First of all I'm sorry for being too pessimistic in the following paragraph, to expect worst must be a general habit of any IT professional.
I'm pretty much surprised that the authentication of whole Steam network depends on single location regardless of how good this location is in whatever terms - costs, availability, reliability, etc. Even for my small non-commercial project joining together few thousand members I'm looking for options to introduce some redundancy. Steam on other hand serves millions of customers worldwide and redundancy is a must for the community of such size. Unfortunately things happen - 9/11, New Orleans, you name it - so no single location in a world is good enough for Steam. At the same time I realise that setting up a redundant authentication system is a huge effort in terms of time and money so I suggest introducing premium Steam accounts for some low monthly fee to generate some income for this and other related projects. First obvious advantage to give to premium account is extra bandwidth of content servers and ability to choose a content server to download things from - people generally value the freedom of choice they can get for a reasonable fee :) Second advantage can be a special icon which could be shown is friends chat, score tables and other places where player name is mentioned - kids gonna like it, believe me :) After some brainstorming more advantages which do not require enormous effort can be invented - longer expiration time for some demos, releasing demos/games to premium customers say week before releasing it to everyone else, more guest passes, premium content like wallpapers, desktop themes, etc. By the way, I can generate even more ideas backed with detailed justifications, feel free to ask :) Regards, Roman _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds
