewall to the updater in steam (i know not all users use steam, but this the majority) This app simply needs to place the descision to update a game in the hands of the gamer, this way we can decide NOT to update every day and break our trainers, we can decide to update "after" a trainer has been re-released, which takes the pressure off of you guys a little.

I was thinking about how you could do it, while not upsetting steam, or forcing the users to break steam TOS, and I have a few ideas I can share. I just want to point out that the ideas are vague, and not technical and are "ideas" not "hows", I'm very computer savey, but I'm no programmer, so I'll be the architect of ideas here and let you guys be the engineers that can figure out how it might become reality.

My ideas are thus:

create an actual firewall. A firewall designed to intercept communication from the steam update servers. The firewall client gui would then list the games that have updates available and give the option to allow or hold them, then either spoof a no update signal to the steam client, or let it pass.

This method would be ideal as it wouldn't require any individual game coding, it wouldn't violate any TOS, Valve could whine about it, but would be powerless to interfere as you aren't touching their code, only their transmissions.

You could add value to the firewall, and increase your presence on our computers by adding RSS, or a live page to your site advertising newly released trainers, which would then give us a heads up that we can go ahead with the updates.

Another method:

Create an app that can break the steam installed version, while creating a method similar to the fixed exe, which then can be installed as a non steam game, eliminating the update problem.

How it could work... Create an app that we can add as a non steam game and run from within our steam libraries, then when we download our trainers we could add them to that app as a plug in which would then fix the exe or something similar and break the steam install (so it doesn't update)and allow us to not update the game until we "unbreak" the steam link, or install the new trainer. As a bonus you could make that app require login, or personal key to activate, then also personalize the trainers (like you already are) so that they require both keys to function (the trainer key and the app key) which would (i think?) reduce piracy of your trainers (you could manage this because the app would be logged in, and the customer would be logged in on the browser as well, so you could match the keys, maybe, like i said, im not a programmer...)

Anyway, food for thought... thats all I have time for right now, its 6:45am already, time to eat and then go to bed.

While we appreciate your feedback and believe that you have the best of intentions, I don't think it's feasible for a few reasons.

1. It would probably violate the Steam TOS, if it could even be made to work. We would have to interrupt a secure connection between the user's Steam client and their servers. Steam itself has a way of telling each game to NOT auto-update itself and even this doesn't prevent many games from updating on their own. They can't make their OWN CLIENT follow no update rules, so not sure that we could do it either.

2. Most people WANT their games to update. 90% of games released today are EARLY ACCESS and require updates to actually add content and fix game breaking bugs because they are 10% finished when they start selling them.

3. We can't dictate that people use a fixed .exe or disable auto-updates just so that our trainer will work and we don't have to update them. It's just not our place and not fair to the majority of users.

So, for now we will continue doing our best to keep up with the onslaught of daily game updates and try to figure out better ways of making auto-updating trainers that hopefully work through the majority of the micro-patches and only require re-writes on the major changes.

Thanks again for your feedback.