What actions have you taken due to the Library UI change?

[FluffyPinkDecoyBunny]

I've read a lot of angry posts on the subject of this change and lots of folks demanding things to be changed back. I'd personally like it changed back or at the very minimum, get the new UI to work without running like crap. Right now the new Library UI runs slow, doesn't load most of the time, causes Steam to crash and eats up to 4x or more RAM than it used to, even if you have Steam minimized.


So, I'm just curious: What have you done in regards to the Library UI change?

* I've reverted back to an older version - things run smooth again. No crashes and nothing from Steam hogging resources.
* I've cleared out my nearly 70 game wishlist.
* I won't stop using Steam due to the fact I have a good amount of games on it, but I won't support them anymore by spending money with them. I found a good chunk of the games on my wishlist are also on GoG and I'll just shift what company I spend my money on.

[IQØ]

Some people still do not get it, or maybe they do and they are waiting for a pat on the back that will never come.
Steams UI's sole purpose was and should only ever be to index a game library in the most convenient and resourceless way possible. Steam serves no real purpose once a game is launched to when it is closed and never should do. There is a simple reason why a book index is as clear and uncluttered as it is and an even simpler reason why a multi game launcher should be as lightweight as possible. A few FPS in games is the difference between playable games and none playable ones (This really needs pointing out?).

Publicado originalmente por Erebus:

Rather than buying 100s of games sometimes it would benefit people to save that money to keep their computer current

I really hope Valve reward you for defending them to this degree because if they do not then you have made yourself look a bit of a nonsensical for no reason.
There is no real sense in wasting money on machine upgrades when the games purchased are more than capable of running on that machine. Are you seriously suggesting that people should upgrade their machine to accommodate a launcher? You must be so blinkered if you honestly believe this and that's not even taking into account that this new UI has not yet evolved into all they must have planned for its in the future, even this should have alarm bells ringing since we all know how they love even the smallest percentage.

Steam exists because of games and gamers, It is not the other way around! Nobody should ever need to spend their hard earned money to make sure their machine is capable of running steams UI and the game they choose to purchase, especially when that UI is not an integral part of the game and especially when that same game can be purchased and ran on that same machine how it was meant to be but if purchased from another outlet.

Simply this, They are taking liberties with us all, Forced beta testing, unnecessarily bloated UI's dropped out of the blue and the mentality that we can like it or lump it. At the moment some here are happy enough to defend this practice, but that is only at the moment. One way or another this business model that so many blindly defend, will eventually hit all our wallets and even then you still won't get your pat on the back.

[Muppet among Puppets]

Publicado originalmente por IQØ:

Publicado originalmente por Erebus:

Rather than buying 100s of games sometimes it would benefit people to save that money to keep their computer current

I really hope Valve reward you for defending them to this degree because if they do not then you have made yourself look a bit of a nonsensical for no reason.

Well said.
This should remind us that steam is mainly a drm, and that is why everyone who has to use it has the same right to have it bloated or light weighted.

[Erebus]

Publicado originalmente por IQØ:

Steams UI's sole purpose was and should only ever be to index a game library in the most convenient and resourceless way possible.

Which is exactly what it does for those of us that aren't utterly devastated by the change.

Publicado originalmente por IQØ:

Publicado originalmente por Erebus:

Rather than buying 100s of games sometimes it would benefit people to save that money to keep their computer current

I really hope Valve reward you for defending them to this degree because if they do not then you have made yourself look a bit of a nonsensical for no reason.
There is no real sense in wasting money on machine upgrades when the games purchased are more than capable of running on that machine. Are you seriously suggesting that people should upgrade their machine to accommodate a launcher?

A. People complaining about it's footprint misunderstand a number of things. Some of them thing virtual memory allocation is memory actually used, some of them think the system and applications can't free up memory when memory is direly needed, some think if it's not 100% in the RAM that it is creating this behemoth pagefile or somehow illogically paging out to the VRAM (which isn't even how VRAM works), some of them think they need to micromanage the task manager readouts, some think caching is a bad behavior, some misunderstand TMALLOC as Kaldaien explained previously in the thread, and more. Lot of people that see the number in the task manager and think it's immediately significant and worrisome... when it isn't. Just like people see "CPU usage %" and think it's significant and even Intel will tell you it means very very little in modern contexts.

B. My point was more anyone truly actually crippled by this change already either has some significant problems with their setup, or they are cutting it down to the wire on squeezing the life from their platform.

C. "When the games purchased are more than capable of running on that machine." Just an aside on that quote there, it's not all that terribly different from the frequent cries every time a new game hits "MY COMPUTER PLAYS EVERYTHING ELSE I LIKE JUST FINE" while screeching "unoptimized".

Somehow as PCs have become more user friendly we've stumbled into the twilight zone where taking advantage of hardware is a cardinal sin. Games should be 32bit, DX9, hardly touch the CPU, and by god they must not allocate available memory or this same crowd of people will come out of the woodwork screeching that actually using hardware is "unoptimized". Taking advantage of system resources is bad. Everything should be fetching from the HDD on every task and incurring additional CPU overheads from using heavy compression everywhere. Then people will get the warm fuzzy feeling from seeing their "low memory footprint" as their applications take much more time to accomplish the same work.

-------------
And again it's not as demanding as people are acting from flipping out trying to micromanage everything. Once it's cached the library images it's fairly responsive. For the hell of it last night I tried to make the library unresponsive. It took disabling half my cores, disabling multithreading, running 5 separate processes to test memory and hammer the CPU, completely filling my sys RAM with tons of chrome tabs loading high res photography and the prior mentioned memory tests.... It took all that for the library to be unresponsive. I had to cripple my CPU, achieve the fabled "100% CPU usage" (which doesn't mean anything beyond thread scheduling), and completely fill my RAM for the library to hitch and stutter and hang.

Once it has cached the images for the new library it doesn't actually require much to run, it just looks bad to wannabe IT experts trying to micromanage from the task manager. If you notice more of the complaints are about the numbers people see in the task manager and paranoia about that than literal not being able to do things.

[Muppet among Puppets]

Publicado originalmente por Erebus:

Publicado originalmente por IQØ:

Steams UI's sole purpose was and should only ever be to index a game library in the most convenient and resourceless way possible.

Which is exactly what it does for those of us that aren't utterly devastated by the change.

Publicado originalmente por IQØ:

I really hope Valve reward you for defending them to this degree because if they do not then you have made yourself look a bit of a nonsensical for no reason.
There is no real sense in wasting money on machine upgrades when the games purchased are more than capable of running on that machine. Are you seriously suggesting that people should upgrade their machine to accommodate a launcher?

A. People complaining about it's footprint misunderstand a number of things. Some of them thing virtual memory allocation is memory actually used, some of them think the system and applications can't free up memory when memory is direly needed, some think if it's not 100% in the RAM that it is creating this behemoth pagefile or somehow illogically paging out to the VRAM (which isn't even how VRAM works), some of them think they need to micromanage the task manager readouts, some think caching is a bad behavior, some misunderstand TMALLOC as Kaldaien explained previously in the thread, and more. Lot of people that see the number in the task manager and think it's immediately significant and worrisome... when it isn't. Just like people see "CPU usage %" and think it's significant and even Intel will tell you it means very very little in modern contexts.

B. My point was more anyone truly actually crippled by this change already either has some significant problems with their setup, or they are cutting it down to the wire on squeezing the life from their platform.

C. "When the games purchased are more than capable of running on that machine." Just an aside on that quote there, it's not all that terribly different from the frequent cries every time a new game hits "MY COMPUTER PLAYS EVERYTHING ELSE I LIKE JUST FINE" while screeching "unoptimized".

Somehow as PCs have become more user friendly we've stumbled into the twilight zone where taking advantage of hardware is a cardinal sin. Games should be 32bit, DX9, hardly touch the CPU, and by god they must not allocate available memory or this same crowd of people will come out of the woodwork screeching that actually using hardware is "unoptimized". Taking advantage of system resources is bad. Everything should be fetching from the HDD on every task and incurring additional CPU overheads from using heavy compression everywhere. Then people will get the warm fuzzy feeling from seeing their "low memory footprint" as their applications take much more time to accomplish the same work.

-------------
And again it's not as demanding as people are acting from flipping out trying to micromanage everything. Once it's cached the library images it's fairly responsive..

So much text.
What is your argument against view choices?

This is what all the apologists forget. The new library is just not something that everyone would, could or should use.

[IQØ]

I'd love to take the time and read all that you just wrote but after reading

Publicado originalmente por Erebus:

Which is exactly what it does for those of us that aren't utterly devastated by the change.

I can clearly see you still don,t get it and will just be overly dramatic in defence of your nonsensical comments. But hey, Have a pat on the back from me instead.

[Erebus]

Publicado originalmente por Muppet among Puppets:

So much text.
What is your argument against view choices?

This is what all the apologists forget. The new library is just not something that everyone would, could or should use.

Pretty sure I've said repeatedly more toggles and options would be nice. And even a low resolution mode.

I just don't support the other "brilliant" ideas of making the thing not cache data, making it not take advantage of RAM, and so forth to appease task manager fanatics.

[Cat on Linux]

Publicado originalmente por Erebus:

I just don't support the other "brilliant" ideas of making the thing not cache data, making it not take advantage of RAM, and so forth to appease task manager fanatics.

yeah, some grandmas used to play their mahjong or solitary game on old laptop with 4Gb of RAM but then they allowed steam to take advantage of their RAM and there was no RAM left to launch the game. Right, they deserved it because if they want to play solitary they have to invest into high end PC now. Same goes for kids who use their homework laptops to occasionally play simple games, for people (what a silly folks!) who purchased old classics and tried to play it on same grade old PCs to avoid issues with new hardware.
Do you seriously think that you can dismiss valid customers in favor of AAA title players? everyone who have spent their money on this platform has the right to have access to their games, don't you forget about that, corporate shill.

[Quint the Alligator Snapper]

Publicado originalmente por Erebus:

Somehow as PCs have become more user friendly we've stumbled into the twilight zone where taking advantage of hardware is a cardinal sin. Games should be 32bit, DX9, hardly touch the CPU, and by god they must not allocate available memory or this same crowd of people will come out of the woodwork screeching that actually using hardware is "unoptimized". Taking advantage of system resources is bad. Everything should be fetching from the HDD on every task and incurring additional CPU overheads from using heavy compression everywhere. Then people will get the warm fuzzy feeling from seeing their "low memory footprint" as their applications take much more time to accomplish the same work.

We're not talking about the games.

We're talking about the DRM one has to get past to get to the games.

Publicado originalmente por Erebus:

-------------
And again it's not as demanding as people are acting from flipping out trying to micromanage everything. Once it's cached the library images it's fairly responsive. For the hell of it last night I tried to make the library unresponsive. It took disabling half my cores, disabling multithreading, running 5 separate processes to test memory and hammer the CPU, completely filling my sys RAM with tons of chrome tabs loading high res photography and the prior mentioned memory tests.... It took all that for the library to be unresponsive. I had to cripple my CPU, achieve the fabled "100% CPU usage" (which doesn't mean anything beyond thread scheduling), and completely fill my RAM for the library to hitch and stutter and hang.

Once it has cached the images for the new library it doesn't actually require much to run, it just looks bad to wannabe IT experts trying to micromanage from the task manager. If you notice more of the complaints are about the numbers people see in the task manager and paranoia about that than literal not being able to do things.

I don't have your machine, and besides, my test is far simpler, and doesn't involve staring at Task Manager or trying to get to "100% CPU usage" or whatever.

It is as follows:

Does it lag (a.k.a. stutter, or other similar words) when I scroll?
Does the library have to wait for something to load in to become usable?

For my computer, the answer is yes, and seemingly specifically because it has to load images.

The answer is no when I don't have to load images. The recently-added option to disable game icons in the left sidebar has been a very telling example: with game icons, it lags; without game icons it doesn't.

Therefore, I seek a way to disable all the images.

I don't care if it looks ugly. Ugly DRM and pretty DRM are still DRM. If ugly DRM gets out of the way faster, it is less onerous DRM and therefore better DRM for me as a consumer.

[Capa]

For anyone on the autism spectrum, the new library is unusable. Too flashy. Too much everything.

I've reverted to the old library and cleared my wishlist.

Steam can go hang. If Walmart removed all the wheelchair ramps they'd be crucified. This is exactly what Steam has done with the new library; except they're preventing people who have already paid, accessing their goods.

Unbelievable behaviour.

EDIT:
And I was in a random team last night and somehow we got on the Steam Library UI changes. EVERYONE on that team hated it. When I mentioned reverting, "You can do that? AWESOME" was the response.

I doubt Steam will do jack about the library. But there's a lot of people out there who won't buy stuff from you because it's rubbish. In fact, the reason I used to prefer Steam over Epic or UPlay was purely because of the library. Well done. You've brought your service down to the level of those two.

[[SK] Kaldaien]

Publicado originalmente por Quint the Alligator Snapper:

Publicado originalmente por Erebus:

Steam Hardware Survey isn't exactly comparable from month to month. It's done in such a way that if you can't see the backend data, it's basically worthless. And a number of Steam account don't actually buy much of anything like ever.

Low-engagement customers are less likely to buy stuff and do the hardware survey too.

This is wrong; they're the most likely to just click accept on any old random thing. People who never play games at all account for most of the Steam hardware survey :P

Publishers get an additional view of the hardware survey, for each game they get a subset of the global data pertaining only to users who ran their software. Everyone gets historical data and any tiny blip between months does nothing to dominant trends.

The data that publishers get for their games, is MUCH more useful than the public data. The public data is hopelessly broken due to all the people who never play games. Publisher data ONLY contains data from their active customers.

[Erebus]

Publicado originalmente por Cat on Linux:

Publicado originalmente por Erebus:

I just don't support the other "brilliant" ideas of making the thing not cache data, making it not take advantage of RAM, and so forth to appease task manager fanatics.

yeah, some grandmas used to play their mahjong or solitary game on old laptop with 4Gb of RAM but then they allowed steam to take advantage of their RAM and there was no RAM left to launch the game. Right, they deserved it because if they want to play solitary they have to invest into high end PC now. Same goes for kids who use their homework laptops to occasionally play simple games, for people (what a silly folks!) who purchased old classics and tried to play it on same grade old PCs to avoid issues with new hardware.
Do you seriously think that you can dismiss valid customers in favor of AAA title players? everyone who have spent their money on this platform has the right to have access to their games, don't you forget about that, corporate shill.

Again though other than whatever psychotic weirdness you have going on with Linux there, RAM can be released by things as demand calls. Allocating RAM doesn't mean all of it is actually in use or needed. Memory is the main bottleneck in computing right after the physical limitations of latency... so memory management has evolved to be quite complex in how it works and compensates.

On WINDOWS if you start running out of memory the system does things to free up memory, more nuanced things than running around killing random applications. And if some of the Steam processes do end up paged out... it's not a big deal.

Show me one person that can't play some light game because of this update. Though I should throw in the caveat of show me one person on an OS that isn't doing memory management in the least efficient way possible.

[Mikalie]

Publicado originalmente por brian9824:

Publicado originalmente por JRCOBRA:

Rolled back I think the thing that's bugging me the most is they have had nearly a week to respond and are silent.

They aren't silent, have been posting updates on the beta forum and testing improvements to it in preperation for a patch.

Then the New UI should still be completely beta and not forced on everybody.

On topic:
I froze the Steam on my main computer to pre-UI update state. I have sparse access to second computer where I torture myself with new UI. And finally started to acquire my games on GOG/epic. I't is good incentive to start support GOG and get the stuf DRM free when possible.

[Erebus]

Publicado originalmente por Capa:

For anyone on the autism spectrum, the new library is unusable. Too flashy. Too much everything.

It's not good to generalize or assume you're a template for everyone.

[Cat on Linux]

Publicado originalmente por Erebus:

Publicado originalmente por Cat on Linux:

yeah, some grandmas used to play their mahjong or solitary game on old laptop with 4Gb of RAM but then they allowed steam to take advantage of their RAM and there was no RAM left to launch the game. Right, they deserved it because if they want to play solitary they have to invest into high end PC now. Same goes for kids who use their homework laptops to occasionally play simple games, for people (what a silly folks!) who purchased old classics and tried to play it on same grade old PCs to avoid issues with new hardware.
Do you seriously think that you can dismiss valid customers in favor of AAA title players? everyone who have spent their money on this platform has the right to have access to their games, don't you forget about that, corporate shill.

Again though other than whatever psychotic weirdness you have going on with Linux there, RAM can be released by things as demand calls. Allocating RAM doesn't mean all of it is actually in use or needed. Memory is the main bottleneck in computing right after the physical limitations of latency... so memory management has evolved to be quite complex in how it works and compensates.

On WINDOWS if you start running out of memory the system does things to free up memory, more nuanced things than running around killing random applications. And if some of the Steam processes do end up paged out... it's not a big deal.

Show me one person that can't play some light game because of this update. Though I should throw in the caveat of show me one person on an OS that isn't doing memory management in the least efficient way possible.

you should schedule an appointment with your shrink, tell him "every time I want to post something on forums I end up posting about poor RAM management by others". he should be able to help you un-stick your mind from that poor RAM management. why don't you try it? maybe it will help you to see the actual point of my message.

[Erebus]

Publicado originalmente por Cat on Linux:

Publicado originalmente por Erebus:

Again though other than whatever psychotic weirdness you have going on with Linux there, RAM can be released by things as demand calls. Allocating RAM doesn't mean all of it is actually in use or needed. Memory is the main bottleneck in computing right after the physical limitations of latency... so memory management has evolved to be quite complex in how it works and compensates.

On WINDOWS if you start running out of memory the system does things to free up memory, more nuanced things than running around killing random applications. And if some of the Steam processes do end up paged out... it's not a big deal.

Show me one person that can't play some light game because of this update. Though I should throw in the caveat of show me one person on an OS that isn't doing memory management in the least efficient way possible.

you should schedule an appointment with your shrink, tell him "every time I want to post something on forums I end up posting about poor RAM management by others". he should be able to help you un-stick your mind from that poor RAM management. why don't you try it? maybe it will help you to see the actual point of my message.

Maybe you should realize that less than 1% of Steam users use Linux.

Over 74% are on 10 which actually is pretty good with memory management.

Oh added bonus: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam

Assuming that's accurate. 48.27% of users have more than 8GB of RAM. 83.56% Have 8GB or more.