New to Steam? Start Here!
I'm unsure if anyone here who joins will be new to using Steam, but I thought i'd just quickly throw this together.
1. Account Safety
Steam has a great feature called Steam Guard, to enable this, Go to Steam ---> Settings ---> View Steam Guard Account Security, What Steam Guard does is detects everytime you sign onto a PC, It will detect if you have been on it before or not, If you have, you will log on as normal, but if it hasn't, you will recieve a email that includes a 5 digit code that will require to be entered before Steam allows you to sign in. This bundled with seperate passwords is a great tool to keep your account safe.
2. Issues with Steam/Reinstalling Steam
You may have issues with Steam from time to time, Don’t Panic!.
Sometimes it may be a server issue, but if you ever have any issues with your Steam Client, 99 times out of 100 they can be solved by simply closing down Steam, going to the folder you installed Steam into and deleting clientregistry.blob. If the very small chance that it doesn’t work, delete everything but “SteamApps” and Steam.exe and relaunch the program, this is the same as reinstalling Steam.
NEVER delete the “SteamApps” folder, this contains all your games, Deleting this will mean you have to redownload them all again!
3. Sales
On Steam, games go on sale quite frequently, Normally, in a week, you will have 7 Daily Deals, One "Midweek Madness" and "Weekend Deals" although there can be multiple deals at once sometimes.
Sometimes, Publisher Weeks or Weekends can happen, These will normally have a day dedicated to one franshise while having the rest of their catalog discounted, For example, when I'm writing this there is currently a 2K Games publisher sale which has 50% off all titles they have released, today is also a "Borderlands Franchise Sale" which means that Borderlands is 75% off for today instead of the standard 50% on 2K titles, In sales, it is best to avoid buying any games that you want until the last day of the sale, For example, Bioshock 1 and 2 are currently at 50%, however, tommorow may be a "Bioshock Franchise Sale" which would bring them down to 75%.
Steam normally has two big sales per year (with smaller ones filling the gaps between), They are the Summer and Holiday sale, In this time, games are HEAVILY discounted from their initial pricing, There are normally a couple of games on the "daily" sale with massive discounts, with the rest taking smaller discounts, Again, I avoid buying games that aren't on the daily until the last day, because again, you may buy a game for 33% or 50% one day, just to see its 75% the next.
Another thing mentioning is keep an eye out for indie bundles which tend to cost very little or pay what you want, which normally include a few games made by indie developers (Normally smaller and self published)
The most popular of the bundles are at www.humblebundle.com, www.indieroyale.com and www.indiegala.com
4. Free 2 Play
Don't have any money for any games or just want to try something different? Steam has a Free2Play (or F2P for short) section, which tend to be games which you can start playing for nothing, but some may have limitations on free players.
All F2P games can be found at http://store.steampowered.com/genre/Free%20to%20Play/
Personally, I would say the best F2P games available are
1. Team Fortress 2 (A fun multiplayer class based FPS game)
2. Realm of the Mad God (Not for everyone, a rogue like mmo action RPG, Be careful, once your character dies you have to start again!)
3. DC Universe Online (A great MMO set in the universe of DC comics)
I may expand on this in the future, I hope I covered everything well enough, and if I didn’t or you have any questions, please feel free to send me a message and I’ll help.